Poet’s Theater: An Introduction

This special issue of Postmodern Culture takes up a subject until now only rarely discussed in the annals of academic scholarship: that of contemporary American poet’s theater. But what exactly is a “poet’s theater”? Is it primarily a type of writing done by poets for the stage–trying their hand, so to speak, at a theater genre, as the novelist Henry James once did, winning no public acclaim? Is it any poetry presented in a public space before an audience, thus including, for example, both the modern poetry slam and the classic poetry reading? Recent critical studies devoted to the latter have helped us hear the multiple reverberations of sound and aurality particular to American poetry.¹ But what we mean by a “poet’s theater” in the articles of this issue has not been the focus of those writings. Rather, for our contributors here, poet’s theater is a theatrical event that is scripted and preconceived but also open-ended and site-specific. Its meanings unfold not according to some predetermined narrative or social situation, but rather performatively, informed by local contexts, audience makeup, and performance conditions. In their own attempts to define poet’s theater, Kevin Killian and David Brazil, editors of the just-published Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater, 1945-1985, suggest by way of definition simply that we “try and catch it performing its social function” (xiii). We agree with that active assumption.
 
As we consider what we mean by a poet’s theater, we might also consider why multiple instances of poet’s theater have emerged in such a variety of U.S. regions, performance spaces, and venues in the past six decades, with several adopting some version of the name “Poet’s Theater” as their official moniker: the Cambridge Poets Theatre, founded in 1951 by V.R. “Bunny” Lang; the New York Poets Theatre, a.k.a. the American Theater for Poets, founded in 1961 by Diane di Prima, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Alan S. Marlowe, John Herbert McDowell, and James Waring; the Hardware Poets Playhouse in New York, 1962-1964, founded by Peter Levin, Audrey Davis, and Jerry and Elaine Bloedow; the Judson Poets’ Theater, founded in the 1960s by Al Carmines; the Nuyorican Poets Café, founded in 1973 by Miguel Algarín; and the San Francisco Poets Theater, 1979-1984,² founded by Nick Robinson and Eileen Corder and associated with the Bay Area L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (or “Language”) writers. In virtually every case, poet’s theater seems to have been not so much a coherent artistic movement as a creative outlet and countercultural community that brought poets, dancers, musicians, visual artists, theater artists, and performance artists into productive collaboration with one another. And yet placing these activities within a longer historical trajectory reveals key similarities from which we might begin to offer a definition.
 
The cross-pollination of artistic media and political ideologies that fostered postwar poet’s theater was enabled in part by the social and artistic conditions of the 1950s. As Stephen Bottoms explains in his wonderful study of underground New York theaters in the 1950s and 60s, Greenwich Village, and especially the East village, allowed bohemian artists of all stripes to mingle in the smoky haze of its lively bar, coffee house, and jazz-club culture. These provisional spaces hosted poetry readings and theatrical performances outside of the institutionalized structures that, in the economic pinch of the postwar period, hesitated to support anything not guaranteed to be a financial success. Small casts, spare sets, and simple plots made these productions amenable to slim budgets, and they could easily be performed in modest bar and coffee-house spaces. Such aesthetic choices may have been driven by economic necessity, but, as Bottoms notes, they had the additional effect of focusing the audience’s attention on the bodies and speech of the performers themselves, since there was little else to distract from these (16-18, 125). Similar low-budget, performance-centered aesthetics also characterized Action Painting, jazz jams, and poetry readings, and indeed artists, musicians, and poets frequently constituted each other’s audiences.
 
This proliferation of performance-centered aesthetics coincided with a critical turn to performance that might also be said to have its roots in the 1950s, the decade in which J.L. Austin’s Harvard lectures on the performativity of language (published in 1962 as How to Do Things with Words) and Erving Goffman’s 1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, an analysis of the performativity of social life, commingled with, for example, the Living Theatre’s investigations into both poetic drama and Artaud-inspired presentational theater, as well as Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings.” Part of what is advanced in each of these interdisciplinary uses of the concept of performance is the notion of performance as a constitutive act. In fact, contemporary critics frequently identify performance, as Julia A. Walker aptly notes, as “the postmodern turn” in critical discourse (149).
 
It was from this fertile ground that postwar poet’s theater grew–not as a definitive practice but as the sharing of ideas and practices across media and ideologies. Following World War II, the politics of Senator Joe McCarthy, the founding of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, and the attack on artists in particular encouraged a separation of art and politics, modeled, for example, in the apoliticality of Abstract Expressionism. But in the 1960s, artists re-politicized aesthetics as they turned to the models, routines, and practices of “everyday life.” The contemporary poet’s theater that is the subject of this issue arises in this transition. Each of the essays included here addresses poet’s theater’s engagement with the politics of everyday life–via, for example, poet’s theater’s model of an environmental poetics (in James Sherry’s essay on Fiona Templeton), via the ethical implications of the audience’s oscillation between individual and collective reception (in Heidi R. Bean’s essay on Carla Harryman), via the political implications of the performed interpenetration of poetry with urban street culture (Nasser Hussain on Ron Silliman), and via a spatialized model of thought that encourages openness to the “holes” in knowledge (Karinne Keithley Syers on Mac Wellman).
 
