The Poets Theater

 

 

The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985

Kevin Killian, David Brazil, Eds.

Kenning Editions

My friend David Brazil, and Kevin Killian, have edited an anthology of Poets Theater. This is a topic I have taken an interest in over the years, and their introduction and extensive (and lively) notes are a thorough and knowing review of the subject. My interest has always been in the ‘scene’ aspects of the phenomenon, since, as they point out, the actual plays are often laughably bad. But the whole question of poets in the theater, why they go there, what the history and function are is fascinating. The editors hit on all the points imaginable.

One very successful performance of a poets play I saw was the 1999 Trinity Rep (Providence, Rhode Island) production of Preface to an Alien Garden, by Robert Alexander, Directed by Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe and produced by Oskar Eustis. The play is a drug gang tragedy written entirely in verse. While the front row of the audience was sprayed with blood gouts, my heart raced to hear and watch the fury of popular poetry wedded to a timely subject. This was Titus Andronicus meets Little Caesar. And it worked, beautifully.

Poets have always sought out the theatre for financial success. This resulted in a lot of closet drama, also mentioned in their introduction, along with a queer theory of closet drama which is as ludicrous as the poets’ plays, which were certainly often queer. Nor am I sure that Milton was gay because he wrote Samson Agonistes, or that there is much gay sensibility in the dozens of unperformable verse plays the English tradition has thrown up.

Modernists of the postwar period, or post modernists, were a coterie, certainly, and poets theatre of this period largely consists of works written for, about and by a circle(s) of friends. The overlap of milieus is evident, with New York poets writing for The Cambridge Poets’ Theatre, and The Living Theatre in NYC sharing writers with the west coast, ETC. Beats, Black Mountain, NY mutated in and out of each other at the edges. Plays were performed in spaces among friends. Later, the playwrights were ashamed or embarrassed of their works, probably because most of them date from early in the poet’s career, when they were hanging around.

The Spicer and Olson plays are not like this, and probably hark back to the first generation of Modernist’s works, which received their first performances at the grandaddy space of all this, The Living Theatre, where Judith Malina and Julian Beck were most successful (critically) with plays by Alfred Jarry, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Cocteau among others. But it is the younger generation that concerns the editors and this makes sense.

Well, i spent the weekend with the book and send out into the void my wishes that everyone interested in such things will buy the book.

Congratulations and thank you to my friend David. David is an amazing book collector and autodidact. He lived in Ithaca for a number of years, under stacks of books, and started and ran a free school which devoted itself largely to the study of the classics. He now lives out west in Oakland. This is his first publication.