The Book of Benjamin, Ben Robinson
Palimpsest
Press, 2023
With characteristic sparse poetic-prose, Ben Robinson weaves archival photography and an intensely intimate narrative inflected by biblical story and found poetry. It is all to uncover Benjamin. The name, the people, the stories, the cross-temporal registers in which a name is animated and invoked across history. The book demands us to consider how memory and archival environments immortalize story in various ways.
The book operates in (at least) two competing voices; they face each other on each spread. On one side is a narrative composed of found poetry that acts as a catalogue of every Benjamin Robinson one could possibly find with Google’s help. In all caps, with detail from one Ben merging with the next, it reads as a commentary about what the search engine remembers of us. One might call this “half” of the book, the banality of the internet archive. But, Robinson (the author) gives us no context here. Is this found poetry or, maybe, is this a snapshot of the author’s life? (Could he possibly have played that many sports? Does he have any minor drug convictions to his name?) On the opposing page, the reader is faced with what is, convincingly, the author’s voice. Here, what predominates is the oscillation between The Story of Benjamin (as in, Old Testament Ben) and the author’s own personal story of family life, childhood, and loss.
Initially, one is not sure how to approach the reading. Are we intended to read the found poem—in all caps on the left side of the spread—in one go, gratifying our colonial-inspired desires for linearity? But what good is this? In the end, are we obliged to give ourselves over to the Robinson’s of yesteryear—the footballers, the cricketers, the nefarious characters, the subjects of obituaries from the rural Midwest? Alternatively, do we simply skip these in favour of the author’s own voice? This story is sobering, tender. But the only choice is to read the accounts together, all these varied permutations of Benjamin. They call to us, unsettle us; it is almost theatrical, like too many voices—actors murmuring on a crowded stage.
Each spread juxtaposes story with the mediated, web-remembrance environment. The architecture of the book is an archivist-poet’s meditation on coming to terms with personal (or collectively held) memories. The narrative insists that we negotiate the ways memory itself is at risk of disappearing under the weight of what Hannah Arendt called the “dead letter.” Of course, Arendt insisted that in the “dead letter” is held the promise of a kind of immortality, but, in the internet age, public data short-changes the ineffable and foregrounds the banal. This is not the kind of immortality that Arendt had in mind. Indeed, what Robinson’s own account presents, in contrast, is much more akin to the vibrant possibilities Arendt might have imagined. It is only all heaped together that The Book of Benjamin reveals the meaningful task of remembrance set out before us.
timothy martin is a poet and PhD Candidate living in Toronto. His scholarly interests include aesthetics, memory, and (counter)archival practice. You can often find him in the forest looking for birds, or at a playground looking after his three small children.