Once, to get back at a man she intensely disliked, V.R. “Bunny” Lang had thousands of pink labels made up that said “My name is Parker and I am a pig,” and plastered them all over the guy’s neighborhood–and everywhere else in the world he, his friends, and coworkers would be likely to see them.

Somebody at a party once asked her: “What do you do?”

Lang replied, “What I like. Well, let’s see. I wake up about noon; I have breakfast in bed, and I read magazines and the papers, and then I write letters or something. Then about four I get up and have a lovely long bath and dress and go and have cocktails with friends at the Ritz, or they come to my house or I go to theirs; then dinner somewhere; and then, if I’m not going out that evening, I come home and read a novel, or maybe I play old records over.”

In everything, including this dreamy answer to a dullard’s question, Bunny Lang’s imagination was theatrical. Her almost cinematic description of a typical–or at least ideal–Bunny Lang day does leave out one thing: when did she ever have time to write poems and plays? Who was the woman behind–and in front of–the curtain?

The only member of the famed Poets’ Theatre not connected in some way with Harvard, at its founding, V.R. Lang, as she was known professionally, was in many ways the most literary of them all. Between 1949 and the time of her death in 1956–she died, tragically young, of Hodgkin’s disease at the age of thirty-two–she had been published fifteen times in Poetry magazine alone, far outstripping even such soon-to-be-famous Poets Theatre colleagues as Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Donald Hall; she was surpassed–slightly–in her publishing record only by the senior members of the theatre, Richard Wilbur, John Ciardi, and Richard Eberhart. And when she died, Eberhart published a solemn (and slightly unbelievable) elegy to her called “Loss,” which included such lines as “Her loss is as something beautiful in air.” O’Hara did, too, and his–titled simply with her name-is both better, and better known:

You are so serious, as if

a glacier spoke in your ear

or you had to walk through

the great gate of Kiev

to get to the living room.

As Alison Lurie marveled in her indispensable memoir of Lang, “From the beginning Bunny was involved in every Poets’ Theatre show, as actress, director, writer, designer, and producer.” Not only that, because she never discarded something that could be worn, she had a curious collection of old clothes out of which entire poetic plays were spun. And, as Lurie notes, “she could save a bad play sometimes by simply walking out [onstage] and smiling at the audience.” Clearly, the woman was in possession of some kind of powerful magic.

Her poems read better today than they did a half-century ago, and her best-known verse play, Fire Exit–a modern version of the Orpheus and Eurydice story–is a little-known masterpiece that deserves a revival. The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater happily includes a work by Lang (who also appears, in costume, on the book’s cover) not collected in Lurie’s compilation of the poems and plays.

Lang’s writing always perked up substantially when it was addressed to, or in dialogue with her friends, Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery; sure enough At Battles’ End, apparently written during the same feverish year as Fire Exit–1952–picks up where O’Hara’s Try, Try (the first play presented by the Theatre, in which Lang played the villainess, named for her) leaves off. As the anthology’s editors put it: “Both plays tell the story of a returning American soldier’s arrival to face a wife indifferent to his troubles–and both are Noh plays–what are the odds of that?”

The piece is unusual, to say the least. It opens with a lecture by a chorus in the form of a dreary Harvard-style pedant, explaining to the audience what a Noh play is. Buried in all the guff he delivers a key point: “… as we Occidentals have no official language of Symbols, we must do the best we can with what we do have.” The comic near-stichomythia of the exchange which follows, between characters named Jack and Wong quickly paves the way for Jack’s postwar reunion with Melpomene. Things go to hell quickly; I won’t spoil the play’s lethal ending, but it leaves Wong to lament that “Man is like a pumpkin. Man is very weak.” Sooner or later, we all must learn the lesson of the pumpkin; but there’s a sense we get from Lang that in the end, we’re all quite possibly Cinderellas, too.

