Kenning Editions is proud to announce the publication of a major new anthology, edited by Kevin Killian and David Brazil–THE KENNING ANTHOLOGY OF POETS THEATER: 1945-1985.

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. 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anthology of its kind yet assembled, the volume collects classics, long out of print rarities and texts from unpublished manuscripts. Copiously annotated, it will be an indispensable reference for students of postwar American poetry and avant garde theater. Included are works by Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, Michael McClure, Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka, Hannah Weiner, Barbara Guest, Sonia Sanchez, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Carla Harryman, Charles Bernstein, Leslie Scalapino, Kathy Acker, and many others. A unique feature of the book is its editors’ notes even on works omitted but falling within the anthology’s purview, including Pedro Pietri’s The Masses Are Asses and Jessica Hagedorn’s Tenement Lover. Erudite yet highly readable, the plays and prefatory matter offer a highly entertaining glimpse of the ways in which poets have used the theater to widen their audience, develop new techniques, or negotiate their aesthetic community’s precepts and desires. In the process, some of the most mature and progressive work within and about the theater was produced, and is at last gathered in one place.

“Kevin Killian and David Brazil have done a great service…an invaluable guide not just to poets theater, but to the ins and outs of the entire poetry world of the four decades in question.”–Mac Wellman in BOMB

590 pp. / paperback / ISBN 978-0-9767364-5-5 / $25.95

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Read guest-bloggers on poets theater: Aldon Nielsen on Lorenzo Thomas; Laura Elrick and Rodrigo Toscano on Hannah Weiner; Peter O’Leary on Robert Duncan; David Hadbawnik on Diane di Prima; Don Share on V.R. “Bunny” Lang; and notes on Pedro Pietri, Steve Benson, Jack Spicer, Fiona Templeton, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Lorenzo Thomas wrote his “Two One-Act Plays” in 1964, the same year that witnessed the explosive Cherry Lane Theater production of Baraka’s Dutchman. Baraka, then still known as LeRoi Jones, had been in a playwright’s workshop with Edward Albee, whose Zoo Story had been produced in America just four years earlier on a bill with Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. Only eight years had passed since the Coconut Grove, Florida, American premiere of Waiting for Godot, featuring well-known screen actors Tom Ewell and Bert (cowardly lion) Lahr. It was a time of great ferment in theater; a time when that ferment achieved a level of what Baraka was to term populist modernism. Lahr even appeared on a popular television game show in the wake of his Godot appearance.

A very young Lorenzo Thomas was taking all this in. Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun had been the first Broadway play written by a black woman, and the first directed by an African American, and that had only come to pass in 1959. In 1961, Saint Marks Playhouse opened their production of Jean Genet’s The Blacks, a production that gave a tremendous boost to the careers of Roscoe Lee Browne, Lou Gossett, Jr., Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, Maya Angelou, Charles Gordone, Godfrey Cambridge and Moses Gunn. Cambridge would marry Barbara Ann Teer, who went on to found Harlem’s National Black Theater. It was this potent mixture of experimental theater and black theatrical talent that gave us a Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s led by poet/playwrights like Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez and Larry Neal. It was a moment when even the commercial theater was given to experiment, and something like Marat/Sade, with its near-assault on the audience, could become an international hit.

And Thomas’s colleagues in the Umbra Poets Workshop were part of all of this. Both Lloyd Addison and Oliver Pitcher were writing plays. Poets’ theater was very much a part of the conversation among these writers, and the ritualistic aspect of much of the drama being staged found its immediate expression in the Black Arts Movement in such plays as Baraka’s A Black Masque Humor, too, was an essential part of the equation, perhaps most scathingly exemplified by Baraka’s Jello and Sidney Poet Heroical. “Two One-Act Plays” is young Lorenzo Thomas at his most bitingly satirical. In introducing one of his early poems that he liked to read even years later, he elaborated a purported motivation. Having surveyed the rather short list of black poets getting into print, he reported, he found that most of them were African poets writing surrealist poetry in French badly translated into yet more surreal English; so he set out to write a poem that would sound like those more successful and published poets. The poem itself was far more than that, though, and “Two One-Act Plays” is far more than a send-up of plays like The Blacks or even The Brig.

