David Benedetti

David Benedetti is an American poet and prose writer associated with experimental poetry and the San Francisco poetry scene from the 1960s onward. He earned a Ph.D. in American Literature and taught poetry and writing in a number of settings, including colleges, high schools, and jails. His work explores language through prose poems, computer-written texts, palindromes, humor, puns, satire, and experimental writing systems, and has been connected to Language poetry, cut up techniques, and postmodern theory. Early works including The Internal Weather from 1971 and the prose poem collection Nictitating Membrane from 1976 explored experimental approaches to language and prose writing. During the early 1980s, while working as a system analyst and researcher at Southern Pacific Transportation Company in San Francisco, Benedetti produced computer-written literary works including Social Climax Text: A Computer-Written Novel Programmed by David Benedetti from 1982 and Ideas Imagine Passion: a computer written prose poem from 1983, both created using an IBM 370/158 computer. He later published the poetry collection Defense Mechanism in 1986 and continued to produce works that combined formal language structures, humor, and experimental writing, including Are Poets at a Taste Opera?, an epic poem composed of palindromes, from 2015 and Just Being: a novel poem from 2018. In 2007, Benedetti was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where a recording of his poetry readings was produced by VOX Audio.