Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era

by Chad Bennett

Overview

Shirley Temple tap dancing at the Kiwanis Club, Stevie Nicks glaring at Lindsey Buckingham during a live version of “Silver Springs,” Frank Ocean lyrics staking new territory on the page: this is a taste of the cultural landscape sampled in Your New Feeling is the Artifact of a Bygone Era. Chad Bennett casually combines icons of the way we live now—GIFs, smartphones, YouTube—with a classical lover’s lament. The result is certainly a deeply personal account of loss, but more critically, a dismantling of an American history of queerness. “This is our sorrow. Once it seemed theirs, but now it’s ours. They still inhabit it, yet we say it’s ours.” All at once cerebral, physical, personal, and communal, Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era constructs a future worth celebrating.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946448491
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	01/14/2020
Series:	Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Chad Bennett’s poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Gulf Coast, jubilat, The Offing, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Volta, and elsewhere. He is the author of Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry, a study of twentieth century poetry and the queer art of gossip. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.

Read an Excerpt

HOW THAT BIRD SINGS
[Ten discrete lines: four repeated]

How do you doubt your bird was untrue? Think

“Few sadder histories have been than his.”

Wake late: take the boulevard soaked in sleep

Then delete his browsing history. Claim

That’s just how that bird sings, just how that bird

Has his way with me where his throat begins.

Wake late: take the boulevard soaked in sleep

Where the wide turn of hair thins at his thigh

Or perk your ears at the erased tape’s hiss.

Make an inkling an ambience: decide

“Few sadder histories have been than his.”

How do you doubt your bird was untrue? Think

Where the wide turn of hair thins at his thigh

How the trivial fucks with the divine


LIVES OF INFAMOUS MEN
History misses pansies
—Gertrude Stein

Who is a history. He is a surface the eye skims. He is not the light’s
scrim. He is who is. He comes in threes.

Who is a history. He misses the taste of metal. He misses the sheen
of gasoline. He misses a gaped mouth and misses a gasp missing
still. He unfastens history’s clasp. He will not scream.

Who is a history. He will not scram. He who finds pleasure in the
ledger, who anoints a fidget king, who escapes a scrape at history’s
edge: he.

Who is a history. Who imagines he is a history. Who is and who
in imagining is. Who in a pinch. Who from scratch. Whose violet
thought, freaked with jet, set adrift on history’s inch.


FEMMES
I was with a girl, but I felt like I was with a boy
—Violent Femmes

I was with a girl but felt like I was with a boy.
I was with a grievance but felt like I was with a blessing.
I was with a going but felt like I was with a beckoning.
I was with a grisaille but felt like I was with a blur.
I was with a grave but felt like I was with a birth.
I was with a god but felt like I was with a beast.
I was with a Genet but felt like I was with a Bataille.
I was with a grotesque but felt like I was with a beauty.
I was with a ghost but felt like I was with a body.

Table of Contents

Foreword Ocean Vuong vii

Idiorrhythmy 1

How That Bird Sings 5

Andy Warhol 7

Other Weathers 9

Trick 10

Some Faggy Gestures 12

Poem Beginning and Ending with a Line by Morrissey 15

Gerhard Richter 16

Lives of Infamous Men 18

Blue 19

Knock Knock 21

Femmes 22

White Halls 23

Little Thought Experiment 25

Memory and Forgetting Are Equally Arrogant 26

Theory of the Lyric 27

Soon-to-Be Innocent Fun / Let's See 28

Where Your Body Is Is a Very Precious Place 29

Black Jacket 30

Silver Springs 35

How to Live Together 61

I Am Odious (As It Turns Out). I Am Monstrous Glad 63

Brighton Rock 65

Punctum 66

Found Photograph 67

George Dyer 68

Patroclus in the Armor of Achilles 70

The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry 72

Little Spell against Future Woe 73

Now at Your Lips 75

Every Kind of Love or At Least My Kind of Love Must Be an Imaginary Love to Start With 76

