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kind yet assembled, the volume collects classics of poets theater as well as rarities long out of print and texts from unpublished manuscripts and archives.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 Also included are previously unpublished plays by Jack Spicer, V.R. “Bunny” Lang, James Schuyler, Robert Duncan, Madeline Gleason, Diane di Prima, Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, James Keilty, Theresa Hak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.]