Poetic verse drama is, of course, one of the oldest forms of literary activity and culture, including the ritual dramas of the ancient Greeks, and a major genre in English literature certainly since the Renaissance. But contemporary American poet’s theater is not so much grounded in the verse dramas of Aeschylus; or in the so-called “Golden Age” of English theater canonically represented by playwrights like Ben Johnson, Marlowe, or Shakespeare; or even in the stage works of modernist poets like W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden. Instead, the scripted performance works of these particular contemporary American poet-playwrights self-consciously examine the relationship between discursive language, performing bodies, and audience members’ interactions and experiences. Poet’s theater is thus indebted as much to the rise of the conceptual arts, with their emphasis on multimedia forms, as it is to the histories of poetry and of drama and theater. Inhabiting, as Killian and Brazil put it, “a charged social space between the disputed territories of performativity, theatricality, and the textual” (xiii), poet’s theater might best be characterized as a self-conscious layering of different modes of representation, from the linguistic to the embodied, that is aimed at an investigation of the conceptual logic that joins representation to human-social experience.
 
In addressing what poet’s theater is, then, we wish to emphasize not only its formal-aesthetic hybridity and artistic collaborativity but also the critical effects of these exchanges. The recent American poet’s theater that is the topic of our issue here is informed perhaps most crucially by a theoretical dialectic, the perceived “split” between literary textuality and performance. Modernist text-versus-performance debates date back to avant-garde circles beginning as early as the 1870s. In “The Avant-Garde and the Semiotics of the Antitextual Gesture,” Erika Fischer-Lichte writes that, while some German Romantics like Goethe and Wagner may have “considered performance itself a work of art,” most of their contemporaries viewed “the artistic character of performance” as “primarily affirmed through the performance of literature, through the dramatic literary text that was supposed to steer and control performance” (80).
 
Such anti-theatricalism, particularly in the early twentieth century, was motivated in part by a fear of the public sphere, by a resistance both to theater’s collaborativity and to the perceived risks of collective reception. This version of modernism, theater theorist and historian Martin Puchner writes, celebrated “the figure of the individual artist who withdraws from the public sphere and the allegedly undifferentiated masses” and championed a model of reception that idealized individual contemplation in privacy (9). Both this model of the individual artist producing a highly complex creation as well as the private reception required by such a work “are responses,” Puchner asserts, “to the fear that the theater would actually provide a forum in which the constitution of public opinion might take place” (11). High modernism’s critique of realism and impersonation and its emphasis on the receptive value of absorption therefore work in tandem, as conspiratorial “barriers erected against the possibility of the public role of art suggested by the theater” (11).
 
In contrast to the anti-theatricalism of high modernism, the modernist avant-garde was decidedly pro-theatrical, even if it was also often critical of the conventions of the traditional theater itself. Puchner credits Wagner and his notion of the gesamtkunstwerk, or “total theater,” with transforming the theater from an art form into a value–a value which places not only the work of art but the conditions of its production and reception at the center of modernist debates (31). The avant-garde’s embrace of theatricalism, writes Puchner, demonstrates its “greater affinity to populism and the masses” and exhibits Andreas Huyssen’s “hidden dialectic” between the experimental or avant-garde and society’s mass culture (9).³ Certainly, the postwar poet’s theater that began to proliferate in living rooms, coffee houses, city streets, open galleries, and other makeshift spaces is indebted to the avant-garde’s embrace of collaboration and collective reception under the sign of theatricalism.
 
And yet, as much as contemporary American poet’s theater owes a debt to the modernist avant-garde, it should not simply be seen as a pro-theatrical break with modernist poetic drama. Instead, we might better perceive this postwar poet’s theater as a merging of the avant-garde’s theatricalism and literary modernism’s anti-theatrical strategies. Indeed, as Sarah Bay-Cheng and Barbara Cole have compellingly argued in their recent anthology of modernist poetic drama, Poets at Play, the category of modernist poetic drama properly includes both the literary stylings of H. D. and of Wallace Stevens, whose apparently anti-theatrical “closet” dramas resisted the conditions of the material theater, and the pro-theatrical plays of Edna St. Vincent Millay and E.E. Cummings, which incorporate such popular performance practices as vaudeville and minstrelsy. Bay-Cheng and Cole argue that modernist poet-playwrights often employed poetry as an intentionally anti-mimetic strategy that could offer “the hallmark of truth within the theatrical illusion of realism” (21). Thus, although it is conventionally written off both for what is perceived as its less-than-serious engagement with the theater and for its presumed lack of importance in the discourse of American modernism, modernist poetic drama may actually be better understood as an important departure from representational theater. This characteristic is one that postwar poet’s theater both inherits and extends.
 
