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.”[3] 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.
[6]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.”[7] 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 […].”[8] 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.
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.
[9] “[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.” Named Chevalier de l'Ordre des palmes académiques by the French Ministry of National Education in April 2005.