[Text copyright Don Share, 2010. Images courtesy of Poets Theater Records， Harvard Theatre Collection，Houghton Library， Harvard University。 Order The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985 online from Small Press Distribution, Amazon, or postage paid by ordering directly from the press. Further discounts are available by subscription to Kenning Editions. See also this curio, a 1954 Harvard Crimson review of Lang's I Too Have Lived in Arcadia.]

Kenning Editions proudly announces THE KENNING ANTHOLOGY OF POETS THEATER: 1945-1985, edited by Kevin Killian and David Brazil.

With new interest in poetry as a performative art, and with prewar experiments much in mind, the young poets of postwar America infused the stage with the rhythms and shocks of their poetry. From the multidisciplinary nexus of Black Mountain, to the Harvard-based Cambridge Poets Theatre, to the West Coast Beats and San Francisco Renaissance, these energies manifested themselves all at once, and through the decades have continued to grow and mutate, innovating a form of writing that defies boundaries of genre. THE KENNING ANTHOLOGY OF POETS THEATER: 1945-1985 documents the emergence, growth, and varied fortunes of the form over decades of American literary history, with a focus on key regional movements. The largest and most comprehensive anthology of its kind yet assembled, the volume collects classics of poets theater as well as rarities long out of print and texts from unpublished manuscripts and archives. It will be an indispensable reference for students of postwar American poetry and avant-garde theater.

Among the poets featured in THE KENNING ANTHOLOGY OF POETS THEATER are Charles Olson, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Russell Atkins, Gregory Corso, Helen Adam, Michael McClure, James Broughton, Kenneth Koch, Jackson Mac Low, Lorenzo Thomas, Anne Waldman, ruth weiss, Hannah Weiner, Lew Welch, Sonia Sanchez, Joe Brainard, Bruce Andrews, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Bob Holman and Bob Rosenthal, Steve Benson, Ted Greenwald, Carla Harryman, Ntozake Shange, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Robert Grenier, Alan Bernheimer, Charles Bernstein, Stephen Rodefer, Fiona Templeton, Kenward Elmslie, and Leslie Scalapino. Also included are previously unpublished plays by Jack Spicer, V.R. “Bunny” Lang, James Schuyler, Robert Duncan, Madeline Gleason, Diane di Prima, Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, James Keilty, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Johanna Drucker, and Nada Gordon. The editors provide informative and provocative prefatory matter, including extensive notes on each play, as well as several that fall within the purview of the book but, for one reason or another, were omitted, as with Pedro Pietri’s The Masses Are Asses or Jessica Hagedorn’s Tenement Lover. Rounding out the book are contemporary classics, such as LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and Kathy Acker’s The Birth of the Poet.

Order online from Small Press Distribution, Amazon, or postage paid by ordering directly from the press. Further discounts are available by subscription to Kenning Editions.

ISBN: 0-9767364-5-4 / ISBN 13: 978-0-9767364-5-5 / $25.95

596 pp. / paperback / POETRY/DRAMA/PERFORMANCE

Cha’s delicate, complexly structured and minimalist performances have been little studied in comparison to her other work. Even the brand new Exilee/Temps Morts, a “Selected Works,” edited and introduced by the curator Constance M. Lewallen, which is packed with unpublished work new to general audiences, manages to sidestep these texts. Lewallen explains that, “[i]n general I have not included texts from performances,” nor texts from installations “in which they were not the primary element,” apparently because such texts are incomplete, or at any rate lack context without the visual and/or performative elements they were written to accompany. Isn’t that funny, that is exactly why the two pieces here seemed so perfect to us for the present volume, since looked at in the context of a poet-run theater, the very contingency and provisionality—the incompleteness, if you will—of these texts called out and spoke the words, “poets theater,” in a stage whisper.

Cha’s writing is predicated on opposites so tightly yoked that to disturb them just a little provokes an enormous mental fracas, and it is a device she especially liked to use in her performance work. Light and dark. Open and shut. Through this forest of dichotomies wander a lonely band of the in between—the vampire, caught between life and death; the mist, halfway between air and rain. Like the “white sheet” of Joe Brainard’s stage dream, Cha has a complicated relationship with what she calls the “screenspilledwhite.” Like every other displaced person, she “moves in and out of the image screen,” finally to stand still, as though motion were itself a trap to avoid. In one piece she carries a lit candle, in the other a lit match circles her body, her hand craning like a windmill. These plays are like self-guiding systems calibrated to pin down one’s location as closely as possible.

