The four performance works documented in this book were each built through advance planning and spontaneous decisions, in response to the opportunities and constraints I anticipated and experiences in the process of composition. Each depends on live improvisation to verbalize content, themes, and manner throughout the performance itself. Steve Benson’s public presentations have surprised and refreshed poetry audiences since his Blindspots in 1977. Here are his arrangements for the page of his own verbatim transcriptions of four improvisational public performances from 2005 to 2012. Each engages the conditions and parameters set by the particular situation where it took place, as well as constraints or challenges Steve imposed on himself. The words, issues, and manner of his speaking voice were all spontaneously improvised, not decided in advance. Reading Four Eyes traces the intimate compositional play of each work as it finds rhythms and structures grow through its process, as well as what gets said. What happens in writing is manifest and thrown into question. Freedoms are negotiated through this experimental, experiential form of action.