[Text copyright Aldon Nielsen, 2010. Photograph of Paulene Myers, Raymond Patterson,Margaret Walker, Paula Gidding, Herbert Martin, Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis, and Lorenzo Thomas, L-R, sourced from report on the 1972 Dunbar Centennial at the University of Dayton at Jump Back Honey. See also Nielsen's blog post on Thomas' work, "But Which Way Is Redemption?"; Dale Smith on Thomas at Book Slut; Thomas' author page at Penn Sound and his 1973 reading of "High Heel Jesus"; Nielsen and Thomas on "How We Place African American Poetry" (2003); Time Step, a chapbook originally published by Kenning Editions in 2004; Patrick Durgin on the recent (circa 2005) work of Lorenzo Thomas, in Jacket Magazine; and Thomas' obituary from the Houston Chronicle, care of Tom Raworth. 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.]

Dating from the late sixties, Hannah Weiner’s Code Poems are widely recognized as among the earliest attempts to explore poetry as code and code as poetry (an interest she shared with Jackson MacLow, though apparently neither was aware of the other’s experiments at the time). Weiner’s book uses the International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations (a visual system for communication between ships at sea), which consists of strings of letters that signify longer phrases that would be commonly used in communications between naval vessels at sea.

In November 2007, Laura Elrick, Rodrigo Toscano and Kaplan Harris performed a version of Weiner’s “Romeo and Juliet” (originally published in Code Poems) at St. Marks Poetry Project for the celebration of the publication of Hannah Weiner’s Open House, edited by Patrick Durgin. Unlike the original performances of this piece (which employed the use of large flags marked with the code), Elrick and Toscano used walkie-talkies to signify the dialog’s coded content.

LE: Patrick asked us to share some of our reflections about the performance we did of “Romeo and Juliet.” It’s hard to know where to begin because Weiner has been so important to so many different New York poets. And I had a substantial relationship with her work for many years too, reading everything I could find when we first moved here in the late 90s, enlisting Kevin Davies to bring all his books to our proofreading job in the basement of a Wall Street financial institution – Clairvoyant Journal, Silent Teacher Remembered Sequel, and Little Indians. Around that time Judith Goldman also shared a copy of her then in-process dissertation about HW with me, later published as this essay. All this is to say that I definitely remember coming across “Romeo and Juliet” a number of years before the St. Marks event, but at that point I was focused on reading it primarily as a textual practitioner, as someone interested in the idea of the code and the predetermined vocabulary as a decentering device.

Later, when we started thinking about how to render “Romeo and Juliet” for performance (quite a different relationship to a text it seems) – this was for the Kenning event at ACA Gallery held in early 2006 and organized by David Kirchenbaum – I remember that we realized fairly quickly that it would have to be some sort of translation, mostly because we didn’t have the resources or the time to construct the flags. However, I’d also been working with voice recognition software around that time, and I was interested in the uncanniness of the computer’s translations of the poems I was voicing into my mic…I mean, so much of the text had a “censored” feeling because the vocabulary of the software program was so antiseptically limited. Yet, the intended meanings would always sort of seep in from the side anyway in a very funny way, so that what was “heard” was then the logic behind the vocabulary limitations. The code speaks. Or what the code negates speaks, through the code itself.

Early performances of “Romeo and Juliet” that I had come across were of course really substantially different from what would later become our version, and I was initially nervous about such a drastic intervention—I think we haggled over it for a night over take out in our living room. While researching the piece in preparation for our meeting, I had read a description of a performance Hannah had arranged in the yard of St. Marks in the late 60s in which players stood on platforms in far corners of the yard, raising flags with the letter strings stitched on them, while shouting their lines. In another version, a video I found from a much later date (but which I am now unable to locate – if anyone knows the whereabouts of this video, please contact us!), Hannah stood alone in a wide green field somewhere in New England at a far distance from the camera, silently raising the coded flags in a slow and repetitive rhythm; only the sound of birds echoed from a mass of trees behind her. Though it is striking how different these renderings are, both versions emphasized the visual nature of the code, as well as the machine-like automation of the “nature” of the user/s communication. In both, distance is at a premium.

