Guy Bennett

Guy Bennett is a writer and translator.

He lives in Los Angeles.

Guy Bennett was born in Los Angeles.

After studies in art, music, languages and literature, he graduated with a PhD in French literature from UCLA in 1993.

Bennett has worked as a musician, teacher, translator, typographer and book designer.

He joined the faculty of Otis College of Art and Design in 1999.

Bennett’s early collections of poetry were written from source texts via the use of constraints.

“His writing,” Douglas Messerli has noted, “often has formal systems quietly embedded in it, but the poetry itself is influenced by a wide range of interests: music […], photography, film, architecture, and, as one might Expect, the languages and literatures of other countries.” In The Row for example, Bennett adapts the fundamentals of the twelve-tone technique to verse, drawing its verbal content from writings on music by and about Anton Webern, a pioneer of twelve-tone composition.

In “The Lilac Variations,” written in memoriam Jackson Mac Low, he applies the latter’s diastic method to Walt Whitman’s elegy on the death of Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Commenting on this approach, Eleni Gioti observes that, “What he is ultimately interested in is the application of non-literary methods or systems through which poems can be created, and not so much the poems themselves as vehicles of description or narrative.” She adds:

"Although this aesthetic quest seems merely formalistic, it does not, however, cut Bennett's poetry off from the main stakes of artistic avant-gardes, that of art's direct connection with everyday life, that of the critical function that art is called upon to perform in order to have a liberating effect on life."

His more recent collections have evolved away from “external” subject matter to address more writerly and literary concerns.

In the essay “Guy Bennett : l’écriture marginale” [ “Guy Bennett: Marginal Writing” ], Jean-Philippe Cazier has claimed that Bennett’s project consists of “writing books which are, as acts, critiques of the book, of the representation and production of the book, a critique that necessarily implies the creation of a new type of book centered on margins.” He explains:

"We could liken Guy Bennett’s approach to Jacques Derrida’s reflection on the “supplement,” the “frame,” the “inside” and “outside” of the work – all that Derrida in Truth in Painting designates, like Kant before him, with the term “parergon” […]. In Guy Bennett’s work, the parergon has invaded the ergon – the work – and not to erase it but to become its center. What is meaningful and valid is what was previously only secondary, superfluous, subordinate and silent in relation to the text’s truth, to the text as truth: truth is now expressed by what was formerly excluded from it."

Elaborating on this idea, Gioti writes that, “In itself, this gesture of shifting the center of gravity towards the margins of the poetic text, towards what surrounds a work as a parergon, has a strong political charge, as it subverts the traditional hierarchy between texts and locates (or invents) the poetic within the non-poetic.” Bennett himself has qualified these later works as explorations in paratext, “transforming literary dross […] into fully-fledged writerly forms and literary genres now able to stand on their own […].”

A similar de-centering informs Poetry from Instructions, a collaborative collection of generative poetry.

In this case, the burden of authorship was assumed by the more than 50 contributors to the project: working from a set of verbal algorithms provided by Bennett, which they were free to interpret as they would, they created “original” poetic content that he otherwise had no hand in.

His contribution – the instructions – opened a space for that of his collaborators – the poems themselves – which constitute the actual work.

In his work as a translator, Bennett has focused primarily on experimental writing by contemporary French and francophone authors, among them Nicole Brossard, Mohammed Dib, Jean-Michel Espitallier, Mostafa Nissabouri, Valère Novarina, and Jacques Roubaud.

Named Chevalier de l'Ordre des palmes académiques by the French Ministry of National Education in April 2005.

He has also extensively translated the Italian visual poet Giovanna Sandri, editing a volume of her selected poems in 2016.

“I remain fascinated by visual poetries and other more marginal types of writings,” he remarked in an interview with Teresa Villa-Ignacio.

“[I] am intrigued by the problems they pose to translation and what one can make of […] experimental writings that may not mean in traditional ways.”