Broken Lines: Prose Poems
“Perhaps it is the vast Minnesota sky that gives David Bengtson the ability to see and feel and understand the human condition as well as he does in these wonderful prose poems. He takes the reader with him on his/our internal journey and we are illuminated, inspired, unbroken.”
––Lucille Clifton
“The world that "he" and "she" inhabit in Broken Lines is filled with surprises, as ordinary scenes constantly undergo startling transformations. The prose poem form is a perfect match for Bengtson's subtle but quick insights into the lives and people of small-town Minnesota. I admire the book for its casual manner and easy stealth, always delivering more than was expected. Few writers can pack so much punch into such a soft touch.”
––Jim Heynen
“I read Broken Lines straight through, amazed at how the strange and familiar could blend into revelation and at how insistent we human beings are on finding something beyond happiness. In many of these poems, the world is split wide open, all of its loneliness and uncertainty plain to see. Luckily for us, David Bengtson has been watching the broken lines on Highway 71 long enough to assure us that there is also mercy and a song to sing.”
––Joyce Sutphen
“Many prose poems are like stand-up comics and one has to like them because they make us laugh. David Bengtson’s poems in prose go beyond laughter, however. They do so much more by exploring the human psyche driving along the highway or sitting through a sermon in Long Prairie, Minnesota. None of the characters are named—they are either “he” or “she.” Yet as the poems progress and unfold, we get to know these people who represent a kind of non-allegorical every-man and every-woman of the late 20th century. They grapple with moral issues, and like true moralists, they find themselves frequently alone, full of introspective questioning. This leads to epiphanies that are frightening and heart-rending, as when a man, listening to a sermon likening Grace to nuclear fallout at Chernobyl, realizes he is the only one who sees through the flawed analogy and nothing he can say will ever convince the preacher or the other parishioners otherwise.
“For those of us who have admired these remarkable poems individually through typescript and film, seeing them gathered together at last is a very important event. This is a stunning collection.”
––John Minczeski
Reviews
Broken Lines
Poems by David Bengtson
Juniper Press, 2003
$12.95, 86 pages
Book rating: 8 out of 10 stars
David Bengtson's new book of prose poems, Broken Lines, just released from Juniper Press, begins with this epigraph by Chekhov, excerpted from a letter to his brother Alexander:
Best of all, shun all descriptions of the characters' spiritual state. You must try to have that state emerge clearly from their actions. Don't try for too many characters. The center of gravity should reside in two: he and she.
These words serve as an anchor, a means of thinking about the two primary characters in the book, an unnamed "she" and "he" whose lives are slowly revealed through slice-of-life vignettes. He often drives highway 71, is concerned about spiritual matters and the meaning of his dreams; he is a quiet man living honestly in his various circles of family and community. She is both the object of his affections and his sometime foil, interested in fortunes, the wildlife around their house, and their relationship. There is a distance between them, something quiet and unspoken and decidedly heartbreaking.
Ritual, as a means of adapting to the push and pull rhythm of their lives, is a recurring theme in these poems. The man goes on drives and is given to noticing small graces, like the applause of tree leaves. The woman goes on daily walks, returning, as the male speaker in "Her Eyes" would say, somehow transformed:
When she returns, something about her is different. It's not the water still dripping from her hair, not marsh weeds clinging to her clothes, not the splotches of mud caking on her shoes. It's her face, her eyes, something in her eyes says she's not the same.
The lives of these two characters are so artfully and honestly rendered that if people wanted to know what it was like to be a Middlewesterner alive in Minnesota at the turn of the millennium, they would get a pretty good idea from this book. And that is why poets like Lucille Clifton have commented, "Perhaps it is the vast Minnesota sky that gives David Bengtson the ability to see and feel and understand the human condition as well as he does." We imagine ourselves lost in the quiet loves and struggles of these two characters.
And this brings up the age-old debate about what makes prose prose and poetry poetry, and if poetry is in the form of prose is it still poetry? Clearly, master practictioners of the craft of writing prose poems — Louis Jenkins, Russell Edson, Mary Koncel, to name a few — have already addressed this issue, have taken poems beyond "the tyranny of the line". A number of recently released major anthologies of prose poems have rekindled interest in this poetic form. What happens, though, when the poems are pieces of an ongoing dialog between characters, a series whose overall arc serves a purpose that is greater than the sum of its parts? How does this differ from, say, a novel-in-stories or a series of micro-fictions?
It might very well be that the answer is in the poet's attention to what matters: the everyday stuff of life, the resistance of plot, drama, story. These poems — by focusing their attention to the limited, if quotidian, details of ordinary lives — serve as a lense for general experience. These pieces are poetry: they celebrate the joys and foibles of human experience. David Bengtson's book pushes the boundary of what is possible in prose poetry; his is a well written book that, as poet Joyce Sutphen would say, "assure[s] us that there is also mercy and a song to sing."