In our version, I guess the central feature is to highlight the intimacy of the code, and especially the hilarity of this supposedly natural heterosexual encounter taking place in pure code. It is a technically complicated code (with its roots in colonialism and militaristic “exchange”) that both “ships” speak, but it renders them dumbly unsensuous. The sheer clumsiness of the maneuvers that must be accomplished between the two romantically inclined “ships at sea” with their estranged bodies and official orifices—like the employment of walkie-talkies in the bedroom. I think you first came up with that idea!

RT: Yes, those walkie-talkies. Let’s see, I’ll try and retrace the steps of how we got to using those things…

First, at the first Post_Moot conference (“a convocation for innovative poetics”) in Oxford, Ohio, I remember doing a performance of my Eco-Strato-Static with Tom Orange on a wide stage. I had specified that the mics be placed far apart. And boy did my hosts supply! The mics were so far from each other that I lost contact with Tom’s physical presence altogether. The audio-spatial experience of that evening stuck with me for a long time. The sense that every speech utterance could be thought of as a re-instantiation of a social-psychic “place” (i.e. “and where are you now?” “in which direction are you headed?”, etc)—that was a key insight.

But also, I had been studying the theoretical (as well as practical) outlines of Richard Schechner’s “six axioms for environmental theater.” Schechner defined environmental theater as theater that uses the space (defined as the area and time in which the performance takes place) in accordance with its own properties as well as those of the performers, groups, and content working within that space.  The idea was that one had to account for the separate characteristic and performative properties of a given space, even before it is “used” or practiced upon by humans. This a qualitatively different approach to space than trying to bend a given space into a “stage,” however modified.

Added to those encounters, I had been working with Utility Worker’s Union at the Queens training facility (an industrial complex along the East River), and all day long people were coming in and out of trainings using walkie-talkies. I remember really liking the punctuated “over-and-out” style of speaking. Nobody could talk over anybody for even a micro second, which of course, created a special kind of tension for people overhearing an exchange. The affirmative response form (the “copy you”) seemed almost dreadfully fated, so a special kind of humor arose from it. Curious too, was the electronic-mechanical “tsh” that came from pushing the speaker button. Though it was non-semantic—it said something! Many things actually, depending on where the exchange was going.

Ok, so one day, as you and I were trying to figure this thing out (we had actually kicked around the idea of a planned wrestling match between us while performing Weiner’s piece), we saw the walkie-talkies sitting on a bookshelf. I picked one up and read one of the lines. You immediately followed suit—and there it was—the main performance parameter laid down. Or so it seemed!

Well, well first we needed to find a third wheel, and Kaplan Harris was shoe-in. Kaplan can do a great poker face with strange affect mixed in, and with very clear intonation. I had discovered this when he helped out with a Collapsible Poetics Theater piece (“Humana Ante Oculos”) at the Yockadot Poetics Theater Festival a few years before. So once he was roped into it, we were pretty much set. Ok, what was still missing? Oh! Only the space, the people, the “psychic” (deep-ideological—unconscious—unseen) dispositions of the reader-actors! In other words, 90% of the performance!

