Four Eyes

The four performance works documented in this book were each built through advance planning and spontaneous decisions, in response to the opportunities and constraints I anticipated and experiences in the process of composition. Each depends on live improvisation to verbalize content, themes, and manner throughout the performance itself.

Steve Benson’s public presentations have surprised and refreshed poetry audiences since his Blindspots in 1977. Here are his arrangements for the page of his own verbatim transcriptions of four improvisational public performances from 2005 to 2012. Each engages the conditions and parameters set by the particular situation where it took place, as well as constraints or challenges Steve imposed on himself. The words, issues, and manner of his speaking voice were all spontaneously improvised, not decided in advance.

Reading Four Eyes traces the intimate compositional play of each work as it finds rhythms and structures grow through its process, as well as what gets said. What happens in writing is manifest and thrown into question. Freedoms are negotiated through this experimental, experiential form of action.

Steve Benson was born in 1949 and grew up in central New Jersey. He studied for degrees at Yale College, University of California at Irvine, and The Wright Institute. From 1976 until 1992 he lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, working in new and used book and music retail while building friendships and raising questions with fellow language-centered writers in their frequent contacts. His public readings often incorporated collaboration, auxiliary media, oral improvisation, fortuitous resolutions to unanticipated technical problems and collaboration with writers, musicians, and filmmakers.

He acted in Carla Harryman’s Third Man and Alan Bernheimer’s Particle Arms for Poets Theater productions in the 1980s. He directed a performance of Harryman’s play La Quotidienne and a poets theater workshop at Intersection for the Arts in 1992. Previous books of his performance transcripts and other writings are Blindspots (Whale Cloth, 1981), Blue Book (The Figures/Roof, 1988), Reverse Order (Potes & Poets, 1989), Open Clothes (Atelos, 2005), and It’s a Stool Pigeon Universe (Rastacan, 2021). Other poetry books include Briarcombe Paragraphs (Moving Letters, 1985), Roaring Spring (Zasterle, 1998), and As It Happens (Lulu, 2021). He collaborated with nine friends in language poetry to prepare the Grand Piano: An experiment in collaborative autobiography (Mode A, 2006-10) and, in collaboration with Suzanne Stein, in 36 improvised public on-line chat messaging performances, now collected in Do Your Own Damn Laundry (Gauss.pdf, 2019).

Steve has lived in Surry, Maine, since 1996, serving the Hancock Peninsula as a psychologist in private practice until 2024. He has gratefully shared parenting two children to adulthood with his former spouse. He is an active member of Morgan Bay Zendo, Climate Psychology Alliance, and USA-Palestine Mental Health Network, among other organizations. Links to his works on line are to be found at http: //www.stevebensonasis.com/. Pennsound maintains accessible audio and visual recordings of numerous readings and performances.