Flapper Press Poetry Cafe: The Secret Language of Laurel Benjamin

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The Flapper Press Poetry Café features the work of poets from around the world. This week, we highlight the work of Laurel Benjamin. - June 2022

 

If the ornament was a bird, breakable, then my mother was too, though during her life she presented herself as anything but fragile. As much as the poem is a loose ghazal, it is also an elegy, a lamentation for the glass bird ornament broken by my cat, the moment of it shattering, a reminder of the loss of my mother who gave me the ornament. The piece and the emotion carried describe not just a moment but a reverberation, as “bird” keeps happening, over and over again. 

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AN: Laurel, welcome to Flapper Press Poetry Café. We love that you invented a secret language with your brother in your childhood. Were you also writing poems then? Can you share how creativity in childhood overflows into adulthood? And, I must ask, is your brother a poet too?

 

LB: My brother and I had a secret language. In fact, our aunt, Marilyn Sachs, who wrote children’s books, used this in one of her young-adult books. Some of our communication was non-verbal, where just a look would tear each other up in laughter. Some of the words were made up, like for our cat Orlando, who had many nicknames, such as Wangie, Willie Horton. Our father was called Ogi, Bloge, Perry-the-Puddlepatch-painter (a song was made up of this title), Fool-Around-Bloge. Our mother was called Wilers, Boars. We had names for various articles of clothing, kept a “quote book” of phrases our father said, usually at night while we were irritating him. When my brother and I grew up, our parents adapted and started using some of the language themselves, in a kind of fun familiarity. My brother and I made up songs with characters as well as referencing people we knew. When camping, my brother would immediately, when we arrived at a campground, find a couple of sticks from the ground and start drumming, and we would start singing. As an adult, my brother is an accomplished musician who teaches popular music on the guitar.

 

I always wrote fictionalized stories. I started writing love poems when I started college at 18. I was reading strictly English Romantic poetry; and not until one of my teachers recommended contemporary poetry did I stop spelling words in the British way. I got my MFA in fiction at Mills College. I believe writing in multiple genres informs each of them. I employ that both as a writer and also as an English teacher.

 

My mother did not grow up playing music or having creative outlets, but she loved the opera (her parents loved the Jewish theater). Mom was talented in languages, and when married made sure they both got working visas and lived in England and traveled the continent, saw opera in the great houses, ballet, symphony, theater, etc. Her thirst for high culture extended to involving me as a child in attending performances and going to museums. I studied music, art, dance. I played classical music with the piano first and then carried the oboe to high level.

 

AN: We live in a Renaissance of Poetic Creativity. How do you describe your poetry as compared with narrative and lyrical poets?

 

LB: Traditionally, I have written in the narrative style, and more recently have found my way into the lyric. I also depend on structure, not only in forms, but also in the line. I’ve learned as much from workshops in form as I have from those in free verse. I like to use all the tools, in other words. Sometimes I put a free-verse poem into a form, such as a sonnet or ghazal, and then bring it out again into free verse, taking some internal rhyme, depending on new lineation, or repetition—whatever the form has to offer.

 

AN: I noticed your poem “Inside Bird” engages two strong elements available in a poet’s toolbox, alliteration and repetition (of the word "bird"). Please share with our readers how these poetic devices help create sound in your poem. Is this intentional?

 

LB: “Inside Bird” is a loose ghazal, currently my favorite form; loose as in each couplet is not whole unto itself, and I use enjambment between lines and between stanzas. The forced end line repetition inherent in the ghazal causes surprising word pairings. It also pushes new discoveries while writing—the light bulb going off with a huge “ah”—and in this case, what I may not have realized about my mother.

 

AN: How do the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and the Port Townsend Writers group best support your writing endeavors? Are these community writing groups open to area poets?

 

LB: The BAWPS has an anthology run by local poet Andrena Zawinski—she and I worked together in the English Dept. at Laney College in Oakland, and she is a mentor and a friend. The group has been meeting since 2006, the same time I started teaching at Laney. We meet every six weeks; pre-pandemic meetings took place at a different member’s house with a potluck included, and more recently we’ve met online. Members consist of top-notch writers of the Bay Area. Members have been vetted by the leader.

 

The Port Townsend Writers is a weekly freewrite group in the vein that I was leading in person for a few years early mornings at the Port Townsend Writers Conference in Washington State. It’s a private (not open) group. Members on the West Coast have attended the conference in person.

 

I run asynchronous writing groups; for example, one of many is the Ekphrastic Writers, which has run since summer 2021, a private Facebook group where I provide prompts and members post drafts and receive feedback from other members. It is not a publishing-oriented group, but many of us have had successes and gotten published from work generated in the group.

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