Funny to think about it now, but it hadn’t really fully occurred to us was that Laura and I were going to be read largely through the fact that “in real life” we were/can be these attention-focus curious scrappy go-lucky fuckers from hell! We were only halfway conscious of that read in the performance, which prevented a sense of real hammy (that was key), you know, we were “earnest.” I think people were laughing with us and at us at the same time as we tried to “clarify” Weiner’s (quite ingenious) critique of hetero schmaltziness. It’s like that being half consciousness of our whole bag between us—the beautiful, the ugly, the clear, the confused, the utopian, the dystopic, etc—all that was played out with our body movements in the actual space. I remember being completely unafraid to pursue and be pursued, to hide out and to pop out of a sudden. All sorts of social gender contradiction “release points” were exposed, so that the firmness of Weiner’s critical text stood out like a rocky ledge seen from a distance, indeed, quite more visible than if we had “owned it” as something to “perform.”

[Text copyright Laura Elrick and Rodrigo Toscano, 2010. Photo of Hannah Weiner, Scott Burton, Anne Waldman, Vito Acconi, Berndette Mayer, Eduardo Costa, John Perreault, L-R, sourced from Perreault's Artopia blog report on "1969." 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 Hannah Weiner's author page at the Electronic Poetry Center and this opportunity to mailorder Hannah Weiner's Open House at a discount; read Maria Damon's review of the book at Kaurab, if you need convincing.]

On June 3, 1956, Robert Duncan, nearly six weeks into his teaching stint at Black Mountain College during its final year of academic operation, wrote to Denise Levertov that in the month that had intervened between his previous letter to her “I have written or finishd writing ‘The Origins of Old Son’ which has some nice songs and to my ears right now one beautiful speech partial dythyrambic. But perhaps the busy inertia of the classes in poetics – well, ‘busy inertia’ could also be ‘disturbing excitement of’ because in the process I am stultified by wrestling with tekniks beyond my own practice.”[1] “The Origins of Old Son” is a turbulent play, to be sure, with lots of word play, expressive tics characteristic of Duncan’s work during this period, and a strange array of characters, including Medusa and a god-like but hampered “Birddoll.” It is possible that this play was an attempt to create something to counterbalance the intensities of the poetics classes he was teaching, the ones causing him to wrestle with techniques beyond his own practice. Though Duncan never indicates which of the speeches from the play was beautiful and dithyrambic, I suspect he means Medusa’s initial incantation:

Monstrous.  Woe.  Shame.  Disease.

All ancient things recoil.
The proto-lick-it babe in his tree’s swaddlings pees
        beginnings,
philo-suffier, and says WET comes first,
        the elemental stream is wet, I bet.

Remorseless snakey rain begot
snake hair downrunnings. Cold and hot
        first quantities were.
Shame.  Disease.  Fear.  Wrath.

Toward the end, this first speech of Medusa’s shifts into a mode of nursery-rhyme nonsense, fixing on this primordial babe’s lack of potty training:

His teary begins         his dry ends meet
when eda puddle faeces sphinx.
He grows, she shrinks.
He lies, she growls and dies.

Woe.   Shame.   Disease.

When he pee please to stutter starter,
all dragon truth crawls down his wall
	to lizard size.

Old Son’s first words in the play, said right after Medusa concludes her speech, are: “He pee. He pee. He pee. He pee”. Which prompts Grandma (the third of the four characters in the play) to announce, “Lord, he’s wet his cantos!”

Duncan met Olson in Berkeley in 1947 when Olson was on a trip out to the West Coast; he stopped in Berkeley to research the California Gold Rush. Kenneth Rexroth had recommended Olson meet Duncan.[2] It seems clear, in retrospect, that these two poets recognized in each other kindred realities, articulated soon after, and for a generation quite forcefully, in Olson’s “Projective Verse,” published in 1950. Duncan seems to have related to that statement for the rest of his life, as well as to Olson’s thought and poetry, too. But where Olson’s sense of literature and literary tradition might be understood as canonical and archaeological, Duncan’s sense was more experimental and eccentric. Which is to say there was always a tension of taste and knowledge that stretched between them, even as they depended on each other’s friendship. In 1954, Duncan wrote to Olson, in reference to a recent commentary on The Cantos that had been published, “All the academy that despised here my ardent consultation of the Cantos (as a breaking up into movement of the old log-piles) now address themselves to sorting, identifying, deifying the old log piles to spite the energy set thereabout to break it up. Only Stein remains freshly disreputable. And the ‘objectivists,’ ‘dadaists’ and ‘surrealists’ (of the absolute order – Breton, Tzara, Magritte, Peret) indigestible to the professional readers.”[3] Into the Poundian pedagogical world of Olson’s Black Mountain, Duncan delivered freshly disreputable doses of Stein, Dada, and Surrealism. This, I think, is part of what is happening in the strange, antic, infantilizing, satirical stage show of “The Origins of Old Son.”

