Why Poets Theatre Now?

My initiatory experience of “poets theatre” occurred in the fall of 2002. Writers, scholars and artists were gathered at SUNY Buffalo for a conference called Prose Acts, which focused on the West Coast literary and cultural movement now commonly referred to as “New Narrative.” Among the participants in the conference, organized by music and art critic Brandon Stosuy, were Dennis Cooper, Eileen Myles, Robert Gluck, kari edwards, Matthew Stadler, Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite, Dodie Bellamy, and Kevin Killian. At the close of the conference, Killian staged his play The Vegetable Kingdom (co-written with the San Francisco-based designer, Rex Ray). In The Vegetable Kingdom, the participants of a game show with the same name as the play go in search of Linda McCartney, who one of the participants claims to be her biological mother. On the way, the game show’s co-hosts attempt to pit McCartney against her arch-nemesis, Yoko Ono. This attempt culminates in a hilarious scene in which a stoned-out-of-her-mind McCartney and super mystical Ono face off. The dialogue is peppered with witty plays on pop cultural reference (one of Killian’s signatures) and high-camp humor. The result is a carnivalesque, topsy-turvy, post-identity politics play paved by critical intelligence.

Inasmuch as Killian’s and Ray’s The Vegetable Kingdom is written out of a community-based context of poets, and as the play is staged “on-the-fly,” which is to say with limited time to rehearse and with an equally minimal attention to stage-props, lighting, blocking, and other traditional theatrical elements, it could be said to be exemplary of the historicalliterary phenomena known as “poets theatre.” The tradition of poets theatre, which Killian outlines extensively in the book he recently edited with David Brazil, The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945–1985, goes back at least as far as Henry James, who famously tried his hand at theatre only to fail and move into the prose formats for which he is best known. Among the canonized American and English modern poets one discovers plays; however, these plays are often considered “minor” works in comparison with the poems themselves, as well as the other literary forms modern poets have adventured in. As Brazil and Killian insist in their book, poets theatre is partially defined by its marginality in relation to poets poetry. Consistently one observes in poets theatre that the plays take a backseat to the poems. In many cases the plays are written for a particular social occasion, or simply in the spirit of wit and play among their fellow practitioners—colleagues and friends. As Brazil and Killian also tell us, poets theatre plays tend to be rehearsals for or digressions from a poet’s main body of work. The voices that poets try on in their plays in some cases help them to better define the voices they would like to employ through their poems. In other cases, the forms poets explore in their plays would sometimes seem retrograde in comparison to the lightning progress of their audacious and uncompromising experimental poetry. Which is to say, poets theatre sometimes harks back to theatrical conventions that modern and contemporary experimental poetries have long since shed.

Another important aspect of poets theatre, also discussed by Brazil and Killian, is the extent to which the plays are born out of a social scene and extend a social content. Seeing one’s friends and acquaintances on stage doing the best they can with their lines cannot help but hold one’s attention. It breaks down the fourth wall immediately because you are not only reading a character, but you are thinking about your relationship to the actor and her character simultaneously (Why was this person cast for the role versus another? Was the part written specifically for her? Is this the director’s commentary about the person or did he merely need a warm body to perform the role?). Poets theatre does not merely stage dramatic actions, but produces the social...