[Kevin Killian & David Brazil, culled from The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985, forthcoming, late January 2010. (c) Kevin Killian, David Brazil and Patrick Durgin for Kenning Editions. Pre-orders by subscription only: using a credit card, or via direct mailorder. See also OAC's online archive of From Vampyr and Reveille dans la brume, as well as the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive's current exhibition of Cha's Earth.]

[Anthologies without articulated editorial criteria don't deserve the name; as a genre, the anthology is a definitively self-aware one. A unique feature of The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985 is the self-awareness of editors Kevin Killian and David Brazil, who offer extensive notes on texts that, for one reason or another, are omitted from the volume. One such text is Pedro Pietri's The Masses Are Asses.]

Like that of Jessica Hagedorn, Cherrie Moraga, and Luis Valdez, Pedro Pietri’s work represents a crucial signature of one of the most important roles experimental drama/performance in general, and poets theater in particular, played in the nation’s postwar literary life: the adjudication of identity from within multicultural communities, such as Pietri’s Nuyorica. His theater work demands recuperative measures to see it within his acknowledged practice as a poet, and, because of its importance in his overall development, The Masses Are Asses most especially so. The play’s last edition went out of print in 2004. Since then, public and university library holdings indicate how difficult it is to locate not only a copy of the book (most were checked out and came due over a year ago, presumed stolen), but to understand the legacy of the work. Bootleg copies are rumored to float through the Fox News lynchpin Rupert Murdoch’s social networking (My Space) page constructed on the poet’s behalf by Pietri’s estate, though the estate did not seriously entertain the notion of its inclusion here.

Pietri immigrated to New York from Ponce, Puerto Rico in 1945, just two years of age. Radicalized by service in Vietnam, he became a major literary artist and activist known as much for his poetry as his dramatic works. As well as teaching at SUNY-Buffalo and the Cultural Council Foundation in New York, Pietri was a founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café. He read one of his best known poems, “Puerto Rican Obituary” (also the title of his first major volume of poetry, published in 1973), during the 1969 takeover of East Harlem Methodist Church by the Puerto Rican nationalist group the Young Lords. “Obituary” bears more than a little thematic resemblance to the following year’s The Masses Are Asses:

These dreams
These empty dreams
from the make-believe bedrooms
their parents left them
are the after-effects
of television programs
about the ideal
white american family
with black maids
and latino janitors
who are well trained
to make everyone
and their bill collectors
laugh at them
and the people they represent

What makes Pietri’s poets theater special, though, is how it becomes a site where interrogations of the necessary hubris of tragi-comic representation of “the people,” no doubt the very attempt to represent as such, bears more nuanced takes on the material and means of poems like “Obituary.” As Urayoán Noel has it, his work embraces the “punk” aesthetic of “storm[ing] the sidelines of thought,” shared by Dada, Beat, and Language school poetics, which produces a “Pietrian tonguetwist,” “a brilliant defacement of our readerly temperament.” It can be added that all seem to turn up first and in some ways most vividly in The Masses Are Asses, where form and function enter into isomorphic relation. A forerunner of contemporary “slam” poetics, Pietri’s contrarian boogaloo is now central to Hispanic diasporic poetries. But it stands in high contrast to Latin American high modernist and much post-modern poets theater, thinking of Xavier Villaurrutia’s Autos profanos and, to quote Octavio Paz, their maddening sense of “decorum,” even as both put to shame what USAmerican counter-culture optimists delicately referred to as square society.

