{"id":24544,"date":"2014-01-07T10:22:50","date_gmt":"2014-01-07T16:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=24544"},"modified":"2023-11-15T21:50:52","modified_gmt":"2023-11-16T03:50:52","slug":"c-wade-bentleys-askew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/c-wade-bentleys-askew\/","title":{"rendered":"C. Wade Bentley’s Askew"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bentley\"<\/a><\/p>\n

C. Wade Bentley\u2019s poetry chapbook\u00a0Askew<\/em>\u00a0is appropriately titled because so many of its poems accentuate the way reality can be tilted through verse to expose bits of newness in the monotony of everyday life. Bentley\u2019s poems are often narrative in that they tell a story in miniature, a small moment of loss, waste, or abandonment that becomes significant although couched in the pedestrian and commonplace. Like all good poets, Bentley sees stories in the trivial such as conversations over tea or in simple acts of neighborliness. He also sees the dismal reality so often concealed beneath ordinary living, and he captures the absurdity inherent in the mundane but still manages to instill it with emotion. It is the authenticity behind the emotion in his poems that disturbs at the same time that it persuades and satisfies.<\/p>\n

Poetic satisfaction comes more from the teasing out of possibilities not fully realized\u2014but tantalizing in the possibility of their realization\u2014than from answering questions or from providing closure, and Bentley\u2019s poems are pleasing because they create a palpable longing instead of contentment. In \u201cJack\u2019s Mountain\u201d the story told involves a rock monument or tombstone in memory of a two-year-old named Jack. How Jack died or why his \u201cashes have long ago mixed \/ into the mountain itself\u201d is not revealed in the poem, but the imagery of sage and coyote tracks, a rusted mailbox full of notes for Jack, and the notes themselves are memorable for the wistfulness evoked by the scene. The notes say, \u201c\u2018Great day \/to be in the mountains, Jack!\u2019 and \u2018Jackie-boy, \/ can you see me waving?\u2019\u201d The only answer is the south wind that rattles the rusted mailbox flag. There is both a playfulness and an underlying longing in the poem, longing for youth and connection and longing to know the details of a story that are being enveloped back into the rocks and earth.<\/p>\n

Longing is a recurring theme in Bentley\u2019s poems\u2014longing for innocence, for communion, for belief, for childhood, for liberation, and longing for people once vibrant and present but who have, in one way or another, left others behind. \u201cReckoning\u201d is about one old man\u2019s need to communicate and his longing to speak words that his senescence has reduced to \u201cguttural \/ reductions of language, primal morphemes laced with pleading.\u201d From the man\u2019s mouth to a shadow behind his eyes, the need to speak builds in physical and emotional intensity. This is the kind of tension that is emotionally difficult to observe, but the poet watches and describes the helpless man, trapped in decrepit flesh, struggle \u201cwith a sound like dragon scales against cave walls\u201d to either choke on \u201chis own brine, \/ or foul him with the long trail of erratics he is dying to discharge.\u201d To watch with the poet is painful, even terrifying, but the vivid verse makes the old man\u2019s reckoning impossible to turn away from.<\/p>\n

\u201cStorytelling\u201d is another poem about the need to be heard. Two girls chatter on their way to school when their companion, Jared, sees the body of a young woman floating in the river. The nonchalant conversation and headlong movement from teenage bantering to details of a naked body and how \u201cthe little ripples in this quiet section of water \/ would splash onto her right hip all purple and grey \/ shiny and taut\u201d are grim but compelling, and instead of shocking, the story conveys the same sad need for communication as \u201cReckoning.\u201d In one of the finest moments of the book, the imagined voice of the dead woman says:<\/p>\n

tell the police your story now and play it up big
\nfor your mates at school later but you won\u2019t hear it
\nfrom me that story that love story that fantasy
\nI had hoped to tell had begun to tell has now moved
\nto mid-stream and will be out to sea sooner or later
\nwhere old couples who are even now walking
\nalong the shore will pause from time to time
\ntheir faces into the wind, listening.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the amelioration of poetry that Bentley knows well: stories are told and words written to give voice to the dead or abandoned, even if the stories and words are only imaginary. Without histrionics or exploitation of the dead the poem asserts the power of telling stories and the need to make form out of the strange reality of living and dying. The need to be heard, to listen, and to witness is central to many of Bentley\u2019s best poems.<\/p>\n

