Blanksmanship

Edition of 200 copies pressed on black vinyl in Paris, France. All LPs come sealed with a 28 page poetry booklet containing the full text of Blanksmanship. Jackets are adorned with a rubber stamped “BE BLANK” on back cover.

John M. Bennett’s Blanksmanship is a totemic representation of something impossible: a linguistic object containing a totality. Written and recorded in the early 1990s and released as a sound poetry cassette and chapbook, Blanksmanship begins and ends with a ten word mantra, distilling the poem’s ten cantos that act as phases of an extended meditation.

Performed by the author accompanied only by minimalist shakuhachi flute and bell, a narrative emerges from a mythic place, spoken by a single voice that eventually multiplies into a horde of selves. The author states that Blanksmanship refers to a state of mind, the “empty yet swarming void from which the poem’s voice arises, as if it were the voice of completeness itself”.

An unheralded masterpiece of American avant-garde writing, this is a poetry that has its roots in the most ancient and enduring forms of poesis. Remastered from original tapes, the LP includes a 24 page poetry booklet containing the full text of Blanksmanship. Edition of 200 copies.