JIM LEFTWICH’S LAST BOOK : PIT SWAN & ORBATE WRITING
Luna Bisonte Prods, 2025
It is difficult for me to write about Jim Leftwich, my friend and collaborator, who died this year, far too young, and at the height of his powers and creativity as a writer and artist. Jim’s unique intelligence and approaches to literature were very much in synch with, and yet very different from my own. His death has been saddening to an extreme. But I am grateful for his friendship and for to having been able to publish a good many of his books through Luna Bisonte Prods, a publishing project run by C. Mehrl Bennett and myself.
Here I want to approach his last book, PIT SWAN & ORBATE WRITING, one of his best and in many ways most interesting. It was published just before he died, and he never got to see a copy of it.
The book can be understood as a kind of language-based meditation, best read in the same frame of mind, re-creating the ebb and flow of the words and phrases as a meditation, a listening to the resonant current, which will sound different every time one reads it. Many of the text collaborations Jim and I did over the years involve this kind of reading and re-reading. (This was also our practice, which was especially zen-like, with the visual collaborations we did. There is a current of resonance present in all language, as well as in all graphic glyphs, letters, etc.)
What follows are two readings/meditations done over a few days, each of pages from the two parts of Leftwich’s book.
PIT SWAN
In the pit a swan
In the swan a words
In the words a bract
In the bract a curve
In the curve a canyon
In the canyon a being
In the being a hasp
In the hasp a ear
In the ear a root
In the root a mucus
In the mucus a facsimile
Noise heave mirror en
Circled in the fire
Toothbrush in the wind
The wince the whistle“lung tongue sang”
incubator circles
feet aside
syllabic carbonthe knees crush
city past freeze
the apron weaponized
deep chicken mirrors
naked insect dust
the poem rust vine
ear lung spoon memory
stuff gland knee surface
chasm pillow volcano pillow
volcano pillow volcano pillo
wv olcano pill ow volca nowind face the word listing
robot signage to bed
to bed bedded in the
road round
utter cloud
eggfore text switch body
plumb tex gland olmeqic
gnat lit half stark
shoe frogs vac umyopia lungch last ride
trend meteor nap plop
glue frog étude sheer
time knife ear tellburger daub hot frogs
livers cortic isthmus tooth
fire flit carnate milk
nats flow permit limitbrack sauce science dust
pensive steer horizon node
fog vats word doodads
nut poem knot caesura
ORBATE WRITING
read the orb
line extinct
no farther but
father
but into the
itching sphere
rotting sun
read the
poem for
ever never
the same the
same t he
s me lt
no end one onwater in words
sloshing
sleep
weeds kitchen
circle back &
kcab elcric
en la hacienda
esférica
espérica
palabras in water
es movimiento
of landscape
again ni aga
muck enigma
mind mind
returns
is sweat juts
disease feathers
beat feet
meat leak
nacent boomgarbled worm aspirin splices
radio gulch recombent mask
snake cloud agnosia glare
diploid elbow crowbar arrogatedfrozen feet box drips
shoes & tongue swill & mold
snug wheel & hushed ladders
fuss sensors ploy semanticwreckage sea mind words
aporia bellowed story codex
mirrors walk mirrors ladders
mirrors verdict mirrors schoolgravel style cave style
thawed horse tape corn
knob dust dharma alectic
eaten ampule optics eatenJim Leftwich & John M. Bennett
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Many years ago, during my life as a professor of Hispanic literatures, I developed a way of writing about text, especially poetry, that ran counter to the critical methods of the day. It involved examining how the text affected me, what went on in my mind as I read the text, and then writing and speculating about what that examination meant, what my reactions to the text meant, and/or what resonances they produced. The preceding texts were created using one way of realizing my approach. Jim Leftwich’s writing, which blended into his writing about other people’s work, was the first real example I had seen of someone writing about literature in a way similar to the method I had developed. This is apparent in his published work, in books such as Lunic Panzemes, the 3 vols. of Rascible & Kempt, Poetry Makes Things Happen, and Containers Projecting Multitudes (about my own work), and others. Often there are shorter approaches to poetry found in many of his other books as well. Writing poetry and reading poetry were often the same process, another thing that makes his work so unique and fascinating. His processes, as hopefully my own, are a way of rehumanizing the reading and study of literature, something lost in many current critical fads, which tend to apply a critical theory to literary texts. The theories may be interesting in themselves, but they smother the texts’ resonances, their emotional and experiential depths. His death is a great loss, and for me a personal one, but his work will live on every time anyone reads anything he wrote.
June 2025
photo of Jim Leftwich by Sue Leftwich
John M. Bennett has published over 300 books and chapbooks of poetry and other materials. He has published, exhibited and performed his word art worldwide in thousands of publications and venues. He was editor and publisher of LOST AND FOUND TIMES (1975-2005), and is Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at The Ohio State University Libraries. Richard Kostelanetz has called him “the seminal American poet of my generation”. His work, publications, and papers are collected in several major institutions, including Washington University (St. Louis), SUNY Buffalo, The Ohio State University, The Museum of Modern Art, and other major libraries. His PhD (UCLA 1970) is in Latin American Literature.