Witnessing is also a core aspect of Bentley\u2019s poems that confront belief, faith, and skepticism. \u201cSecond Sight\u201d is a list of superstitious acts meant to induce faith, written in a sing-song internal rhyme that adds to the speaker\u2019s cynical view of the talismanic: \u201cPray to your god? Gentian \/ root on the side? You say you\u2019ve tried \/ all of these, plus crossing fingers, squinting, \/ snakeroot bark, wormwood, whistling in the dark?\u201d The skepticism starts out whimsical but ends with an edge of coercion that detracts from the emotional intensity that Bentley\u2019s other poetry provides. There is a bitterness in \u201cSecond Sight\u201d that is not as becoming as the beleaguered resignation of Bentley\u2019s more controlled poems that explore belief. \u201cNegative Capability\u201d embraces the paradox of rejecting a \u201cworld \/ that can account for ghosts\u201d while at the same time acknowledging how real the uncertainties, mysteries, and ambiguities are that Keats revered\u2014how inevitable and, ultimately, how beautiful they are. Bentley manages to expunge the fist-shaking frustration from this poem and, in \u201csoothing, pallid tones,\u201d to lay bare both the fear of faith and the regret of losing it.<\/p>\n

Bentley tells stories of abandonment in his poems with simplicity and elegance and treats both the need to escape and the pain of rejection with equal compassion. \u201cGone\u201d is a story of intimacy that flees even while the couple remains together and the contemplative surrender of that intimacy. \u201cSome Days\u201d deals with how memory may be used to retrieve the one who has escaped but also the sorrow that the retrieval is only imaginary. \u201cVacation Reel\u201d scrutinizes the portent of a dissolved marriage in past family films, \u201cbecause \/ we would so soon stop believing in such summers, \/ flickers of doubt finding their way \/ into your eyes, captured by a single frame or two.\u201d The language of this poem, and of all Bentley\u2019s poems, is accessible, mostly non-confrontational, and never embellished with the eccentric or grandiloquent\u2014but always grounded in the commonplace. The commonplace of these poems is often about human foibles and emotional need; Bentley treats foibles and needs with gentle compassion, without being preachy, and is diligently watchful and curious about the human condition.<\/p>\n

What is achieved in\u00a0Askew<\/em>\u00a0is an emotional drawing out, and a sympathetic connection that links the poems with the reader without stooping to the sentimental or trite. Bentley succeeds in dealing with the dislocation and alienation of the twenty-first century by locating proportion in poetry and by using language to retrieve meaning. \u201cThings I Know\u201d expresses the anxiety of living in a rapidly changing society and the fear of continual loss of people and \u201ccreatures\u201d that is an inevitable part of aging:<\/p>\n

and it\u2019s some kind of fear that follows,
\nas if someone with a giant push<\/p>\n

Broom is sweeping up the very world
\nbehind me: the stone statues, the trees,
\npure laughter, even the idea of a park
\nin a city near someplace like home.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There is a slight sense of the misanthropic here, as there is in a couple of Bentley\u2019s other poems, but mostly it is just a quiet sadness that what is familiar recedes into the past and what acquaints us to our reality is so readily replaced with the new and sometimes distasteful. The closing metaphor makes the common lament fresh and sums up the need for figuration to counter the fear and reality of loss. The emotional integrity of Bentley\u2019s poems makes the sorrow and regret behind the stories palpable, and his poetic figuration provides complexity and variety to the simple stories he tells.<\/p>\n

Askew by C. Wade Bentley<\/strong>
\nRed Ochre Press (2013)
\n44 pages
\n$11.00<\/p>\n

Listen to the poet read his chapbook\u2019s title poem
\nhttp:\/\/vimeo.com\/55554212
\n<\/a>You can order the book at\u00a0www.redochrelit.com\/cwadebentleychapbook<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

About the Author\u00a0<\/strong>
\nC. Wade Bentley<\/strong>\u00a0lives, teaches, writes, and plays with his grandsons in Salt Lake City.\u00a0His poems have been published or will soon appear in\u00a0Green Mountains Review, Cimarron Review, Best New Poets 2007, New Ohio Review, Western Humanities Review, Rattle, Subtropics<\/em>, and\u00a0Oberon<\/em>, among others.<\/p>\n

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C. Wade Bentley\u2019s poetry chapbook\u00a0Askew\u00a0is appropriately titled because so many of its poems accentuate the way reality can be tilted through verse to expose bits of newness in the monotony of everyday life. Bentley\u2019s poems are often narrative in that they tell a story in miniature, a small […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1557,"featured_media":24561,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,35],"tags":[1811],"class_list":["post-24544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-literary-arts","tag-c-wade-bentley"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/bentley.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-10 02:23:16","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1557"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24544"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71589,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24544\/revisions\/71589"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}