The Masses Are Asses is a one-act whiteface agitprop farce—an avant garde tragedy of errors, the only error being its own theatricality. A “Lady” and a “Gentleman” of audacious sophistication extol their superiority and smear “the poor” over champagne in a Parisian bistro that doubles as a South Bronx toilet (or is it the other way around?). A supposed lust for prestige stokes the terrorist group A.B.C.D.E.F.G.H.I. (“Armed / Brave / Comrades / Determined / Efficient / Fighters / Gonna / Humiliate / Imperialism!”), whose bullets and bombs punctuate the night. Needing an effective distraction from the ambient siege (which sounds an awful lot like a characteristic evening in the burrough), the couple “pretend” to be common, drink straight from the bottle, and grind to the rhythm of the telephone as it rings and rings (presumably by would-be patrons of the establishment they insist to inhabit). But when the lady fails to snap out of the masque, the gentleman duly protests. Lapsing into reality, his fantasies suffer mounting complaints: “We don’t even know what Staten Island looks like, never mind a foreign country.” A fracas ensues, on the costs of “being and not being here,” of play-acting class mobility, of deciphering the tyranny of community scriptures. The discovery scene is to be taken literally, breaking the fourth wall Pietri never bothered with in the first place, and is echoed by the contemporary routines of anaphoric protest (“You look eternally fine. / You look eternally finer.”) and by the redundancies of prosodic correspondence (“Assholes…didn’t rhyme, and it sounded too lower classish, so I changed it to asses when referring to the masses to give the ass class.”), all consumed and reconsumed via the gentleman’s portable cassette machine.

The poet’s caricatures of American entrepreneurial gusto are deftly disorienting. The audience, unable to entertain the terms of the “mass” spectacle, sees itself doubled in the voices of the two players thrown from offstage as crime and calamity threaten to suspend the characters’ disbelief. “[N]ow when an individual selects to pretend to be rich instead of to be poor indicates a superior level of comprehension of what is essential to obtain intellectual and material fulfillment,” our neo-Platonist neophyte explains. “You are the pleasure of your pleasures and the misery of your miseries!” The sheer didacticism of our hero’s imagination clobbers the spectator, and, chez Popeye, those revolving stars they see limn the profoundest horizons of their gullibility. Machismo is coerced into cowardice as our hero exhausts the truly heroic perserverence of the ultrarealist, his “lady.” But by the time he’s realized that not only did he invent the eponymous adage that fuels his zeal, he has invented an “ass class” that entraps his family, his people, his “being and not being.” The couple finally snuggle into their bathtub wrapped in an infested old fur, repeat their opening litany of sweet nothings like a flipbook of souvenir postcards from an unspent holiday, and “snobbishly clear their throats in zero seconds.”

[Kevin Killian & David Brazil, culled from The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985, forthcoming early 2010. (c) Kevin Killian, David Brazil and Patrick Durgin for Kenning Editions. Pre-orders by subscription only: using a credit card, or via direct mailorder. See also Jordan Davis' review of the now out-of-print edition of Pietri's play at Constant Critic and footage of the day East Third became Rev. Pedro Pietri Way.]

It is a commonplace among scholars of the poets theater that, in the late 1970s, West Coast language poets entered poets theater first by getting their feet wet with Grand Piano productions of Louis Zukofsky’s A-24, in 1978 and O’Hara’s Try! Try!, in 1979. By that time Nick Robinson and Eileen Corder came to town and set them on fire. However in thinking about the theatricalization of the scene we kept circling back to Steve Benson’s famous talk piece, Views of Communist China, which preceded all the rest. How wasn’t it poets theater? And yet it appeared in the “Talks” issue of Bob Perelman’s journal, Hills, and not the “Plays” issue like other work reprinted in the present anthology. When we told Benson of our desire to reccontextualize VOCC in a book of poets theater, he was startled, but then succumbed to our request.

Did a printed version precede the one in Hills? “Within a week after it was performed, I believe, I had made a photocopy eight and a half by eleven inch book with cover photos by John Harryman that I gave to a number of friends. I typed it up to see what it was, and then I was so impressed that I made the book. I don’t know how many may still be in existence—I think I only have one.”

