Guy Bennett


Guy Bennett, is an American writer and translator. He lives in Los Angeles.

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 University of California, Los Angeles 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.
He was guest of honor of the Oulipo in 2024.

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.” 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:

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” , 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:
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 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.

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. “ 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

  • En exergue. Paris: Éditions LansKine, 2025.
  • ' Los Angeles: Sophical Things, 2023.
  • Remerciements. Bordeaux: Éditions de l'Attente, 2021.
  • Wiersze zrozumiałe same przez się. Kraków: Korporacja HA!ART, 2021.
  • ' Digital edition published by Jonas Pelzer, 2020.
  • Œuvres presque accomplies. Bordeaux: Éditions de l'Attente, 2018.
  • Ce livre. Bordeaux: Éditions de l'Attente, 2017.
  • Poèmes évidents. 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.

    Translations

  • Hollander, Benjamin. Vigilance. Bordeaux: Éditions de l’Attente, 2022.
  • Nissabouri, Mostafa. For An Ineffable Metrics of the Desert. Los Angeles: Otis Books, 2018.
  • Sandri, Giovanna. only fragments found: selected poems, 1969–1996. Los Angeles: Otis Books, 2016.
  • 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.
  • 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 .

    Selected reviews

  • Cazier, Jean-Philippe, “Guy Bennett : Traduire le langage,” Diacritik, February 3, 2025.
  • Ménard, Pierre, “En exergue, de Guy Bennett: Une compilation d’épigraphes sur la création littéraire et artistique,” Liminaire, January 10, 2025.
  • Nicolas, Alain, “Guy Bennett, merci pour tout et pour rien,” L’Humanité, July 14, 2021.
  • Cazier, Jean-Philippe, “Guy Bennett : l’écriture marginale,” Diacritik, July 9, 2021.
  • Rosset, Christian, “Petite constellation d’été : poésie,” Diacritik, July 6, 2021.
  • Dubost, Jean-Pascal, “, Guy Bennett, Œuvres presque accomplies,” Poezibau, October 31, 2018.
  • Chevillard, Éric, “La fabrique du texte : La chronique d’Éric Chevillard, à propos de « Ce livre », de Guy Bennett,” Le Monde, March 9, 2017.
  • Claro, Christophe, “Le magicien glose : Bennett en son miroir,” Le clavier cannibale, February 7, 2017.
  • Nicolas, Alain, “L’irrésistible évidence des poèmes de Guy Bennett,” L’Humanité, March 2, 2016.
  • Chevillard, Éric, “Nul ptyx : Éric Chevillard chante, lyrique, l’évidence du poète américain Guy Bennett.” Le Monde, October 7, 2015.

    Interviews

  • Nazione Indiana, Andrea Inglese.
  • Permanences de la littérature, Marie-Laure Picot, directrice.
  • Teresa Villa-Ignacio interviews Guy Bennett on translation and its relation to his writing, especially of poetry.
  • by Stephanie Rioux and Mathew Timmons.
  • "Entrevue avec le poète américain Guy Bennett réalisée par Hassan El Ouazzani." art Le Sabord 70 : 44–51.
  • Double Change II.