The play was performed in 1956 at Black Mountain. When Duncan arrived at the once thriving and sprawling campus for his first visit in 1954, he found it in a state of perilous disarray and decay. It was winter then; the students were sparse and the faculty fewer. Duncan found the place “run down.” “We stayed in the so-called Gropius building, which by that time was a derelict piece of modernism – nothing looks more run down than an art moderne building ten years later.” By the time he arrived to teach during the spring and summer of 1956, the school was a ghost of its earlier glory. “By spring, 1956, when I actually taught there, the large dormitory building was not too bad to live in, but the school was very noticeably derelict. One had only to walk about to find deserted laboratories with broken glasses, and splendid kiln equipment which had just gone to ruin.”[4] Vincent Katz describes how those grim last days of Black Mountain were alleviated by Duncan’s theater productions, “which got everyone collaborating again, in a new way, yet with some of the old Black Mountain spirit.”[5] On the play’s typescript, given to Olson, Duncan wrote an inscription that reads: “inscribed to Charles, who – as here – provides the fulcrum for what ever practices out of a geometry this imaginary one might move a real world by – RD 56.”[6]

Playwriting played a recurrent role in Duncan’s creative activities of the 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, in addition to “The Origins of Old Son,” he wrote, among other dramas, Faust Foutu, Medea at Kolchis (also performed at Black Mountain), “A Play with Masks,” and, notably, “Adam’s Way, A Play on Theosophical Themes,” which is the one dramatic work of Duncan’s that made its way into the poetry books of his major period. Most of these plays read like a mash-up of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, especially the Bottom parts, with elements of Stein, Dada, Surrealism, and nursery rhymes, pulled off with the dramatic flair of Helen Adam’s ballads. Clearly, Duncan put a lot of energy into these plays, including their performance. In February, 1966, there was a “concert reading” of “Adam’s Way” at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver for which Duncan prepared extensive “Narration” notes, meant to be read as prologue, commentary and amplification of the recitation of the play itself.[7] But it’s just as clear that most people don’t think of Duncan as a dramatist, and I suspect that most of his dedicated readers think of his playwriting as much as a curiosity as a contributing force to his poetic powers.

How should we think, then, about “The Origins of Old Son”? I’m inclined to expand on Vincent Katz’s description that Duncan’s plays at Black Mountain were intended to get people collaborating and to infuse new energy into a dying system. I doubt Duncan intended this play (or any of the others he staged at Black Mountain) to revive the institution in any way; he could tell that it was dying. I suspect, instead, that he was taking advantage of the potential of Black Mountain’s transitory and liminal twilight moment: using parody to summon absurd and mythical truths. Charles Olson is the Old Son who is portrayed as a giant baby, whose powerful protectress is a nonsense-spouting, malapropism-and-pun uttering Grandma, who hides Old Son from the appearance of a mysterious, Jehovah-like Birddoll, described by the Grandma as “the Lowerd Almighty.” (And who may be a representation of Olson’s mentor Edward Dahlberg (KAPT, 546).) There’s the celebration of a Catholic mass in the play, presided over by the theologically versed Medusa (she makes a speech about agape). And there’s a sense of the transformation of Old Son – who says “Fee Fie Foe Fum” at one point – from a giant baby into a giant man. It’s unclear whether Olson played Old Son when this was staged, but who else could have filled this role? Hijinx and parody in full view, Medusa’s and Old Son’s final speeches are nevertheless exemplary of Duncan’s poetic powers, which, in 1956, were at the beginning of their most memorable expression:

