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.]