A Literary Arts Journal
Guy Bennett
How I Did Not Write Some of My Books
An Appropriation Lexicon
Guy Bennett's most recent publications are Œuvres presque accomplies and For an Ineffable Metrics of the Desert, the selected poems of Mostafa Nissabouri (co-translated with Pierre Joris, Addie Leak, and Teresa Villa-Ignacio). He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the MFA Writing program at Otis College of Art and Design.
Written in 2006 and published the following year, this essay's title echoes Marcel Benabou's Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, whose title echoes Raymond Roussel's How I Wrote Certain of My Books. All three are concerned with how texts have been written and / or why they sometimes are not, as well as with different processes and modalities of (literary) writing.
Reading "How I Did Not Write Some of My Books..." today, I find myself less invested in the categorizing labels that I proposed at the time than in the procedural differences associated with different types of textual appropriation, which I still feel it is important to acknowledge, distinguish, and account for when reading works derived from previously existing materials.
– Guy Bennett
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