Guy Bennett

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:

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.

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.” 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 […].”