University of California, Berkeley, October 13–15, 2017
This is Miss Lang, Miss V. R. Lang, the Poet, or
The Poettess. Bynum, would you introduce
Someone else as, This is J.P. Hatchet
Who is a Roman Catholic? No. Then don’t do
That to me again. It’s not an employment,
Its a private religion. Who’s that over there?
—V. R. Lang, “Poems to Preserve the Years at Home”
Many of the events I attended during the conference Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today posed questions related to collectivity, to the kinds of collective subjects that experimental practices of writing can body forth. So we talked about name-dropping and common feelings, groupthink and juicy gossip, inclusion and exclusion, as we basked in the glow of luminaries such as Eileen Myles, Dennis Cooper, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Boone, Robert Glück, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Camille Roy…. The list could go on. Despite the fact that we all wanted to insist on hybridity and experimentality, the distinction between “artist” and “academic” would often make itself felt in and around the panels and presentations that we were attending mostly in UC Berkeley classrooms. Michael Amnasan pointed out the way standard academic practices can create a feeling of belonging to the only world that really matters, ultimately leading to a sense of “us” and “them.” Fair enough. But what about the artistic coterie, I grumpily wondered. I heard one poet say resignedly to another, “Alright, let’s go listen to our lives get historicized.” En route to a campus coffee shop, I heard another famous poet taking a phone call, explaining that it was “an academic conference,” which unfortunately required “thinking” and “listening.” I’m an academic and I’m exhausted too, I wanted to say, let’s go have a drink instead. On other occasions there were apologies for papers that were felt to adhere too closely to academic conventions. We were ambivalently bringing together the ivory tower and the avant-garde in the apocalyptic haze of the smoke from the wildfires wreaking havoc nearby.
I tried for the first time to embrace risk as some of the artists in the audience had been doing for decades, adding some theatrically performative elements to an otherwise straightforward academic paper on the artistic impersonations of Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. (Of course, my efforts were on a much, much smaller scale.) I found myself constitutionally ill-equipped for such vulnerability and after the panel quickly retreated to the safety of my own conference in-group, anchored by Hannah Manshel and Jean-Thomas Tremblay. The affective resources required by experimental or hybrid practice led to a reentrenchment of “us” versus “them.” This was my experience, in any case. I can’t speak for anyone but myself.
Later the same day the question of hybrid cultural practice and coterie reemerged as Jean-Thomas and I prepared to participate in a presentation of Poets Theater pieces. Along with Laurie Reid, Ismail Muhammad, Suzanne Stein, and Karla Milosevich, we joined Kevin Killian in a reading of The American Objectivists, cowritten by Killian and Brian Kim Stefans. After passing around a preshow flask of whiskey, we were a motley bunch of new and old friends playing legendary acquaintances. I read the part of V. R. “Bunny” Lang, written by Killian and Stefans as a comedic figure whose attention is divided between John Ashbery (Tremblay), George Oppen (Muhammad), and Lang’s no-show drug dealer Jeeper. I did my best to drape myself on Jean-Thomas/John Ashbery although really I have never been good at draping myself on anyone or anything with fewer than three drinks in my system—I’m a repressed academic, after all. I could see Eileen Myles looking out at us (impassively?) from the audience.
Good thing amateurism is part of the point of Poets Theater, as I understand it: its generic hybridity and embrace of the unrefined and unrehearsed puts pressure on the well-sedimented categories of “artist” and “audience.” This erosion of boundaries makes Poets Theater a somewhat horizontal social space that might allow for “the community to take its own temperature,” as David Brazil and Killian put it in their introduction to The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater. Sometimes, they point out, such self-reflection also creates an enduring work of art inextricably bound to the social context that produced it. In other words, it creates the possibility of an artwork that lives or dies according to the values of the counterpublic, and not those of the mainstream.
The historical V. R. Lang may or may not have ever known someone called Jeeper. Her legacy has largely been overshadowed by that of her more famous intimates like Frank O’Hara. However, she can be credited as the founder of the Poets’ Theater at Cambridge in the early 1950s. As biographer Alison Lurie explains, “Bunny was involved in every Poets’ Theater show, as actress, director, writer, designer, and producer.” Lang attended the University of Chicago and was once editor of Chicago Review. Lang presided over the journal at a time in the late 1940s when a shortage of funds forced it to switch from a pamphlet to a tabloid format, but she nevertheless managed to use the journal—and a new reading series aligned with it—to connect the University of Chicago to the main lines of avant-garde literature in the US and Europe. She once invited Anaïs Nin to give a reading at the university on what turned out to be a very snowy evening in 1949. Nin would remember the event for the party that followed, given in her honor; she stood in the snow and watched the festivities through the window of an apartment she couldn’t find a way into. Lang’s experience at Chicago apparently left her with little appreciation for academia. Lurie reports that when the Harvard faculty began to finally show some sustained interest in Lang’s Cambridge scene, she responded with “spitefulness”:
I always dreaded the moment this would happen and I always knew it would come. Professors, by definition, always have a play in their bureau drawer… We were not GOOD ENOUGH TO DO THEIR PLAYS. Now everything is changed. If we don’t do them, they will tell their classes and all of their influential friends that we are capricious and undergraduate and Not Serious. If we do them, we will all die of boredom. (Lurie, 15)
As I’ve learned, the Cambridge iteration of Poets Theater that Lang was such a significant part of would inspire generations of New Narrative writers to embrace the theatrically performative, and their bold experiments, in turn, would inspire new modes of academic engagement. And yet, even as we explore the new creative universe that Lang and her cohort helped to open up, we see categories like “artist” and “academic” chafing against each other as they are forced into proximity. Am I/Carmen/Bunny part of the community taking its own temperature, or am I rather inhibiting the development of new standards of aesthetic success with my institutionalizing presence? Maybe I should stop throwing myself at John Ashbery and sit down in the audience. Or, might the enduring friction, the resistance, between the academic and the artistic, yet generate some real heat?
November 2017