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 : Click on "Preview" to see the opening notes I wrote on processes of making the works in Blue Book and many other pages of Blue Book reproduced here.

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]

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): my 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]

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ONLY SO MUCH : an excerpt from an unpublished longer poem from 2007-08.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

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, 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 [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.)

Recent quasi-poems relating to the themes promoted by the online journal Chant de la Sirene are available at its website, from issues 3 (war), 4 (climate), and soon from 5 (resisting tyranny).

Today Is Different is a book-length project, nearly complete as of autumn 2025. A lengthy excerpt from it appears in R&R.