The front cover of the first printed edition of Views of Communist China.

The back cover of the first printed edition of Views of Communist China.

The original author's note, from the first printed edition, which differs from that which appeared in Hills.

A page of Benson's spring 1977 reading journal marking a primary source for Views of Communist China, in highly suggestive company.

Benson’s author page at PennSound features the audio of the talk, as preserved and donated by Bob Perelman.

[Adapted from Kevin Killian & David Brazil's notes for The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985, forthcoming early 2010. Scans and original texts/artwork provided by Steve Benson, used by permission, all rights reserved, (c) Steve Benson and Patrick Durgin for Kenning Editions. Pre-orders by subscription only: using a credit card, or via direct mailorder.]

In spring 2004 poets Peter Gizzi, Kevin Killian and Aaron Kunin uncovered Jack Spicer’s dramatic version of the Nathaniel Hawthorne story, “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), amid the Spicer papers donated to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, by the poet’s brother, Holt Spicer, and his executor, the late Robin Blaser. Its appearance in The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985 [pre-orders by subscription only: using a credit card, or via direct mailorder] marks its first publication.

Spicer submitted Young Goodman Brown (1946) for a grade, receiving an A- and these anonymous comments (published here exclusively) from his professor:

This seems to me about the most successful dramatization of the story that could be achieved. I have a few questions to ask; and as you will note, they imply certain criticisms, but none organic. The plan of the play is not, I think, much improvable. After all, how can you beat Hawthorne, Eliot and Sophocles, not to mention Spicer. The form in general, then, we pass over. I think allegorical morality plays must be given the highly stylized presentation you manage here, in the Greek mode. As far as I can see, the form is almost exactly that of the formal stasimon-episode alternation, and I think I detect the pathos scene, the catastrophe and the lamentation.

Inquiries:

1. Why do you allow YGB to be saved? So that you can blind him in good Sophoclean style, or as a commentary on the rest? (Or is he the symbolic figure of Milton) . . .

2. Why a Chorus of corpses? (A) to add macabre note; (B) to indicate the dead are no worse off than the living; or what? Why wouldn’t it be more effective if the chorus turns out to be made up of YGB’s townsfolk themselves?

3. Your irrepressible sarcastic note, the Spicer trade mark perhaps, sticks out in this, in a passage of somewhat plethoric ghoulishness, which promotes a laugh just at the wrong place; to wit, the broomstick-riding of Goody Whatsis. Maybe I am especially sensitive to this sort of thing, but whereas I can take the Devil seriously enough (unlike most Californians), I can’t withhold a grin at the broomstick routine.

4. Don’t you think the dialogue is colloquial to a degree that mars the effect of the play? I think you are trying to write a morality play which, like the plays of Chekhov, can be taken as a joke, and can also be taken quite seriously. (If, indeed, you weren’t writing satire.)

5. What’s the advantage of employing 4 actors (or 2 ea. actors & actresses) to squat on stage & say nary a word. If you are only using 1 voice for the choruses, I think you might do better to put them in another shape (as suggested above), or integrate ’em into the story line, or leave them as the merest outsiders . . . picnic-ers, leaning against the proscenium, or whatever your inventive imagination can contrive.

Comparing this to the script, one can see where Spicer flouted each of the professor’s recommendations.

Killian’s Halloween, 2005 production of the play at the San Francisco Poetry Center featured Brandon Brown in the lead role, Dodie Bellamy as his wife, Faith; Spicer’s friends Lewis Ellingham and Landis Everson played the Deacon and the Minister respectively; Killian played the tempter. Here is Killian’s photographic record:

Landis Everson

Ben Mazer, who with Jason Morris, Rodney Koeneke and Taylor Brady, played the First Chorus

Part of our fantastic stage set which really did look spooky from the audience.  This is the famous Halloween Spooky Tree available at Spirit stores everywhere (advantage to staging the play on Halloween, the spirit stores are open)

Kelly Holt played Goody Cloyse

Dodie Bellamy played the doomed Faith in a “Corpse Bride” outfit from the Spirit Store.  She made her entrance to the music of Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen,” the most Godforsaken song we could think of.

