Zone (New York)
@ Torn Page
435 W. 22nd Street, New York
September 20, 2026
with Steve Benson
and Marjorie Welish
hosted by Carla Harryman
and Lee Ann Brown
On the right day, New York is about openings. On that day, Lee Ann and Carla organized an event to launch Zone: correlations (1973 2021) in New York, in the company of two long-time collaborators and close allies in poetry, Steve Benson and Marjorie Welish. As a member of the Grand Piano, Steve has been a significant part of an imagined poetic unity since meeting about 1974 in Santa Barbara, followed by his emigration north to join the community then converging. I first encountered Marjorie a decade later, about 1989 when she published a review of my book Conduit in the San Francisco Chronicle titled “Exposed Wires of an Electronic Age.” This review, edgy but positive, followed the disastrous series of poetic kneecappings that attended Total Syntax and the resistance it inspired among the philistines, which I have returned to past the point of recall. Nothing short of an anti-philistine Poetic Front has characterized our solidarity since then, as Marjorie explicitly confirmed in introducing her reading. Her magisterial A Complex Sentence (2021) stands as a charter document of that movement’s core values. … More