MEDUSA:
I am no One then. I am terrible Earth.
All who go forth by day return to me.
Out of my dead come all flourishings,
all green irruptions, white or orange interruptions.
There is no measure but by the foot that
lifts from me or returns to me. See,
the farmer plants his good seed,
broods good thots above his plot,   a father
comes into the precincts of the Great Mother,
his crop prospers. Yet all things
are dragon teeth sown,  grown from Earth that resists man.
The Medusa is true face of the good Earth
in farce forced, but crownd queen
by human will that radiates like snakes.

It’s May. It May be. The farce has force that drive the, disorderd,
heat comes. These first ones, following the Old Way, across continent
came, and sang a hot time to the old town. That was a Mountain. In
the beginning. Carried on their backs. Badman, Mountain backd was
maybe. Man. Was May then, and dangled columbine, secreted violet,
let loose confusions of dogwood. Old-Son is Sun of the Old Way, the
way across. Repeated in the yoga demonstrating firewalker, these first
ones crossd eighteen thousand years, campd with the Persians. And
effeminate trousers invaded manly diaperd Mediterranean greece. Drank
with the Scythian breeders of horse fermented mare’s milk from the
civilized skull. May then, may be month of Hearts, that was first a
Grail, the cup that held holy blood. A skull. A beaming skull…

Duncan’s satire in this play is fully hibernal: the cycle of life it represents is coming to an end. The dragon’s teeth have been sown in the ground where they wait through the winter to sprout – a farce forced but necessary. Just so, a beaming skull becomes the cup of life for Old Son – portent of a new life.

[1] Robert Duncan to Denise Levertov, June 3, 1956, in The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, edited by Robert J. Bertholf and Albert Gelpi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 38.

[2] See Tom Clark, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 125.

[3] Robert Duncan to Charles Olson, June 17, 1954, in “Robert Duncan on Charles Olson: Eleven Letters,” edited by Robert J. Bertholf, Sulfur 35 (Fall 1994), p. 89.

[4] Robert Duncan to Ann Charters, June 9, 1969, quoted in Vincent Katz, “Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art,” in Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, ed. Vincent Katz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 211.

[5] ibid., 215.

[6] Robert Duncan, typescript, “Origins of Old Son,” Charles Olson Research Collection, Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.

[7] See “Narration for concert reading of ‘Adam’s Way’” in Audit/Poetry 4.3 (1967), pp. 24-30.

[Text copyright Peter O'Leary, 2010. Photo of Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Ruth Witt-Diamant, L-R, sourced from The Poetry Center of San Francisco. 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 the Duncan Symposium sponsored by the Chicago Poetry Project, April, 2010.]

Diane di Prima founded New York Poets Theater in 1961 with James Waring, John Herbert McDowell, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and Alan Marlowe (Fred Herko, another key figure, was not among the official “board” of the nonprofit corporation). Over the next several years, the theater staged a number of important one-act plays by Jones, di Prima, John Weiners, Frank O’Hara, Michael McClure, and Robert Duncan, among others, with artists like George Herms often designing the sets. It’s a testament to the age that Marlowe, at the time di Prima’s husband and driving force behind the enterprise, insisted on incorporating because he felt there was money to be made with poets theater, as di Prima recalls in her 2001 book Recollections of My Life as a Woman. She adds that the police were frequent visitors over the first few weeks’ performances, and the cast and crew were constantly worried about plain-clothes cops in the audience. (Jones had recently been arrested for material that had appeared in The Floating Bear, the magazine he co-edited with di Prima.)

