Ben Sloan, poet

"If I'm in a room and if I read a really good poem or a novel, it's as if a door appears in the wall, and there's a whole new world that is accessible."

Ben Sloan

In July of 2023 Seven Kitchens Press published Ben's second chapbook, Then On Out Into a Cloudless Sky. 

These twenty poems are dedicated to his literature and creative writing students at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, which is located in central Virginia not too far from Ben's home in Charlottesville. Ben taught Creative Writing at the Buckingham and Dillwyn Correctional Center, as well as the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, for over a dozen years, and he's recently retired after a long, successful career as a professor of English at Piedmont Virginia Community College.

Here is a link: https://sevenkitchenspress.com/editors-series-1/volume-five/ben-sloan-then-on-out-into-a-cloudless-sky/ 

Ben states the following taken from an article by Thomas Hodgkins in The Cavalier Daily:

“The ability to describe one's environment or what one sees — one's world — is hard. It's really hard to develop vivid connections with the concrete world and convey that through writing.”

I couldn't agree more. The impulse to convey empathy and sympathy, especially for those who through no fault of their own have been deemed voiceless by society and have clearly suffered great wrongs and indignities, is one that to a certain degree drives most if not all artists. 

The danger one faces with writing poems about others so different from one's self is lapsing into language that sounds overly sentimental, inauthentic, condescending, or somehow makes the poet a moral judge and arbiter. 

Ben avoids this. The power and lucidity in his poems emerge from what he chooses to hold back, keeping to a minimalism he's comfortable with, allowing the spaces between the lines to breathe and speak. He trusts the old adage that less is more.

Each of the poems in his newest collection, as in his first one, The Road Home, are gems that shine and radiate giving off their iridescence in miniature without getting preachy, sophomoric or bobastically political. Yet at the same time, many of them are political, but in the most noble and generous sense of that word. 

For example, in a poem such as "Eva In Berlin, April 30, 1945," which opens the collection, Ben draws on biography as Eva Braun watches her husband (Hitler) commit suicide. 

Eva laments: If only it could have been more.

One of five poems in the book concerning World War II, "Blank Faces in Romania, 1943" is dedicated to Aharon Appelfeld, a survivor of Nazi labor camps. 

Ben asks: How do we end up falling wherever it is we have landed?

Such questions, as always, are asked, but can they be answered? Ben suspects it's wise to doubt this, but ask we must. 

Again here's Ben interviewed in the The Cavalier Daily: 

“The first section of the newspaper I read is the obituaries. By reading obituaries, I learn about a whole range of different people, sports figures, scientists, actors but sometimes it's writers.”

There isn't over-reach or Protean displays of language manipulation in Ben's poems. The influence of Elisabeth Bishop, and Edward Hirsch, among others, is evident in Ben's voice as he displays calm, using a direct sometimes gentle and generally accessible language to open a door or a window, no matter its size, airing out whatever room his reader might be inhabiting. 

History may be written by so-called experts paid to chronicle events and changes, but a deeper history, one I find myself more willing to trust, is lived out in silences, small moments, and Ben, knowing this, captures such moments in many of these poems, whether it's "Medusa In Her Garden" or "How Ghosts Walk," or "Enigma On A Train."

He writes of his own and other's experiences with a quiet confidence, and is often able in one line is to extract a larger meaning from a much smaller vein of ore, as in the poem "In My Office at Work" when he muses: But it is the silences, finally, really, standing in for the other person....

Born in rural southeast Missouri, his first poetry chapbook, The Road Home, was published in 2017 by Thirty West Publishing House, drawing from poems that had appeared in lit mags such as Off the Coast, The Saint Ann’s Review, and the Ozone Park Journal. 

Here is a link: https://www.thirtywestph.com/

Along with poet and translator Vyt Bakaitis, Ben has been part of two projects. He and Vyt co-edited the literary magazine, Thirst, and he was a contributor to the Message Ahead anthology edited by Vyt.

He holds degrees from Washington University, Brooklyn College, and a doctorate from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Here's a sample poem from The Road Home chapbook:

In 2022 and 2023 Ben performed in a series of Virginia Humanities Grant-funded theater events entitled Flying in Place devoted to choreographed interpretations of the original writing, background stories and experiences, of incarcerated individuals. 

Commenting on the Flying In Place project, Ben explained in an interview in Campus Daily that writings from PVCC prisoners were collected, and that he and co-creator Brad Stoller, a fellow PVCC professor, felt it was important to bring the often invisible lives of people behind bars into the consciousness of not only students on the main campus of PVCC, but to the larger community. Either on stage or through video, the program involved PVCC students in the prison system from Fluvanna women's correctional system, Buckingham men's facility, and the Dillwyn men's facility. 