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Deceptively Simple
by Laura Hansen
Not long ago, I received a copy of Broken Lines: Prose Poems by long-time Long Prairie High School teacher, David Bengtson. I had seen some of Bengtson’s earlier collections of poems, and although good, nothing led me to expect the depth and power of this latest collection. The deceptively simple poems in Broken Lines have a deep and mysterious heart. Bengtson has the
unique ability to be, at once, a poet’s poet and a poet for the common man (or woman).
After hearing him read “Her Eyes” at a performance in Little Falls, I felt compelled to read the poem over and over. It was as if he had looked into my heart and found a desire there I didn’t even know I had. In the poem “Pineapple,” I found a deep familiarity with a nameless woman whose love of beauty ultimately leads to pointless decay. Indeed, the men and women that inhabit this collection of poems are all unnamed––the silent performer on the empty stage, the husband mind-walking the shoulder of Highway 71 in “Trip to Browerville,” or the man placing and replacing stones that fall from the sculptures he builds in his garden. Through these quiet vignettes, which always begin with a description of mundane moments, Bengtson offers multiple revelations about desire, loneliness, beauty, and loss.
Broken Lines is a unique celebration of the prose-poem form. Bengtson takes an unassuming, non-threatening form––a few unstructured lines on a page, a form even those who believe they do not understand poetry can easily slip into––and gently takes the readers’ hands, leading them into little moments of lives so like their own and surprising them with glimpses into their own hearts. There is nothing heavy-handed or preachy in these poems. It is as if Bengtson, himself, is surprised at the moment of revelation. Having long taught poetry, however, he understands the power of closely observed detail and how it draws in the reader; understands how the mundane can be transformed into meaning by simply changing focus. We see both techniques in “Fortune Cookies” when Bengtson slips focus from the paper fortunes, “ten white strips like broken lines in the middle of the highway,” to the broken cookie shells lined up on the table, “Side by side, twenty small mouths, jaws set, their secrets pulled from them, their thin, stubborn lips still pressed together.”
Only in revisiting this collection, do I realize how often the broken lines of the title appear and reappear throughout the collection. Each gap in the broken line giving us a brief glimpse of something deeper and larger. The reviewers represented on the back cover of Broken Lines are as diverse as nationally renowned poet Lucille Clifton, and regional favorites, Joyce Sutphen and Jim Heynen. All call attention to Bengtson’s ability to invoke life’s “epiphanies,” those “startling” moments in which we find ourselves “illuminated, inspired, unbroken.” If this collection of poems receives the attention it deserves, Juniper Press should be firing up the presses for subsequent printings.
March/April 2005
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Broken Lines
By David Bengtson
Juniper Press, 2004
Price (Softcover) $12.95
Reviewed by Jason Benesh
David Bengtson’s Broken Lines depicts an anonymous couple navigating their world, often pausing to consider how best to proceed in their uneasy, insecure lives. The book’s first section ends with “Semi Passes,” a prose poem that encapsulates Bengtson’s theme: In trying times, all we can do is hit the brakes and try to find the lines in the road.
Originally from Rhode Island, Bengtson settled in Minnesota after graduating from Concordia College in Moorhead, and he taught high school English in Long Prairie for 34 years. Bengtson clearly spent that time observing rural Minnesota. The openness of the countryside—especially Highway 71—in his poems reflects the oppressive ambiguity in his characters’ lives.
Absurdities dot these poems. Some are gentle, like a line of escaping cows, while others are more startling, such as a preacher who compares God to the results of a nuclear accident. Through all of the strangeness, Bengtson’s characters try to figure out themselves and their relationships. Each fears the other has it all under control. Fear of the truth plays as large a part in their silence as confusion or dissatisfaction, and their inability to communicate becomes another absurdity looking for interpretation.
A passage by Anton Chekhov that serves as an epigraph to this book advises a writer to allude to his characters’ inner conditions by description of their actions, and that the focus of the story “should reside in two [characters]: he and she.” Bengtson follows this advice, and the result is an effective rendering of a couple facing the uncertainty resulting from poor communication. He even goes so far as to refer to his characters only as “he” and “she.” The “he” of the poems looks to the world outside himself for answers: the church, his dreams, the night sky. “She” seems to become more aware of her body in the physical world, and how it fits and interacts with the things around her. In the end, resolution may be found as silently as the problem was created.
Bengtson’s skillfully told tale leaves the reader without definite answers, but satisfied anyway. If there is a weakness to this work, it is that a surface reading might lead to a sameness across these poems. The tone is steady, and the music is mostly subtle, but the subjects provide frequent surprises, as well as wry grins of recognition. This book is well worth a careful reading. Read it closely, read it out loud, and read it repeatedly.
THE CORRESPONDER / Fall 2004
Minnesota State University, Mankato
Department of English
Broken Lines (ISBN: 1-55780-168-1) is available from the publisher, Juniper Press, P.O. Box 8037, St. Paul MN 55108-0037, for $12.95 plus $3.00 shipping.
