We eagerly look forward to 2009, when Kenning Editions will be the busiest it has ever been.
Next year 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. (Catalog available from December 26th.)
We are presently at work on the second planned title for 2009: 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 Theater of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, to the West Coast anarchy of Robert Duncan, Helen Adam, and Michael McClure, 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. Is “Poets Theater” play or poem or both or neither? Are the community energies revealed here a form of political activism, or “merely” artists blowing off steam? The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985 will document 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the volume will collect all the classics of poets theater as well as rarities long out of print and texts from unpublished manuscripts and archives.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.
Dolores Dorantes’ work continues to be lauded–most recently by 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. Dorantes, poet-translator Jen Hofer, and Laura Solórzano read together at the Poetry Project, New York City, on April Fool’s Day (4/1/09). Dorantes will also read with Hofer on January 17th and 18th as part of a month-long festival at Links Hall in Chicago, IL. The first weekend of said festival is devoted to the work of Hannah Weiner, whose selected works, entitled Hannah Weiner’s Open House, was published by Kenning Editions 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.
