Steve Benson: For my live reading for GP TV, I chose to select a passage or two from each of the
ten essays I wrote into the Grand Piano books and read them straight, which is to say, with due
emphasis and embodiment, articulating myself and my laptop camera in physical relationship, as
well as its mic. One continuous shot as if ten.
"A moment on life/or not," Segue Series Reading at the Zinc Bar, February 16, 2013
Ariel Goldberg introduces Steve Benson, who reads individual pages from a long unfinished poem and improvises passages in between pages. Film made by Robert Withers.
"unfinished and perfectly still," The Poetry Project, NY, NY, March 20, 2010
A fully improvised collaborative work by Steve Benson (spoken voice), Konrad Steiner (montage and projections), and the Jon Raskin Quartet (music), including
Jon Raskin (saxophones, jaw harp, electronics), Liz Allbee (trumpets, conch), Ches Smith (drums) and John Shiurba (guitar, effects). Film made by Konrad Steiner.
"All Words Spoken Represent Words Being Read," Eastern Michigan University, February 16, 2010
Begins with Carla Harryman's introduction (in mediasres), after which Benson reads verbatim, choosing improvisationally what to read when, from a variety of texts on a long table before him.
Improvisational performance, March 14, 2009, Berkeley [video]
This video
was filmed and produced by Konrad Steiner. Benson's performance that Saturday night
was the closing event for "Medium and Margin: Multiplying Methodologies and
Proliferating Poetics," a two-day conference at the University of California
at Berkeley (in the Maud Fife Room, Wheeler Hall). The introduction was given
by Lyn Hejinian. [ link
to video ]
Steve Benson improvised both typing on his laptop and orally into a microphone, partially on the basis of notes he'd written in the past day or two, so that amplifiers and projection made his speech and writing present to the audience. Filmed by Brandon Downing and produced by Konrad Steiner.
Without prepared text or notes, Steve Benson orally improvises a long poem composed entirely of questions, and then he responds to questions and comments from the audience. His transcript of this performance appears in his book Open Clothes (Atelos, 2005) as "If you stop to listen to yourself think" and "Is your thinking about the words."
Without prepared text or notes, Steve Benson improvises a long poem composed entirely of questions. His transcript
of this performance appears in his book Open Clothes (Atelos, 2005) as "Did the Lights Just Go Out?" [text].
These recordings were all improvised in studio. "I Was an Absent Alien" (solo on three tracks, 12/91), followed by six tracks improvised as a quartet in studio (2/91) and an excerpt from an improvised performance at New Langton Arts in San Francisco (2/91).
Benson improvises reading while writing longhand in three-line stanzas, recites from memory a paragraph from Huizinga's book on Erasmus, makes speeches on the basis of notes, and reads five stanzas from his poem "Reverse Order" while making and wearing paper masks.
Segue Series Reading at the Ear Inn, New York, May 25, 1985
Improvisation based on transposing fragments from memorized prose taken from two-page spreads in published work of Henry Thoreau, James Barrie, Cabeza de Vaca, Samuel Johnson and Johan Huizinga (described and transcribed into Blue Book [The Figures/Roof, 1988] as "The Town of He").
Segue Series Reading at the Ear Inn, New York, April 28, 1984
Reading includes "Aposiopesis," followed by excerpts from "Quartets," "About the Subject," and "Briarcombe Paragraphs" interspersed with remarks and re-phrasings of "Speech is...," bracketed by two paragraphs written in the Southwest.
"Talking Leaves Reading," Talking Leaves Books, San Francisco, CA, March 27, 1981
Begins with Benson making community announcements of other poets' up-coming readings and then proceeds to a dialogue between text he had written in recent weeks into a notebook and, after reading each page, spoken improvisations. Later transcribed and collected in Blue Book as "Talking Leaves Reading."
From the Talk Series curated by Bob Perelman. Benson's transcript is available in The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater 1945-1985, edited by Kevin Killian and David Brazil (Chicago: Kenning Editions, 2010).
Complete Recording (1:17:37): MP3 (Break around 45:00 when the tape flips over.)
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