It seems to have been a remarkably creative moment, when the Poets Theater acted as a living analog to the artistic “cross-pollination,” as di Prima puts it, that took shape in the Bear. Not only were different disciplines brought together—in addition to important artists like Herms, dancers from Merce Cunningham’s troupe often took part—but poets from various backgrounds mingled, contributed, and acted in each other’s plays. To me, that’s the essence of what Poets Theater can do; it’s what I find so magical about the still-thriving events in San Francisco, a space in which temporal, geographical, and aesthetic differences are temporarily dissolved, and poetry is enacted as both confrontation and entertainment, in ways that break the bounds of the traditional journal or reading format. As di Prima writes, there was something more immediate about the theater: “… the bump and grind of George Herms’ set for Michael McClure’s Blossom up against Frank O’Hara’s aesthetic—none of that waited on our readiness, it came when it came, and none of it was terribly comfortable.”

Di Prima’s 1961 play Rain Fur reflects this exuberance and immediacy. Despite—perhaps because of—the fact that it was a “throwaway” according to di Prima that was rescued from the trash by Waring (an anecdote that the author relates in the end note to the play), it also encapsulates in miniature many of the central concerns that continue to drive her creative output to this day. The first clue to these concerns is the names of the characters themselves—“A,” “A-PRIME,” and “A-SUB-ONE”—which recall mathematical figures; di Prima was a math whiz who initially majored in advanced calculus in college, and this motif would recur in her 1972 book The Calculus of Variation, which refers to the complex field of functional mathematics that shares that name.

Another feature is the formal innovation and wordplay that permeate di Prima’s work, and which she’s rarely given credit for (“PRIME-A” is also clearly a pun on her name, brought to the surface when that character repeats the sound “di di di” early in the play). The immediate influences here would seem to be Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, who offer models of a fragmented, collage approach to language, which di Prima infuses with a surrealist wit. Stein seems present not only in lines such as “achoo / only a rose I bring you,” but the recurrent naming of domestic things and foodstuffs—as di Prima writes, “After all, why refrain from these things: red socks, peanut butter, a gold star …”—unbound or split apart from their ordinary meanings and set forth as language in all their strangeness. Pound is given a more direct shout-out: “free Ezra Pound!”; di Prima had corresponded and visited with Pound at St. Elizabeths, from which he’d already been freed in 1958. But it’s Stein, especially the Stein whose play Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights would recast the old story as one of “gender trouble” and the anxiety-inducing threat of female sexuality, who really seems the guiding spirit of the play. As the editors note, the play “burns with anger right under its lovely surface. Had Minos been a woman, di Prima suggests, the archeologists would have just risen up and moved away in droves, for nothing in a woman’s civilization is worth preserving or restoring.”

In this way it also anticipates the writing of Kathy Acker. Right after a “Doctor” has ominously asked, “Ether anyone?”, a “Tree” responds, “how ambitious to be in labor / to run a news stand / how ambitious / how ambitious to get on a bus.” These lines remind me of the famous opening of Acker’s novel Don Quixote: “When she was finally crazy because she was about to have an abortion, she conceived of the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love.” Death, madness, conception, love; these elements hover as well in di Prima’s surrealist narrative, only the logic is inverted, more hopeful somehow, even as the stakes seem every bit as high. For di Prima—and we must also recall one of the most incendiary interludes in her most famous book, Memoirs of a Beatnik, “Fuck the Pill”—childbirth itself is a choice and a risk that’s part of being human precisely as a woman, one that’s “ambitious” but not impossible. There’s a power in being woman that, again, strikes me as hopeful, even exuberant:

I shall be known as the woman par excellence.

O I can feel the flowers that stir in my flesh

the snakes, the earthquakes, the white

racing cars.

I am the tides.

I shall be heard of, in song.

Lines such as these look forward to di Prima’s long, ongoing Loba project, which revisits the question of what it means to be a woman in terms more overtly mythical and, obviously, poetic. It’s a deeper, more mature project; but as I argue, so much of the incredibly varied formal tropes and thematic elements that di Prima would later develop can be found here in germinal form.

[Text copyright David Hadbawnik , 2010. 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 nice set of notes on the New York Poets Theatre from warholstars.org]

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.]