Books
The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985
Edited by Kevin Killian and David Brazil.
POETRY/DRAMA/PERFORMANCE
ISBN 978-0-9767364-5-5 $25.95
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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kind yet assembled, the volume collects classics of poets theater as well as rarities long out of print and texts from unpublished manuscripts and archives.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, Ron Padgett, 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 Also included are previously unpublished plays by Jack Spicer, V.R. “Bunny” Lang, James Schuyler, Robert Duncan, Madeline Gleason, Diane di Prima, Barbara Guest, James Keilty, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,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: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and Kathy Acker’s The Birth of the Poet.
This is a great book! Here are the poets, the great modern poets who have given us our language, our imagery, our style…And though the fickle theater has sometimes betrayed them, they remain the foundation of our hope that the theater of poetry lives today.—Judith Malina
Don’t be fooled by the sober title. This wonderful volume cannot but delight anyone who likes their plays served in the raw and the cooked of poetry.—Caroline Bergvall
Reminds us of the vital role of theater among postwar U.S. poets and testifies to the enduring connection between poetry and drama from Shakespeare and Milton to Gertrude Stein and Amiri Baraka…This is a major contribution to poetics and performance studies.—Michael DavidsonIf poets theater has been about language capacitance foregrounded from the get-go, then this book is the go-to-go.—Rodrigo Toscano
sexPUROsexoVELOZ and SEPTIEMBRE
A Bilingual Edition of Books Two and Three of
Dolores Dorantes, by Dolores Dorantes.
Translated by Jen Hofer.
POETRY/TRANSLATION/MEXICAN LITERATURE
ISBN 978-0-9767364-2-4 $14.95
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sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and SEPTIEMBRE are books two and three of Dolores Dorantes’ lifelong project, entitled Dolores Dorantes. They consist of fragmented interlocking poetic sequences that create a scaffolding to frame Dorantes’ vivid explorations of the intensely personal and intensely social questions inhabiting the space called “Dolores Dorantes.” Dorantes writes, “May be / I had to forget how…”; in her unique enactment of forgetting how, we might begin to remember why.
Dolores Dorantes is from Ciudad Juárez, where socioeconomic violence and politically-charged daily brutalities inform her radically humane work as a poet, journalist, and cultural worker. Dorantes is a rare presence in Mexican literature: she takes a wide-ranging international stance toward poetics while refusing to accept state funding from a government she cannot respect. She is a founding member of the border arts collective Compañía Frugal and has published four books of poetry in Mexico. This is her first full-length collection in English. Poet Jen Hofer edited and translated Sin puertas visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women.
Hannah Weiner’s Open House, by Hannah Weiner.
Edited and with an introduction by Patrick F. Durgin.
POETRY/ART/PERFORMANCE
ISBN 0-9767364-1-1 $14.95
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Hannah Weiner’s influence extends from the sixties New York avant-garde, where she was part of an unprecedented confluence of poets, performance and visual artists including Phillip Glass, Andy Warhol, Carolee Schneeman, John Perrault, David Antin, and Bernadette Mayer. Like fellow-traveler Jackson Mac Low, she became an important part of the Language movement of the 70s and 80s, yet her influence can be seen in the “New Narrative” work stemming from the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as in contemporary poetics. With other posthumous publications of late, her work is being discussed by scholars in feminist studies, poetics, and disability studies. But there does not yet exist a representative selection spanning her decades of poetic output. HANNAH WEINER’S OPEN HOUSE aims to remedy this with previously uncollected (and mostly never-published) work, including performance texts, early New York School influenced lyric poems, odes and remembrances to / of Mac Low and Ted Berrigan, and later “clair-style” works.
Hannah Weiner is one of the great American linguistic inventors of the last thirty years of the 20th century. Patrick Durgin has brought together touchstone works, some familiar and some never before published. HANNAH WEINER’S OPEN HOUSE provides the only single volume introduction to the full range of Weiner’s vibrant, enthralling, and unique contribution to the poetry of the Americas.—Charles Bernstein
Hannah Weiner’s syncopated patterning uncovers a conversation so thrilling that I never want it to end. As Frank O’Hara had earlier shifted the stable lyric self into a multiplicity of positions (“I don’t know what blood’s in me”), Weiner began in overdrive and rocketed outward, inhabiting texts and communities with the same skill with which she herself was inhabited.—Dodie Bellamy
If her art both early & late insures her standing within the twentieth-century avant-garde, it connects her as well to the experience & writings of many traditional poet-mystics (clairvoyants in her word for them & for herself). It is, when taken as a whole, an achievement without precedent or comparison among her sometimes better-known contemporaries.—Jerome Rothenberg
HANNAH WEINER’S OPEN HOUSE restores a crucial figure to the present.—Liz Kotz
Who Opens, by Jesse Seldess.
POETRY
ISBN 0-9767364-0-3 $12.95
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Jesse Seldess is a Chicago-based poet and literary activist currently residing in Germany. His work has been published in numerous journals, including Chicago Review and Kenning. He was a founding curator of the acclaimed Chicago reading and performance series Discrete Series and has read his own work from New York to Paris. Antennae, the small press journal of which he is editor and publisher, is internationally recognized for publishing cutting edge music, poetry, and performance texts. WHO OPENS is his first full-length collection.
In Jesse Seldess’ poetry, words require a certain elasticity to perform an attentive music of formation. The manner in which phrasal units arrive, depart and recombine creates a movement like a flock of birds making a wide turn—there is a harmony of ever-shifting participants. The “who” of WHO OPENS is a similarly mobile designation—it is “who you have continually overheard” and what is itself being overheard. With great compassion and precision, this book returns language to the habitat of sound from which poetry has been away far too long.—Kerri Sonnenberg
These seven poems fit together with a perfect weave, three sets of twins (in each set, you might read the first as the sounding of themes, the second as a rhetorical raga exploring them) followed by a coda, as sweet as it is final. It is impossible not to read these poems aloud &, sounded, they are magnificent. Jesse Seldess has written a wonderful book.—Ron Silliman
A formalist poet who has found freedom in porous fixity…Seldess places all bets on the persistence of agency in a world of submission; on the strength of “chorus,” “chord,” “harmony,” and the meaning of voice.—David Pavelich
Forthcoming:
Ambient Parking Lot, by Pamela Lu. PROSE. 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 anthology Biting the Error and in periodicals such as Harper’s, Chicago Review, call: a review, 1913, and Fascicle. Pre-orders accepted by subscription only.