John Bensko

John Bensko Poems

John Bensko Biography

John Bensko is an award-winning American poet who teaches in the MFA program at the University of Memphis, along with his wife, the fiction writer Cary Holladay. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee. Bensko has an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Alabama (1979) and a Ph.D. in 20th century poetry and narrative technique from Florida State University (1985). He was a student of Thomas Rabbitt in poetry and Barry Hannah in fiction, and classmate of Clark Powell: Our weekly workshops were simple - take the latest purple mimeographed worksheet of student's poems, and have everyone critique the poems. I once wrote a four-line poem that had an epigraph from Moby Dick that was almost an entire paragraph. I read the poem. Silence. Then everybody started laughing. It was that bad. Another student named John Bensko made a comment that broke everybody up: "This poem is a bit top-heavy." Before coming to the University of Memphis, he taught at The University of Alabama, Old Dominion University, Rhodes College, and, as a Fulbright Professor in American Literature, at the University of Alicante, Spain. He has been the Coordinator of the MFA program at the University of Memphis and was Director of the River City Writers Series for the 2005-2006 season. His work has appeared in Georgia Review, Iowa Review, New England Review, New Letters, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, AGNI, Critical Quarterly, The Southern Review, The Southern Poetry Review, Shenandoah, Chelsea, OnEarth, Epoch, The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Poet Lore, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, and many other periodicals.)

The Best Poem Of John Bensko

Blind Sight

What moves in the corner of your eye
is a twitch of your right hand, is a branch
falling toward you, is that neighbor dog

who's bitten you twice, is your love
packing the break-up suitcase.
Morning brought a transit of Venus,

but we couldn't look. Bright sun
and reasons for living where we are
came too hard to decipher.

What we see and don't
takes unknown paths
to get beyond us. It leaves us blind.

So we watch the shimmer of trees, a lake.
We desire the ocean. Joy is wanting
but not knowing

eternity. Anything else frightens.
A cliff drops below
with sickening attraction.

We turn away and remember
what we never saw. Let love
be blind, they say, repeatedly

to our satisfaction and dismay.
A child new born can't determine
but feels through its skin

touch that will be mother.
Beneath the deep-voiced eventual
father, eyes so large

take in smiles, frowns, burning faces
gone in smoke. Terrible
possibilities invade the nearly blind.

A hand moves up and down, which might
feed you. Which might smother you,
as if seeing clearly were better,

would make it stop.

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