*   *   *   *   *

1st C:

When will it start?

2nd C:

He’ll be here soon. The Black Man is waiting for him. It’s one of their nights tonight.

1st C:

Yes, but no one has come yet.

2nd C:

Except us. [Both look slowly around the full circle of the audience including them.] There are too many of us here. Can there be enough blood [to] feed us all?

1st C:

There always is. It’s surprising how much blood the heart holds. I remember –Do you hear someone coming?

2nd C:

Just the wind in the trees. Hear the wind rattle the trees. Just a quiet forest full of corpses.

1st C:

It must be his wife that’s keeping him. Maybe she kept him a longer time tonight over dinner. Maybe he had to fix the broken stair-step before he left. Maybe she’s standing on the stair step now, sobbing and looking toward the woods. The pink ribbons in her hair are bobbing as her face cries.

2nd C:

Does she think he’s being unfaithful?

1st C:

They’ve only been married three months.

[Laughter, then silence.]

2nd C:

I hear him coming.

1st C:

Someone ought to pray for him.

Fiona Templeton is a figure so prominent in our understanding of today’s poets theater practice that we completely failed to notice that she had already written a number of accomplished plays before our 1985 cut-off date (“well yes,” she said dryly, “I’ve been at this game since 1975”) and she must have been just about the last person we asked once this omission sunk in.

Templeton’s play Against Agreement (1982) has a loose, open structure like the intersticed netting of a hammock, belied by the increasingly difficult constraints poured across its surface, like glues of varying origins and flavors, by the elegant prompts of her “Characters and Structural Characteristics (and Ploys).” She describes it as “game structure,” wherein characters are “ways of behaving in relation to others.” Hence the lead roles are synonymous with the collaborators, who probably deserve equal billing in performance: Fiona Templeton and Peter Stickland realizing the piece at The Red Bar in New York’s East Village, 1982. But Against Agreement is a collaboration in performance if not in script, and the mere act of anthologizing it as a text reinforces its thematic and gestural self-reflexivity. The “Time Diagram” referred to on page 453 is both extraneous (literarily) and essential (to a production).

The absence of “Peter’s text” marks “contradictory simultaneities,” the accommodation of unforeseen and subsequent tandems. (While, the song lyrics cited on the diagram reflect the piece’s basically claustrophobic aura as well as a tin pan alley motif the setting, itself perhaps somewhat adaptable, already suggests: “I’ve got you under my skin,” “Me and my shadow / strolling down the avenue,” and “Should I reveal / exactly how I feel?” as examples.) Peter and Fiona progress from “agreement,” past a pure state of uninvolved disputation, to “something else” that transcends but looks a whole lot like absolute disagreement. This narrative maintains the limpidity of its surface bubbling along against a large cast of bar patrons, while aiming for a gradual decline in naturalism.

Staged in a bar, Templeton’s piece replicates the classic “off-Broadway” conventions of the saloon play (think The Iceman Cometh, or Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life) but changes them up with her “Scenic Metronomic Drunk,” her “Rhythmic Metronomic Barmaid,” her chorus of bartenders each with his or her own scraps of personality, the traits of character bestowed by the writer to be really worked up by the actors. Can you imagine, originally “Steve” was played by actor Steve Buscemi, since those days a well known film performer, but in the production photos of Against Agreement impossibly young, his mournful features like a child painted up like a clown’s.

For the original production, Templeton wrote these notes, helpful to those of us trying to think about the difference between reading and, well, life:

In the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, the complex perspective of the trompe l’oeil behind the tiny stage is best seen from one seat in the theatre—the Duke’s, to whom actors would turn to deliver speeches that ostensibly addressed another actor. In the cinema, everyone sees the same because it is bigger. In conventional proscenium, the art consists in making everyone look at the same aspect and not see what does not conform to the illusion, or, if there is no illusion, the point.

