Benjamin Hackman is a poet and lyricist interested in the exploration of depth psychology through personal narrative. His writing has most recently appeared in Canadian Literature, the Literary Review of Canada, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, and in Yiddish in the Yiddish Forward. In 2011, he was the recipient of the Ted Plantos Memorial Award from the Ontario Poetry Society for an excerpt from his on-going work, The Benjy Poems, for which he has received granting from the Toronto Arts Council, twice from the Ontario Arts Council, and from CUE for the adaptation of eleven Benjy Poems for the audio stage. His audio poems have appeared as sound installations in galleries across Ontario, in online journals in the USA, and will be syndicated in their entirety in Carte Blanche throughout 2013. Benjamin lives and writes in his hometown, Toronto, where he is a student of psychotherapy.
His audio poems "A Note to the Players," "Benjy's Education," and "Benjy in the Supermarket" appear in issue Thirty-Eight of The Collagist.
Here, Benjamin Hackman talks to interviewer William Hoffacker about living with trauma, infantile egocentrism, and the blurring of past and present.
1. What inspired you to make “The Benjy Poems” into a work of creative audio with multiple performers and sound effects underlying the poetry?
Well, you have to consider it this way: The Benjy Poems is a long project; I’m moving in on my eighth year, which isn’t too impressive for a poet who hasn’t published his first book yet. I started to get antsy over the last year or two. I wanted to get my poems out, and not just to a few dinky lit journals and a reading every few months. So I set out to find alternate ways to put my poems out into the world. That was the prime inspiration.
To some extent I’d always wondered how excerpts of the piece might translate into performance, and of course, the poems themselves take place in an imaginary play, but I never gave too much serious thought to theatrical adaption until my partner came home one day and told me about CUE, this wonderfully radical organization that provides funding and mentorship to new-generation artists working in the margins here in Toronto. She told me they were looking to fund seven or so projects, so I said, “That’s great. I wonder if they’d fund The Benjy Poems.” She said, “No, they want stuff that can be exhibited.” So I said, “Well… maybe I’ll pitch an audio adaptation.” And from there I got to thinking about the project at its core, and what it is I was trying to accomplish.
You know that piece by Duchamp—“Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2?” I think that’s the biggest influence on the Benjy Poems. One genderless figure. Three versions of itself. One action. Three different perspectives of that action—in three different points of time. And all at the same time. That’s what I try to do with Benjy on the page; I try to explore the non-linear, fragmented, multi-charactered Self. And I try to do it naked—and make it beautiful. But in order for me conceptualize and execute a protagonist who exists with so many simultaneous versions of himself requires some degree of order to prevent the piece from manifesting as something entirely too surreal. I employed a number of techniques to keep things… not clear… but from becoming too confusing for a reader. So on the page, for example, the Speaker is depicted in plain, unaffected font; Benjy, in italics; the Stage Director (as I’ve come to affectionately call her), in square brackets; and everyone else, with quotations, with far too many exceptions to concretely mark this as a structural consistency. And grammar is hardly reliable. To further complicate things, every character is truly the speaker, either in perception, memory, or dream. The reason the piece is taking so long to write is because I spend forever discerning who’s speaking. I go back to poems I wrote years ago, and I still don’t know who’s speaking. My point is this: The labour is simplified in the audio because characters can speak over each other in real (and imagined) time. Visual cues don’t matter at all. And in adapting the poems for audio, that was a liberating epiphany for me, indeed.
2. You also write that through this project you are attempting “to encourage dialogue about domestic violence and child abuse.” Has your work inspired listeners to share their own personal narratives with you or to take part in the desired dialogue?
Regretfully, I can’t say it’s happened yet. But I’m hopeful. And I will say this: directing the actors and the audio engineer throughout production and rehearsal of the audio adaptation forced me to speak in much more concrete terms than I’m used to in my poetry. And that helped me find a way to connect with the actors on real issues like domestic violence and child abuse. It wasn’t group therapy or anything, but we shared. An actor can’t go about character like a poet. You can’t talk in elevated language and metaphor when you’re directing. It’s not appropriate. Actors need clear direction if a director’s going to get what he wants out of an actor. So the actors asked me questions about their characters’ motivations. They needed back stories. I provided them. From there we chatted a bit about physical discipline and dreams and about incest and rape and where those things come from and what the connections might be to our childhoods and adult lives. In summary, I guess I’ve been able to crack open more dialogue about it with myself, and that’s been good for my craft, and my life in general, which I’m grateful for.
