Four Eyes

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. Pennsound maintains accessible audio and visual recordings of numerous readings and performances.

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