The linear nature of playscripts suggests that nothing happens simultaneously. This is a feature of writing:  even where a narrative is broken, or there is none, one can only read one thing at a time. Although a great deal more went on in a Shakespearean production than he wrote as text, the texts are taken as the model for academic playwriting, which suffers from its literary analogy. This need not be a feature of theatre, where the inclusion of space allows contradictory simultaneities (as in life).

Agreement is not multiple. In contradiction, a choice is necessary and mutuality impossible. In paradox, a mutual impossibility must be apparent though not prohibitive. In a mathematical tautology, the negative is just as true.

If you think I’m your enemy, and I do not, who is the enemy? If I think you are my friend, and you do not, who is the friend?

Against #l. the best. the biggest, the first, the only, the winner, the right, the end.

[Kevin Killian & David Brazil, culled from The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985, forthcoming early 2010. Drawing and photograph by Fiona Templeton, used by permission, all rights reserved, (c) Fiona Templeton and Patrick Durgin for Kenning Editions. Pre-orders by subscription only: using a credit card, or via direct mailorder.]

This is a great book! Here are the poets, the great modern poets who have given us our language, our imagery, our style—plunging us into their theater: John Ashbery’s The Heroes, with its classical echo in Ashbery’s singular idiom, which The Living Theatre produced in 1952; Bunny Lang’s marvelous re-invention of English phrases, which The Poets Theatre at Cambridge so boldly produced; Frank O’Hara’s The Houses at Falling Hanging, which inspired a whole generation of poet-playwrights; the stylist Schuyler, our blustering hero Corso, the magical Duncan; their names themselves are poetry. Michael McClure read me his poem play The Feast with vocalizations beyond words—in the sense of outstripping them. The Living Theatre produced VKTMS, McClure’s Oedipal drama in 1988, a highpoint in poetical theatre. Kenneth Koch, magisterial leader of the new poetry and teacher of the art; Diane di Prima, the legendary strong woman’s voice among the poets; Jackson Mac Low, whose The Marrying Maiden, at The Living Theater in 1960, overthrew all the rules of theatre, playing Cagean chance against the hexagrams of the I Ching, with a pair of dice ordering the action; Amiri Baraka, world famous Revolutionary playwright, author of the masterpiece, Dutchman; Anne Waldman, beloved high priestess of Poetry, who is here represented by The Stoop, a poem of the 60’s, and who now carries forward the banner of poetic theatre in her new play, Red/Noir, to open in The Living Theatre in December 2009.

So many more are contained in this treasure of a book. For these are the very creators of our art—and though the fickle theater has sometimes betrayed them, they remain the foundation of our hope that the theatre of poetry lives today—and will flourish tomorrow if our planet is to be saved from oblivion.

—Judith Malina

The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985, edited by Kevin Killian and David Brazil, is forthcoming in early 2010. Including Killian and Brazil’s extensive notes on the plays (even those for which reprint licenses could not be secured) as well as their substantial preface, “Why Poets Theater?”, the anthology brings together fugitive texts, classics of the genre, and several unpublished works. Here is the table of contents:

Jack Spicer / Young Goodman Brown (1946)

Charles Olson / The Fiery Hunt (1948)

John Ashbery / The Heroes (1950)

V.R. “Bunny” Lang / At Battle’s End: A Verse in the Manner of Noh (1952)

James Schuyler / The Mystery Chef Mystery (1953)

Frank O’Hara / The Houses at Falling Hanging (1953)

Russell Atkins / The Corpse (1954)

Gregory Corso / In This Hung-Up Age (1954)

Robert Duncan / The Origins of Old Son (1956)

Helen Adam / Initiation to the Magic Workshop (1957)

James Broughton / Mission to Gomorrah (1958)

Michael McClure / ! The Feast ! (1960)

Madeline Gleason / The Dreaming Bed (1961)

Diane di Prima / Rain Fur (1961)

Kenneth Koch / The Construction of Boston (1962)

Jackson Mac Low / The Twin Plays (1962)

