Texts

These texts, now on line, here listed in the order of the original generation, represent or are work I’ve done or made, currently available on line for reading or download:

Steel Idea was in effect my first chapbook, published in 1978 as volume 6 of Tom Mandel’s miam series. 

Careers in the Arts (archived link) : a talk given in February 1978 at the Talk Series curated by Bob Perelman in San Francisco, represented here by a 2006 transcript, typescripts copied from handwritten notes used to prepare the talk, and examples of responses to a questionnaire; slought’s website also has a complete sound recording (see my Audio page).

SOME NOTES ON THE TEXT : the opening notes I wrote on processes of making the works in Blue Book are reproduced here.

Maybe I could . . . (archived link) : an excerpt from Roaring Spring. 

There are railroad tracks that run : an excerpt from a May 2001 oral improvisatory performance at Canessa Park Gallery in San Francisco, in which I was speaking with my eyes closed for about half an hour. [archived link here]

Does one thing lead (unable to find archived link): an animated version and revision of the first several pages of “Open Notebook,” a long work in the book Open Clothes (2005), prepared in collaboration with Deb King, co-editor of markszine.

the ball : the ball is a chapbook one can download documenting a two-day writing project in April 2005. [archived link here]

Friday, July 08, 2005 (archived link): a long response to Ron Silliman’s review of the ball .

Never hear, never see : a prose as poem work from 2005.

Enter : text made from a performance at a reading for the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University in 2005, juxtaposing improvisations oral and textual that were generated simultaneously as ongoing unsystematic variations. [archived here]

AS TO THE BODY : my transcription of my fifteen-minute pre-recorded statement for a May 12, 2007, panel on “The Body and Language Poetry” in New York City.

Oration at Berkeley presents a copy of Vlak‘s second issue, and pages 274-285 (as pagination is counted on this webpage) present my transcript of my performance talk at the ‘Medium and Margins’ conference in Berkeley, CA in spring of 2009, with photographs from the video posted at Pennsound.

IN 1978 LARRY EIGNER READ IN SAN FRANCISCO (archived): a statement on arranging for Eigner to do a poetry reading in the late 1970s.

A memoir of exchange : a review I wrote for Jacket2 of Michael Gottlieb’s memoir and essay. [archived here]

ONLY SO MUCH : an excerpt from an unpublished longer poem from 2007-08. [archived here]

Working for myself, in collaboration : a longer 2011 statement for the Poetic Labor Project on my relationship with the work I do for a living. [archived here]

THINKING ABOUT THE OCCUPATION IN THIS : a short statement I made in 2012 on how the Occupy movement seems to have influenced my writing.

What nothing is in here? : a review of Andrew Levy’s 2011 novel Nothing Is in Here from Eoagh is also an extended consideration of contemporary quandaries in identity orientation, with reflections on works by Robert Musil, J.M. Coetzee, and Jonathan Lethem, as well as Levy’s book. [archived here]

“I didn’t mean to be”: a review from Division/REVIEW of Trish Salah’s book Lyric Sexology Vol. 1. [offline, cannot find archive]

PAGE ONE [archived link only] was commissioned by annexpress.org as a serial presentation, improvised from day to day over about two and a half months in the spring of 2015. It remains archived there as a discrete set of entries organized by date of posting.

WHAT THIS IS AS IT HAPPENS is a working title for a long poem sequence I’ve been getting gradually written, typed, and published over much of the 2000s so far. The first half, WHAT THIS IS, is coming out in the summer from Chax Press in Tucson. 

This work is represented in extended passages from WHAT and IS on line now at Across the Margin, under the title Nothing but, [archived link] and in onedit, on pages 39-45 of With+Stand 6, [cannot recover link] and in the October 2015 edition of Heir Apparent (archived link only).

The whole of THIS appears under the title What Are These Signals From? in the form of an on-line chapbook at https://www.essaypress.org/ep-49/. [archived link here]

Parts of AS also appeared in Brooklyn Rail, January 2020: https://brooklynrail.org/2019/12/poetry/AS [archived link]

Three pages from IT appeared in x-peri on July 18 2020: https://x-peri.blogspot.com/2020/07/steve-benson-three-pages-from-it.html, [archived link here] and two other pages from IT appeared in Elderly’s End Capitalism Now issue, at https://www.elderlymag.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Elderlys-End-Capitalism-Now.pdf [archived link here]. (Pages in Elderly are not numbered and they are many. Works appear in alphabetical order by writers’ first names. Scroll to page 345 to find Steve Benson.