Guy Bennett

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Guy Bennett
NationalityAmerican
Known forPoetry, Literature
AwardsChevalier de l’Ordre des palmes académiques, 2005.
Website http://guybennett.com/

Guy Bennett is a writer and translator. He lives in Los Angeles.

Contents

Biography

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.

Work

Poetry

Early books (1998–2011)

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.” 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.” [2] 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. [3]

Later books (2015–present)

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.” [4] 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. [5]

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.” [6] 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 […].” [7]

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.

Translation

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. [8] “[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.”

Honors

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

Selected publications

Poetry

Translations

Selected reviews

Interviews

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References

  1. ↑ “Guy Bennett,” The Project for Innovative Poetry Blog, October 25, 2009.
  2. ↑ “Αυτό που τελικά τον ενδιαφέρει είναι η εφαρμογή μη λογοτεχνικών μεθόδων ή συστημάτων μέσω των οποίων μπορούν να δημι- ουργηθούν ποιήματα, και όχι τόσο τα ίδια τα ποιήματα ως οχήματα περιγραφής ή αφήγησης.” "Guy Bennett: Παρασιτα, σκωριες, περιθωρια," Τεφλόν [Teflon] 30 (Χειμώνας–Άνοιξη 2024): p. 101.
  3. ↑ “Αν και αυτή η αισθητική αναζήτηση φαντάζει απλώς φορμαλιστική, δεν αποκόβει, ωστόσο, την ποίηση του Μπένετ από το κύριο διακύβευμα των καλλιτεχνικών πρωτοποριών, αυτό της άμεσης σύνδεσης της τέχνης με την καθημερινή ζωή, αυτό της κριτικής λειτουργίας που η τέχνη καλείται να επιτελέσει για να επιδράσει απελευθερωτικά πάνω στη ζωή. Η ποίησή του […] παραμένει γειωμένη και ιδιαίτερα πολιτική.” Ibid.
  4. ↑ “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.” Diacritik, July 9, 2021.
  5. ↑ “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.” Ibid.
  6. ↑ “Από μόνη της, αυτή η χειρονομία μετατόπισης του κέντρου βάρους προς τα περιθώρια του ποιητικού κειμένου, προς ό,τι περιβάλλει ένα έργο ως πάρεργο, διαθέτει μια ισχυρή πολιτική φόρτιση, καθώς ανατρέπει την παραδοσια- κή ιεραρχία μεταξύ των κειμένων και εντοπίζει (ή επινοεί) το ποιητικό μέσα στο μη ποιητικό.” Gioti, op. cit., pp. 102–103.
  7. ↑ “transformant des scories littéraires […] en des formes scriptibles et des genres littéraires à part entière, désormais capables de se suffire à eux-mêmes […].” Remerciements (Bordeaux: Éditions de l’Attente, 2021), p. 83.
  8. ↑ Teresa Villa-Ignacio interviews Guy Bennett on translation and its relation to his writing, especially of poetry. (October 2013)
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