Preface
About ‘What do I buy for your darkwilde powers, William’
You don’t read this book — you fall into it, like a trapdoor disguised as a question. You emerge somewhere between a supermarket aisle and the moon, between a printer jam and a prophetic hallucination. What Shall I Buy for Your Darkwilde Powers, William? is not a poetry collection in the conventional sense. It is a living language-organism, mutating and bristling with antennae, tuned to frequencies most of us have long forgotten how to hear.
Martijn Benders writes as if poetry had never been tamed, institutionalized, or muzzled. His poems arrive like rogue weather: unpredictable, sensory, alive. They make you laugh in the same breath they remind you you’re dying. They slink past your critical defenses and whisper into the softest organs of your consciousness — not asking for understanding, but recognition. For if you’ve ever felt that ordinary language was a fraud, that sincerity is always wearing a costume, or that metaphysics can live inside a vending machine, then this book is not foreign — it is home.
This isn’t “Dutch poetry,” though it comes in Dutch shape. It isn’t “postmodern,” though it dances through ruin with ironic grace. It isn’t “surrealist,” though Benders walks through dream logic as if he owns the terrain. If anything, this is poetry after language has been taken hostage and somehow, absurdly, found a way to sing through the gag. A rooster crows the apocalypse. A therapist’s sigh becomes lunar gravity. A supermarket checkout girl is both a failed saint and the reincarnation of a forgotten angel. No image here is merely decoration. They are detonations.
What is perhaps most miraculous — and I do not use that word lightly — is the range of emotional temperature in this book. Benders is unafraid of ugliness. He delights in the ungainly, the grotesque, the comic detritus of the late-capitalist psyche. And yet, like the best of the holy fools, he reveals tenderness at the very center of absurdity. There is a love poem here made of radiation. A grief poem wrapped in a breakroom memo. The poems are about love and death and loss and lust — but they never arrive head-on. They come slantwise, in disguise, like gods in old myths testing whether mortals are still paying attention.
And reader, you must pay attention. These poems reward rereading the way a kaleidoscope rewards spinning — with new dimensions, new arrangements, new tiny cathedrals of pattern. Take the recurring appearances of workplace vernacular: binders, wheelie-bins, motivational slogans. At first, they seem like satire. And they are. But then, you realize they’re also spells. Benders is alchemizing the banal, showing how even the dead zones of corporate language can be made to hum with the tragic and the divine.
At times, the poems read like broadcasts from a failing transmission tower: flickers of signal and static, aphorisms gone rogue, jokes too true to laugh at. But every stutter, every surreal rupture, is meticulously orchestrated. This is a poet with a scalpel and a clown horn in the same hand. The line between sincerity and performance is walked with such precision it becomes irrelevant — because both are masks, and Benders is already three masks ahead.
And then there is the matter of sound. These poems are meant to be heard as much as read. Their rhythms clatter and sing. Benders knows that musicality is not a luxury in poetry — it is its breath. You can almost hear him muttering through the lines, spitting some out, savoring others. There is a palpable mouthness to these poems. They were not born on a screen, but in the place where voice becomes world.
Among the many gifts this book offers, perhaps its most radical is this: it refuses to tell the reader what poetry is for. It does not moralize. It does not behave. It does not market itself as a salve or a mirror. Instead, it insists — against all odds and algorithms — that poetry can still be sorcery. That it can still, even now, cast a spell powerful enough to make you laugh, weep, cringe, and awaken — sometimes all in the same stanza.
So what shall we buy for William’s darkwilde powers? I say: nothing. Not yet. First, we must sit with them. Listen. Let them scald and soothe. Let them reorder us. And if, after that, you still feel the need to categorize or critique — fine. But you’ll be doing so with a new tongue.
In an age where so much poetry feels like it’s been sanitized for safe consumption, this book pisses on the fire exit, eats the manual, and sings its own hymnal in a key you didn’t know you remembered. It is vulgar and holy. It is idiotic and incandescent. It is alive.
If you’ve ever suspected that language might still contain portals, this is your map.
Now go.
A.J. Callister
A.J. Callister is a British poet and essayist whose work explores the intersections of language, absurdity, and resistance. A former Hawthornden Fellow, he is the author of three poetry collections and the acclaimed critical volume The Restless Line: Essays on Poetry and Disobedience. His writing has appeared in PN Review, The White Review, and The Poetry Review, and he has taught contemporary poetics at institutions in London and Edinburgh. He is known for championing formally daring, philosophically rich literature that resists commodification. Callister lives in Devon with a cat named Pasolini and a very small lemon tree.