It should come as no surprise then that our preferred term here is not drama, indicating a literary production intended to be read, but rather theater and/or performance, a turn that signals the space and relations of enactment as central concern. In re-encoding this text-and-performance “split,” poet’s theater calls its very terms into question: what is a “text,” what is a “performance,” how do these definitions relate to the conditions of their production and reception, and when might one affect, shade, or even become the other? From this perspective, American postwar poet’s theater might be best understood as an inheritor of both literary modernism and the modernist avant-garde, with the term “poet’s theater” itself rhetorically signaling, simultaneously, a disavowal of dramatic realism and an embrace of theatricalism. If realism effaces its own means of production, achieving its sense of “reality” by removing the traces of theatrical mediation, then poet’s theater is decidedly anti-realist, in the sense that it foregrounds, even celebrates, the theatrical event. Yet unlike modernist poetic theater, which structures its staging according to the (absent) verbal text, neither text nor performance over-determines the meaning or effects of postwar American poet’s theater.
 
As a theater of language, of what some might call poetic language, American poet’s theater grants special emphasis to embodied and performed language. “Poetic” language is imagined by many of the poet’s theater writers and stage-producers here not as a stabilized form of “content”-based meaning or communication but as decentered, slippery, highly active, mobile, and/or conflicted. Language becomes its own performance “act.” As a recuperative re-embracing of the performance practice embedded in any linguistic utterance, poet’s theater articulates language’s internal conflicts between signfier and signified, and it reconsiders the subject-object binary relations implicitly established within any imagistic and/or spatialized art form. Poet’s theater, particularly as embodied performance text, acts as a performance mirror and critique of these conventional linguistic processes. It does so by calling into question the stability not only of semantic “meaning” but also of human social identity–perceived in Emile Benveniste’s concept of the “I” to “be” only that transitory, unstable linguistic “subject,”⁴ and in the “performance” of identity that Judith Butler has famously described in gender and queer studies.⁵
 
As a formal hybrid of often competing discourses and media, poet’s theater is not a “poem,” nor is it even a series of poems, nor merely a script for a play. Instead, postwar poet’s theater is, for our purposes here, an active performance that is centered on, though not confined to, language. And–crucially–in being performed (by reader, actor, or poet) it performs, and revises linguistic-interpretative value. Poet’s theater thus acts upon the very instability of language enunciated in the work of so many post-structural theorists, from Roland Barthes to Julia Kristeva to Jacques Derrida–those ascribed to “writing,” to “degree zero” in poetic writing, to the “borderline psychosis” that Kristeva, at least, believes has been the experiment of poetic language. Thus, alhough this poet’s theater heartily embraces the imaginary of this odd writing scene / written text, it counters the conventions of what performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood has called “textocentrism” (151)–that is, the sense of the text as authorized and authoritative, as an enduring document that always gets the last word.
 
A performance art? A conceptual poetics? Any scripted work performed in a designated space that butts against the more academically recognized, canonized literary theaters? Perhaps, we might conclude, that contemporary American poet’s theater is all of the above. Poet’s theater might be seen as a special category of “post-dramatic theatre,” Hans-Thies Lehmann’s influential term for non-characterological, non-narrative, multi-vocal, frequently multi-mediated, unstable “new” theater that “confirms the not so new insight that there is never a harmonious relationship but rather a perpetual conflict between text and scene” (145). In its eschewal of realistic portrayals of character, scene, and temporality, poet’s theater releases performance from regulation by the drama–even while it enhances the complexities, dissonances, and possibilities of its own play of language, especially as it pertains to the theatrum mundi of everyday life.
 
The poet’s theater that is the subject of this special issue thus trains its awareness both on theatrical processes and on the production of meaning in everyday life, with theatricalized performance frequently functioning as a kind of social and linguistic laboratory. Most of the essays here also focus on the ways in which the play of language and embodied and/or staged performance work together or in relation to one another. Whether in an epic solo reading of a piece by Ron Silliman on a street corner of San Francisco in the 1970s, or in a post-millennium arts space in multimedia collaboration with a range of artists performing Carla Harryman’s Mirror Play nearly three decades later, the concept of performance writ large–encompassing theatrical, social, discursive, and material enactments, as well as their relationships with one to the other–undergirds the conceptual and post-structural means at the heart of these poet’s theater works.
 
