Sentiments, Stitches, and Embodied Poetics
Discovering Jessica Bebenek's Poetry
Photo by Viv Amara
When my grandmother told me the family used to be bookmakers, I thought they were publishers. Turns out, that's not at all what she meant. When Jessica Bebnek talks about bookmaking, she couldn't be more literal.
“It's so funny, because I actually got into making really nice books and then got into making zines. It's a weird backwards experience to what a lot of people have. I was in this creative writing program, and our teacher introduced us to the concept of chapbooks, and he invited us to submit our final portfolio as a chapbook. Maybe even make a series of that chapbook, and sell it, blah, blah, blah. So from there, I just got really into the artistic design of making books, and I made a lot of blank notebooks. I got into doing different kinds of bindings. And then, as I was making these very beautiful sort of one-of-a-kind notebooks…overlapping craft and Fine Art, right? Yeah, making a one-of-a-kind piece, which is not usually the case for a notebook that you can buy to write in, right?
“So, I love making these things, but then I started to realize as I was tabling and selling my stuff, that my stuff is just too expensive for a lot of people, which is totally fair, and I wanted to create things that people could buy for two bucks, five bucks. I didn't want my work to be behind a paywall. So, while I still make things that are more expensive -- like a journal that might cost 40 or 60 or 80 dollars, because it's like a large sort of one-of-a-kind collaged handmade piece -- I started making things that people can pick up and afford. And I like that I can give things away, too, like they're cheap enough that I can just give them to people if I'm like, oh, you should read this. You will like this. I can just put it in people's hands.”
So when she calls No One Knows Us There, a poetry collection, her “first quote unquote book”, she's again being as accurate as can be, though she has 8 zines and chapbooks under her belt, hidden behind an asterisk on the statement. This collection, called her debut, is the first she's put out with a publisher. While it removed some of the hands-on work she loves, it has its perks. “It's been really nice to actually have some of the heavy lifting taking off my shoulders and also just realizing you can do so much more when you work with other people.”
Writing is one of the truly solo, arguably isolating, arts. Just try to get a writer-type to a social event, and you'll understand how addictive the solitude becomes. As a multi-disciplinary artist, Jessica Bebenek gravitates toward solo modalities, like textile arts, but as with writing, there's a shared intimacy in bringing those private acts to the public. She once did a performance piece in which she knit a scarf for 12 hours straight while a recording of T.S. Eliot read The Wasteland. “It takes about half an hour, so I listened to it 24 times in a row, and so now it’s ingrained into my DNA,” she told me of the experience.
The first time I saw her perform, she did a talk about streamers who stream themselves sleeping. Off the top, it sounds weird and wild, but as she spoke, I could feel the reasons both the streamer and watcher participate. She brought our collective isolation right into the spotlight; our basic human needs (the ones we don't talk about in polite company) stepped out of the shadows on her words, and the oddity of it all became natural, understandable. No, I don't remember what she said, but I know I loved how she said it.
She tells me that for a writer, she's quite a visual thinker, and it tracks. She brought breath to those sleeping strangers, and her poetry is vivid. Jessica recognizes how visual, almost tangible, her poems are. “It's very grounded in setting and character. Sort of cinematic. They'll often be people moving around doing things, so it's not that kind of heady or abstract.” Which is, of course, the complaint with so many of the poems that academia wanted us to read: that they were heady, stagnant, more concerned with meter than humanity.
In this collection there's a poem called On The Night of the Morning my Grandfather Died, and it opens as if the title is the first line:
“we got shit-faced. Crawled through the pubs of that town
with its illusion of smallness. The moon and its illusion of light.”
Reading it I could smell the alcohol, feel the evening breeze, and that melancholic sense of the moon’s magic being a mere reflection of the sun. Ah, it's beautiful and poignant, made moreso by the real life infused into the lines. This is not contemplation on the abstraction or philosophy of death, this is the reality of surviving, and I feel it in my bones.
I ask her if knitting and poetry are kind of the same, a stitch and a word each being so meaningless on their own until piling onto each other to make a neat, perfect piece. I consider the emotions and energy poured into each, all but unknown to the viewer who sees the finished product. But I'm off: these scratch very different itches for Bebenek.
“When I'm writing just like a straight up and down lyric poem, it's quite improvisational and all over the place. Like, I'm jumping around from start to to finish and putting words in, and it's all kind of happening in a jumble, like a rush of inspiration, and then editing similarly is, kind of all over the place. But when I'm making textile art, what I like about it is that it is quite procedural. You might even compare it to something more like procedural poetry. It's more of a conceptual act where I make the plan, and then execute the plan. I have to make the pattern, and then I execute the pattern. So making the pattern is very involved, but then executing the pattern is often kind of relaxing, and even though I'm making this strange art, I can do it while I'm listening to a podcast or watching whatever.”
(As a sidebar, a light went off in my head here as I realized that I write everything out of order except poems, and I couldn't believe I'd missed that. This is perhaps one of the reasons I'm not a poet.)
Jessica has always been a poet first. “I would fuck around and and have my little, like, child poems and stuff, but I was also drawing a lot, doing a lot of visual art stuff when I was a kid, because kids do that.” Then things got more serious in high school. “It was really encouraged when I was in high school because I had a creative writing teacher, and then I also wrote a couple plays that were performed in high school, so that was kind of going on. I thought I might try to write for TV. But I wanted to sabotage my career, obviously,” she jokes. Being a poet in 2025 might be like loving tech in the 1700s, but we need these genius dreamers.
Knitting came later, at about 20. Working as a server one slow night, a co-worker taught her how. “And as soon as I picked it up, I was like this is it. It's over for me.” While she doesn't consider herself a textile artist (explaining that compared to trained textile artists, she knows “nothing”), it's clear she's an artist to her core. Jessica places no boundaries on herself, exploring modalities as her curiosity moves her. It's a hands-on approach to life, one that I admire, and strive for. It's clear that she's driven by the need to manifest something from nothing: books, scarves, pictures with words.
Leonard Cohen famously said Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. It's the proof of what is happening, the physical manifestation or the unseen.
“When I was at the center for expanded poetics, Nathan Brown, my boss there, the founder, changed one of the research interests to Embodiment, and I was, like, oh yeah, that is my thing.”
At a time when so many things are detached, hands-off, curated for the algorithm, being grounded and embodied is the secret sauce that so often eludes us. It's the blood, sweat and tears that bring life to creations, be they scarves infused with poetry, or poems infused with humanity. This collection, Jessica’s “first book”, is an intimate lyrical journey into the realities that make us who we are, the small details and memories that form our being. If you're in need of poetry that reawakens your heart, this one's for you. Go get it.
Jessica Bebenek’s No One Knows Us There is on sale now. Visit Book*hug Press to get your copy today!
Visit Book*hug Press to get your copy today!