Here's Ben speaking about his work as a teacher in prisons: 

“As I try to empathize with them and understand their work and who they are as people, I feel transformed. I see the world in a different way.”

CHARLESTON FARMHOUSE, A PHOTO ESSAY, PART FOUR, INTERIORS, THE STUDIO

 

"Making things -- visual or literary -- was Bloomsbury's dominating passion. It was also, in a paradoxical way, its link to the nineteenth century past that it was at such pains to repudiate."

Janet Malcolm from A House Of One's Own

Above, Stephen Tomlin's Bust Of Virginia Woolf

From the official Charleston website: 

https://www.charleston.org.uk/object/3128-2/

This bust of Virginia Woolf which sits atop the chest of drawers in the studio is by the British sculptor Stephen Tomlin – a friend of the Bloomsbury group. He was bi and enjoyed many love affairs within the group. Fellow artist, Duncan Grant, and the writer Lytton Strachey were among his lovers. Frances Partridge, a writer also closely associated with the group, described him as a heartbreaker.

He was a talented sculptor and made portrait busts of several of his friends. In 1931, he asked to sculpt a portrait of Virginia Woolf, but the process didn’t exactly go smoothly. Firstly, Virginia hated being looked at and needed much persuading to even sit for the portrait. Secondly, with so many demands on her time, it became – Vanessa Bell recalled – ‘quite impossible for her to get half an hour free from her friends and admirers.’ In the end a frustrated Virginia decided to call it a day. The original plaster bust remains here and despite the struggle, it captures a good likeness.

Tomlin died in 1937, aged only 35 – ill health exacerbated by alcoholism and poor mental health. Virginia remarked it was a ‘tragic, wasted life’. His busts of Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant are also on display in the house, and his sculpture of David Garnett is in the Orchard.

Though the photographer is unknown, the larger photograph above, atop the shelf to the viewer's left, is of Vaslav Nijinksy

"During my tour of Charleston, I had been struck by the amount of space Clive occupied in the house -- he had a downstairs study, an upstairs library, a bedroom, and his own bathroom. They are decorated with Duncan's and Vanessa's usual painted panels, windowsills, bed boards, and bookcases -- but they are more elegant and more luxurious. Clive had evidently wanted his little comforts and conveniences, and he had got them."

Janet Malcolm from A House Of One's Own

"We should have felt it to be not merely wrong, but unpleasant not to work every morning for seven days a week and for about eleven months a year. Every morning, therefore, at about 9:30 after breakfast each of us, as if moved by a law of unquestioned nature, went off and 'worked' until lunch at 1. It is surprising how much one can produce in a year, whether of buns or books or pots or pictures."

Leonard Woolf, Autobiograpy Volume 4

CHARLESTON FARMHOUSE, A PHOTO ESSAY, PART THREE, INTERIORS, OBJECTS AND ROOMS

 

This is an excerpt from the official Charleston website: https://www.charleston.org.uk/event/house-visit/

Almost as soon as they moved to Charleston in 1916, Bell and Grant began to paint. Not just the walls, but on every surface imaginable, transforming the house into a living, breathing work of art. Over the following decades, Charleston became a gathering point for some of the 20th century’s most radical artists, writers and thinkers known collectively as the Bloomsbury group. It is where they lived out their progressive social and artistic ideals.

"If the place is Chekovian -- as perhaps all country houses situated in precariously unspoiled country, with walled gardens and fruit trees and not enough bathrooms, are -- it is not of Chekhovian ideleness and theatricality that it speaks but, rather, of the values by which Chekov 's good characters are ruled: patient, habitual work and sensible, calm behavior."

Janet Malcolm from A House Of One's Own

"Charleston is dominated by its workplace -- its studios and studies and the bedrooms to which guests retired to write. The communal rooms were only two in number -- the living room (called the garden room) and the dining room -- and were modest in size. They were not the house's hearth."

Janet Malcolm from A House Of One's Own

"The ubiquitous decorations only extend our sense of Charleston as a place of incessant, calm productivity."

Janet Malcolm

"I was drawn to the windows as if by a tropism. Today, we come to house to see the decorations and the paintings that Clive and Vanessa and Duncan collected as well as the ones that Vanessa and Duncan produced."

Janet Malcolm

"What Clive and Vanessa and Duncan looked at when they entered a room was the walled garden and a willow and the ponds and fields beyond, and as I looked out of the windows they had looked out of, I felt their presence even more strongly than I had when examining their handiwork and possessions."

Janet Malcolm