OLVIDOS by John M. Bennett

$26

342 pp.

ISBN 9781938521058

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Bennett has been the avant in avant-garde in the latter half of the 20th century with his Lost and Found Times, one of the great “small press poetry rags” of all time, and then through his Luna Bisonte Prods press. OLVIDOS (“Memories”; though the word also and literally means “things forgotten”) is quite possibly his masterpiece. 339 pages of zany often inarticulate expositions of a kind of lunar madness that can only be the work of the descendent of such poets as Vicente Huidobro and Guillaume Apollinaire. There is most likely something for everyone here from minimalist visual techniques and zen-like koans to architectured poems such as “olvidos y fragmentos” with its enigmatic phrase “lock the boot”. But then the entire text is one immense sequence of enigmatic and puzzling dicta, summed up best in his own portmanteau word “hablacagada”. This is an important work and should place Bennett centrally on the map of great, innovative American poets. - Ivan Argüelles