Guy Bennett

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.”[1] 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.”

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 “écrire des livres qui sont en acte une critique du livre, de la représentation et de la production du livre, critique impliquant nécessairement la création d’un nouveau type de livre centré sur la marge”[2] [ “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:

On pourrait rapprocher la démarche de Guy Bennett de la réflexion menée par Jacques Derrida au sujet du « supplément », du « cadre », du « dedans » et du « dehors » de l’œuvre – tout ce que Derrida, dans La vérité en peinture, désigne avec Kant par le terme de « parergon » […]. Chez Guy Bennett, ce serait le parergon qui envahirait l’ergon, l’œuvre, non pour effacer toute œuvre mais pour en devenir le centre. Ce qui fait sens, ce qui vaut, est ce qui n’était jusqu’alors que secondaire, superflu, subalterne et muet par rapport à la vérité du texte, au texte comme vérité : la vérité est dite maintenant par ce qui en était exclue.[3]

[ 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. ]

Bennett himself has qualified these later works as explorations in paratext, “transformant des scories littéraires […] en des formes scriptibles et des genres littéraires à part entière, désormais capables de se suffire à eux-mêmes […].”[4] [ “transforming literary dross […] into fully-fledged writerly forms and literary genres now able to stand on their own […].” ]

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. 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.[5] “[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.”

• Poetry from Instructions. Los Angeles: Sophical Things, 2023.
• Remerciements. (Co-translated with Frank Smith) Bordeaux: Éditions de l'Attente, 2021.
• Wiersze zrozumiałe same przez się. (Translation of Self-Evident Poems by Aleksandra Małecka) Kraków: Korporacja HA!ART, 2021.
• Post-Self-Evident-Poems. Digital edition published by Jonas Pelzer, 2020.
• Œuvres presque accomplies. (Co-translated with Frédéric Forte) Bordeaux: Éditions de l'Attente, 2018.
• Ce livre. (Co-translated with Frédéric Forte) Bordeaux: Éditions de l'Attente, 2017.
• Poèmes évidents. (Translation of Self-Evident Poems by the author and Frédéric Forte) Bordeaux: Éditions de l'Attente, 2015.
• View Source. London: vErIsImIlItUdE, 2015.
• Self-Evident Poems. Los Angeles: Otis Books | Seismicity Editions, 2011.
• 32 Snapshots of Marseilles. Corvallis, OR: Sacrifice Press, 2010.
• Drive to Cluster. In collaboration with painter Ron Griffin. Piacenza: ML & NLF, 2003.
• The Row. Los Angeles: Seeing Eye Books, 2000.
• Last Words. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1998.

• Hollander, Benjamin. Vigilance. Bordeaux: Éditions de l’Attente, 2022. [With Frank Smith and Françoise Valéry]
• Nissabouri, Mostafa. For An Ineffable Metrics of the Desert. Los Angeles: Otis Books, 2018. [With Pierre Joris, Addie Leak, and Teresa Villa-Ignacio]
• Sandri, Giovanna. only fragments found: selected poems, 1969–1996. Los Angeles: Otis Books, 2016. [With Faust Paoluzzi and the author]
• Dib, Mohammed. Tlemcen or Places of Writing. Los Angeles: Otis Books / Seismicity Editions, 2012.
• Spatola, Adriano. Toward Total Poetry. Los Angeles: Otis Books / Seismicity Editions, 2008. [with Brendan W. Hennessey]
• Roubaud, Jacques. Poetry, etc. Cleaning House. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006.
• Khaïr-Eddine, Mohammed. Damaged Fauna. Los Angeles, Seeing Eye Books, 2006.
• Espitallier, Jean-Michel. Espitallier’s Theorem. Los Angeles: Seismicity Editions, 2005.
• Novarina, Valère. Adramelech’s Monologue. Los Angeles: Seeing Eye Books, 2004.
• Brossard, Nicole. Shadow / Soft et Soif. Los Angeles, Seeing Eye Books, 2003. Selections published in Drunken Boat 8 (2006).