Lorenzo Thomas / Two One-Act Plays (1964)

Anne Waldman / The Stoop (1964)

LeRoi Jones / Dutchman (1964)

ruth weiss / m & m (1965)

Ron Padgett / The Kiss Behind the Smile (1966)

Hannah Weiner / RJ (Romeo & Juliet) (1966)

Lew Welch / Abner Won’t Be Home for Dinner (1966)

Barbara Guest / The Chinese Ghost Restaurant (1967)

Sonia Sanchez / Sister Son/ji (1969)

James Keilty / Jahkh (1970)

Joe Brainard / The Gay Way (1972)

Bruce Andrews / Song No. 3 (1973)

Keith Waldrop / The Same Sensation (1974)

Rosmarie Waldrop / Remember Gasoline? (1975)

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha / From Vampyr (1976) and Reveille Dans la Brume (1977)

Bob Holman and Bob Rosenthal / Ted Berrigan’s Clear the Range (1977)

Steve Benson / Views of Communist China (1977)

Ted Greenwald / The Coast (1978)

Carla Harryman / Third Man (1978)

Ntozake Shange / Spell #7 (1979)

Bob Perelman / The Alps (1980)

Kit Robinson / Collateral (1981)

Bertolt Brecht & Bob Grenier / from The Baden-Baden Instructional Play Concerning Understanding (1981)

Alan Bernheimer / Particle Arms (1982)

Charles Bernstein / Entitlement (1982)

Fiona Templeton / Against Agreement (1982)

Stephen Rodefer / A & C (1983)

Johanna Drucker / Through the Dark End of Daylight (1984)

Kenward Elmslie / Quarks Report (1984)

Leslie Scalapino / Leg (1985)

Nada Gordon / Distraction (1985)

Kathy Acker / The Birth of the Poet (1985)

Pre-orders by subscription only: using a credit card, or via direct mailorder.

“A proposed settlement to a class action lawsuit settlement among Google, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and the Authors’ Guild threatens to monopolize the access to and distribution and pricing of the largest digital database of books in the world, cornering much of the value of book digitization and reserving it to the private parties that have negotiated what is essentially both a new policy and a business model governing access to this material without input from appropriate government officials or the public.” Read more and become involved at openbookalliance.org

Early 2010 will see the publication of Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot. Part fiction, part earnest mockumentary, Ambient Parking Lot follows a band of musicians as they wander the parking structures of urban downtown and greater suburbia in quest of the ultimate ambient noise—one that promises to embody their historical moment and deliver them up to the heights of their self-important artistry. Along the way, they make sporadic forays into lyric while contending with doubts, delusions, miscalculations, mutinies, and minor triumphs. This saga peers into the wreckage of a post-9/11 landscape and embraces the comedy and poignancy of failed utopia.

Pamela Lu is the author of Pamela: A Novel. Her work appears in the anthologies Bay Poetics and Biting the Error as well as in periodicals such as 1913, Chicago Review, Call: A Review, Fascicle and Harper’s.

Read an excerpt from Ambient Parking Lot on the flipside of the Kenning Editions catalog, available with any online purchase or subscription.

Dolores Dorantes’ work continues to be lauded–most recently byChristopher Winks at Jacket Magazine and Meagan Evans at Zoland Poetry–since Kenning Editions collaborated with Counterpath Press to publish sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and Septiembre: a bilingual edition of books two and three of Dolores Dorantes.

Hannah Weiner’s Open House was published by Kenning Editions in 2007 and recently reviewed in American Book Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review and Crayon. Editor Patrick F. Durgin discussed Weiner’s work, as well as his own, on northern California public radio’s “Mad River Anthology” program, now archived at Weiner’s author page at PennSound. Footage of the celebration of Hannah Weiner’s Open House at the Poetry Project is also posted to PennSound.

In recordings ranging from late 2003 to September 2008, Jesse Seldess’ PennSound author page now comprises readings of the entirety of his Kenning Editions collection, Who Opens, also reviewed in the recent edition of Crayon.