Steve Benson is an American poet and performer

Performance art

In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...

. He is often associated with the Language poets

Language poets

The Language poets are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s...

. Benson lives in Downeast Maine

Maine

Maine is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and south, New Hampshire to the west, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the northwest and New Brunswick to the northeast. Maine is both the northernmost and easternmost...

 where he is a licensed psychologist in private practice.

Life and work

Benson was born in 1949 in Princeton, New Jersey

Princeton, New Jersey

Princeton is a community located in Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. It is best known as the location of Princeton University, which has been sited in the community since 1756...

. While in high school, Benson became interested in contemporary art, film and theater. During his college years, he was close to composer Humphrey Evans III, dramatist Evan McHale, actor Drew Denbaum, novelist Paul Grimes

Paul Grimes

Paul Grimes is a former gangster who, from an early age, was active in Liverpool's criminal underworld. He has 38 criminal convictions and was involved in a range of violent and illegal activities. He also set up legal businesses recycling scrap metal and disposing of waste...

, and poets Kit Robinson

Kit Robinson

Kit Robinson is an American poet and translator. An early member of the San Francisco Language poets circle, he has published 20 books of poetry.-Life and work:...

, Alan Bernheimer

Alan Bernheimer

Alan Bernheimer , is an American poet, often associated with the San Francisco Language poets.-Biography:He attended Horace Mann School, and graduated in 1970 from Yale College, where he became friends with poets Steve Benson, Kit Robinson, Rodger Kamenetz, and Alex Smith and studied literature...

, Michael Waltuch, John Alter, and David Wilk among others. He studied writing with Susan Holahan, Peter Schjeldahl

Peter Schjeldahl

Peter Schjeldahl, , is an American art critic, poet, and educator.Schjeldahl was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He grew up in small towns throughout Minnesota, and attended Carleton College and The New School...

, and Ted Berrigan

Ted Berrigan

-Early life:Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 15, 1934. After high school, he spent a year at Providence College before joining the U.S. Army in 1954 to serve in the Korean War. After three years in the Army, he finished his college studies at the University of Tulsa in...

.

In 1976, Benson moved to San Francisco with his friend, his then partner, Carla Harryman

Carla Harryman

Carla Harryman is an American poet, essayist, and playwright often associated with the Language poets. She teaches Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University and serves on the MFA faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College...

. With Harryman and a number of other young poets including Ron Silliman

Ron Silliman

Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet...

, Lyn Hejinian

Lyn Hejinian

Lyn Hejinian is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is well known for her landmark work My Life , as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry .-Life:Hejinian was born in the San...

, Barrett Watten

Barrett Watten

Barrett Watten is an American poet, editor, and educator often associated with the Language poets.Since 1994, Watten has taught modernism and cultural studies at Wayne State University in Detroit...

, Kit Robinson

Kit Robinson

Kit Robinson is an American poet and translator. An early member of the San Francisco Language poets circle, he has published 20 books of poetry.-Life and work:...

, Tom Mandel

Tom Mandel (poet)

Thomas Poeller Mandel is a contemporary American poet whose work is often associated with the Language poets.-Biography:...

, Alan Bernheimer

Alan Bernheimer

Alan Bernheimer , is an American poet, often associated with the San Francisco Language poets.-Biography:He attended Horace Mann School, and graduated in 1970 from Yale College, where he became friends with poets Steve Benson, Kit Robinson, Rodger Kamenetz, and Alex Smith and studied literature...

, Rae Armantrout

Rae Armantrout

Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language Poets. Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California but grew up in San Diego. She has published ten books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies...

, Ted Pearson

Ted Pearson

Ted Pearson is an American poet. He is often associated with the Language poets.-Life and work:Pearson was born in 1948 in Palo Alto, California...

, Bob Perelman

Bob Perelman

Bob Perelman is an American poet, critic, editor and teacher. He is often associated with the Language School group of poets. Perelman is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.-Life and work:...

 and others he was instrumental in creating Language Poetry

Language poets

The Language poets are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s...

, a new school of innovative writing that emerged in San Francisco, New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

, and other places during this period. Where much language poetry is seen as emphasizing linguistic features of the literary text, Benson became widely known and admired for his forays into questions of process, especially the process of improvisation, both in composition and in performance.

Benson has a BA from Yale

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 and an MFA from the University of California

University of California

The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...

 at Irvine, as well as a PhD in Psychology from the Wright Institute.

Selected publications

• As Is 1978, The Figures (Berkeley, CA)
• The Busses 1981, Tuumba (Berkeley, CA)
• Blindspots 1981, Whale Cloth (Cambridge, MA)
• Dominance 1985, Coincidence Press (Oakland, CA)
• Briarcombe Paragraphs 1985, Moving Letters (Paris, France)
• Blue Book 1988, The Figures, (Great Barrington, MA) and Roof (New York, NY)
• Reverse Order 1989, Potes & Poets (Elmwood CT)
• Roaring Spring 1998, Zasterle (Tenefife, Canary Islands, Spain)
• Open Clothes 2005, Atelos (Berkeley CA)

Selected links

• Ron Silliman reviews Benson's Open Clothes.
• The Body & Language Poetry May 2007
• mark(s)
• the ball
• Collaborative performance with Jackson Mac Low
  Jackson Mac Low
  Jackson Mac Low was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practioneer of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle...
  
   at New Langton Arts
  New Langton Arts
  -About:New Langton Arts was a not-for-profit arts organization focusing on contemporary art founded in 1975 in San Francisco, California. Part of the first wave of alternative art spaces in the US, New Langton Arts was a leader in exhibiting new media forms in art, and involving artists in the...
  
  , 1996
• Kelly Writer's House: improvised performance 2003
• Return: improvised, oral revision of a written text that audience members received at their seats at a poetry reading at Canessa Park Gallery in San Francisco. Return is presented at the link as text, streaming audio, and a facsimile of the original typescript.
• Discrete Series Reading: a sound recording of an extended oral improvisation, premised on development through variation, presented as a poetry reading at the Discrete series in Chicago in October 2003.
• Careers in the Arts: a talk given in February 1978 at the Talk Series curated by Bob Perelman in San Francisco. In addition to a full audio recording of the event, there are links to a 2006 transcript, typescripts copied from handwritten notes used to prepare the talk, and examples of responses to a questionnaire sent out as research in advance of the talk.