Alice B. Toklas 77

Caught in a Trap but Can't Back Out Because I Love You Too Much Baby 79

Goodbye Party 80

Your Fade-Out Is a Tiny Philosophy but No Less True for That 82

The Noise of Time Is Not Sad 83

Illegible Cloud 85

Nights 86

Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era 91

Annotations 93

Acknowledgments 99

Editorial Reviews

01/20/2020

The sensual, vulnerable debut by Bennett reckons with queer history and identity through short prose pieces and lyric poems “et adrift on history’s inch.” Bennett allows personal experience, rich with desire and loss, to float alongside ephemera, questioning the relationship between the self and the queer body politic: “Who is a history. He is a surface the eye skims.” Distance echoes in everything, whether along telephone wires, across screens, or in bed. Lines repeat in poems alongside quotes from Stein, the New York Times, and the Violent Femmes, weaving in and out and changing in their repetition. The book’s second section, “Silver Springs,” is a semi-critical meditation on the Fleetwood Mac song of the same title and a past love. It offers one of the most accomplished of the book’s poems, one in which Bennett arrives at a sequence of beguiling images, insights, and reflections. “In fact to be beautiful, shame requires only a stage,” he writes, as though casting a knowing eye on the book’s aesthetic interests. This collection originally and imaginatively challenges perceptions of American queerness. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Longlisted for the Julie Suk Award
Finalist for the Writers' League of Texas Book Award
”Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin,” Poets & Writers
”A Reading List for Pride Month and Beyond,” CLMP
"Must-Read Poetry: January 2020," The Millions
"Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2020," Big Other
"Versifying / Collection Development: Poetry," Library Journal
”National Poetry Month 2020 Reading List,” Outsmart: Houston’s LGBTQ Magazine
”Mayor’s Book Club Says: ‘Read Local,’” The Austin Chronicle


"The sensual, vulnerable debut by Bennett reckons with queer history and identity through short prose pieces and lyric poems '[S]et adrift on history’s inch.'"
—Publishers Weekly

"Bennett’s songs of longing are clever and carefully rendered—smooth control over lines being only one defining element of this welcome debut collection."
—"Must-Read Poetry: January 2020" by Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions

"Bennett is expert at seamlessly exploring queer icons, tropes, sorrows, and celebration."
—"New in January,” LAMBDA Literary

“Stunning.”
—”National Poetry Month 2020 Reading List,” Outsmart: Houston’s LGBTQ Magazine

"At once daring, humorous, and tender, these poems show the mind at work exploring what it means to live in the body, to desire and be desired."
—American Literary Review

“It is rare for a book of poems to be both rooted in a consistent thematics while also existing, and therefore thriving, as a place where these themes can live and think on the page and in the world. They declare their own truths without reducing themselves to definitives. Their metaphors act as epicenters, where queerness is not a category or subgenre, as it’s often expected to be, but is the only bones—irreducible and undeniable—in which these poems stand. The manuscript haunted me in searing and challenging ways—the best ways—and I returned to it through the weeks, as a traveler returns to new terrain, all the while reminded that, in the end, regardless of who we are to each other, ‘what we have is small / and strange. But true.'” 
—Ocean Vuong, Judge 2018

“Just when you think poetry's sort of done everything, along comes Chad Bennett to give it all a fresh makeover. Disarmingly frank, sensual, experimental, and approachable, this is a glorious homage to queer culture as well as a moving personal account of living through the era of change.”
—D.A. Powell

“In Chad Bennett’s poems, the thinking is intimate and the vulnerability razor-sharp. His forms embody the past and the now, and his language is exact and charged; each word, beautifully stapled down, radiates to make visible the contours of the self wrestling with desire and isolation. 'What I hide with my language my body utters,' writes Bennett (adapting Roland Barthes), reminding us queerness, though hypervisible, often lacks intellectual and emotional depth in our society. Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era argues against such erasure. The poems are astute, moving, and exquisite.”
—Eduardo Corral

From the Publisher