I hope one day someone writes to me to tell me that they felt connected to a particular poem, or saw themselves in something I wrote. But these things take time.
3. In “A Note to the Players,” the “inner child” is said to occupy the spotlight, while the speaker on stage is shrouded in darkness. What went into your decision to have light for one and not the other? (Is this how you imagine setting the stage if your work were presented in a visual medium?)
That’s a great question. In The Benjy Poems, Benjy is the centre of the narrative. He’s the subject. But of course the person telling the story, the Speaker, is Benjy also. Naturally Benjy must be, figuratively, in the spotlight of his own story. But that’s the nature of early childhood, isn’t it? For our first three years we are the centre of the world. I mean, good luck convincing a two year old otherwise. You say to her or him, “Hey, what do you think you’re mummy wants to do right now?” They’re just not interested at that age—and many would argue that they physically can’t be interested. Their brains just aren’t fully formed yet. Empathy is softwired at birth, and not hardwired. The context and ways in which we’re raised are the deciding factors that enable us to start considering the feelings of others. But so many of us, due to various traumas and insecure attachments at infancy, take much longer to grow out of that narcissistic character type, and many never do. From a psychoanalytical perspective, I place Benjy in the centre of the dream stage. We can call it the theatre of the unconscious, if you’d like. If the inner child represents pure character origin, which is to compare it to a sort of introspective holy grail, where else can the inner child be but in spotlight centre stage? The Speaker is the person who discerns between Light and Dark.
As for how the play may actually be depicted on a stage, I think the concept is for the play to be rather impossible to stage in any orthodox understanding of space and time, because, as I said, it’s really the theatre of the unconscious. It works in audio. It could work probably quite well as animation, and if it needed, it could be done in film, but I’d be hesitant to stage the Benjy Poems in live action without a wormhole.
4. Also in “A Note to the Players,” the Stage Director says, “Actions of the past and present happen at the same moment.” Does this imagined play reflect how you consider the life of a person with trauma in their past? (Are you trying to capture both past and present moments at once in your other audio poems like “Benjy in the Supermarket”?)
Well, you’ve asked me a psychological question. And psychology is a lot like religion. Everyone has a take on it, and everyone makes sense of it for themselves and there will always be people who will go to war to defend their beliefs. So take my answer with a grain of salt, and with the assumption that others may have very florid rebuttals to my stance, but I’ll say with as much conviction as I can today that everyone lives with the trauma of their past, if even only the trauma of birth, and quite expectantly, much, much more. This is a fairly well accepted view in the psychodynamic tradition. I don’t imagine it’s too contended in modern times, but there other proponents of other schools of thought, and I don’t pretend to have insight into how they think and feel.
There is not a single poem in the series that does not explicitly strive to blur the lines between time and space and past and present. In one or two, I failed to achieve it, but then… that’s inevitable, isn’t it? My goal is to show how our pasts creep into our presents and morph our futures. That’s the quick and dirty of it, really.
5. What projects are you currently working on? (Are “The Benjy Poems” complete or still in-progress?)
Right now the Benjy Poems are nearing their end. I’m hoping to begin shopping the manuscript around by the Spring. That’s my primary project, and has been for a long time. It’s hard to imagine their ending.
The wonderfully talented musician and film composer, Craig Saltz, who produced and engineered the audio for the Benjy Poems, is collaborating with me again on an opera. I’ve been hammering out the libretto during breaks in the Benjy Poems for about a year or so, and putting words to music with Craig when we can find the time.
6. What artists would you recommend who also work in the realm of creative audio or spoken word poetry? What literary installations or performances have you seen/heard recently and really enjoyed?
Probably the most keen and committed artist I know working in audio literature right now is Jason Samilski. His work is terrific, and his range is enormous. I highly recommend that readers check out his work.