My name is Benn
“ I am forty. I don’t know, I don’t care”
My name is Benn. I am from a small village, in the north of France, near the border with England.
My mother is all the time in England. But when I tell people I am writing poetry, they say, “Oh, Benn, you’re a poet,” and go away.
I moved out to France with an American wife.
There are more poets on the planet than there are people on the planet: there are fifteen million of them. I am forty. I don’t know, I don’t care.
When I was in the boys’ school, we used to write poetry and write about poetry, although we weren’t allowed to make up a poem. We just wrote down things and kept them in our mother’s cupboard until we had something to write about. We learned to write all we could not live by, but there was some poetry left. The only way we could live it the way we liked, we had to write it, and when we were done, we had to go back and say sorry and show that we were better than we were.
When I was twelve I published my first volume of short stories, Scenes from One of the Whole Bucheon, and won the first gramophone prize of the world. I have since collected my collection of short stories, Rites — a collection of R. J. Mermelstein’s stories all of which are from England, and some of which are from America. I studied radio and spent six months on the radio in Spain, as we all did, as an unemployed frequenter.
I wrote a treatise on red roses at the age of eleven.
I read The Book of Henry Eerdmans at twenty-four.
At thirty-six I’d been in a group therapy session and had begun to study solitary behavior.
It came a few months afterwards that my bowl of dried roses was full. I washed them with cold water, put them in my mouth, and closed my mouth. I was lying shy and ashamed of my fountain pen-stroker.
That’s when I went to see a psychiatrist. You don’t feel so guilty, he told me, holding a mirror up to me and sliding it, as if to show how clear I was my breasts are still a river