As Nasser Hussain shows in his article “Performing Ketjak: The Theater of the Observed,” Ron Silliman’s 1978 street corner reading of Ketjak in San Francisco was more than simply an open–a very open–“poetry reading.” It was also language in action and a close cousin to Fluxus-style events and “Happenings” of the 1950s and 60s. Silliman’s solo-voice performance “event” constructed a public viewing of “language performed independently on the stage of everyday experience,” as Hussain writes, and it layered the vanguard’s poetic play upon word form, syntactic parataxis, against the daily world of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. As the latter became, or becomes in Hussain’s essay, an authentic spatialized public arena in which this theatrical presentation was staged, the event addressed the nature of poetic form, audience makeup, and theatrical reception. In Hussain’s analysis, it also calls into question the real and multiple meanings generated–which is to say, performatively available–within a poetics offered in the public space.
 
Similarly, Fiona Templeton’s YOU–The City (1988) employs an urban-public venue as spatialized public theatrical arena. In the performance analyzed here, the venue is the crazed, hectic, and somewhat seamy environment that was (in the 1980s and 90s, at the time of its staged production) and sometimes still is New York City’s Times Square. James Sherry’s essay, “The Poetic Theater of Fiona Templeton: An Environmental View,” couples poet Sherry’s own commitment to an “environmental poetics” (as opposed to an “eco-poetics”)–which he suggests is a poetics that is fully and philosophically-structurally engaged with its environmental surroundings, whether urban, natural, or both–with a reading of this “event.” Templeton’s play itself proposes a “client,” rather than an actor and/or an audience, who, in keeping an appointment, begins a tour through the city: inhabiting, observing, and also becoming one with a transitory urban ecosystem. An environmental view, writes Sherry, “[s]ignificantly modifies our engagement with the world,” challenging at some fundamental base our subject-object relations as well as humanity’s Cartesian rather than integrated view of its role in the environment. Sherry reveals the way in which Templeton’s poet’s theater creates a theatrical stage as environment, making poetry in performance a conceptually fluid act with political implications.
 
Audience activity and experience are under scrutiny in the essay by Heidi R. Bean, who, like Sherry, finds ethical implications in poet’s theater’s structuring of audience relations. In “Carla Harryman’s Non/Representation and the Ethics of Dispersive Performance,” Bean examines recent productions of plays by Carla Harryman, who is commonly associated with what has become known as “Language” writing. Harryman’s Mirror Play (2005) is a direct response to recent U.S. militarization as well as an attempt to rethink social and global relations as they are figured in and by language. One of the play’s goals, Bean writes, is to place “under scrutiny not only the structure of interpretive practices but also the very impulse to interpret.” Bean thus proposes the term “dispersive theater” for thinking about the ways in which postwar poet’s theater such as Harryman’s constructs an interpretive “community” marked, paradoxically, by discontinuity and dispersion. Dispersive theater, as it is conceptualized here, is not simply an interpretive free-for-all but rather an embodiment of the ethical dilemma in the postmodern era–the contradiction, as Geoffrey Galt Harpham puts it, between “How ought one to live?” and “What ought I to do?,” between generalizable norms and individual acts in actual (and unique) situations (26). The result is a theater that not only rejects realist narrative theater’s appeal to public morals, which have become increasingly suspect over the last century, but that also offers itself as a relational paradigm better suited to the present world’s complex interconnectivities.
 
One assumption shared by the essays in this collection is the view that poet’s theater is, at its basis, a critique and rethinking of language’s complicity in the production and imposition of generalizable norms. In “This Theater Is a Strange Hole: Mac Wellman’s Poetics of Apparence,” Karinne Keithley Syers demonstrates poet-playwright Mac Wellman’s demand, via interpretive impediments and non-naturalistic performance, for openness to unknowingness, or what Syers terms a “hole poetics.” “Instead of finding out once again that incest hurts or that racism is bad,” she explains, “Wellman suggests we allow theater to make us venture into spaces where we don’t already know the answer.” Reading Wellman’s Antigone alongside notions of landscape composition, William James’s writings on consciousness and language processing, and classical Greek theater, Syers argues that Wellman’s theater acts both upon and with audience members, making them aware of the mental leaps common to acts of storytelling, and creating in them feelings for new relations. Thus the traditional sight-oriented model of landscape theater becomes, in Syers’s engagement with Wellman, a language-driven “wilderness expedition quite unrelated to any form of conquest”–a field, a hole, a topographical unknown at the edge of thinking.
 
Given poet’s theater’s essential hybridity, it is perhaps not surprising that the role–and disciplinary home–of poet’s theater in the academy is in flux. Critical attention to poet’s theater (and indeed poet’s theater as critical activity) has increased in the wake of the rise of both Cultural Studies and Performance Studies. The essays here benefit from this broader range of scholarly attention and make use of production and publication histories, performance analyses, cultural contexts, aesthetic ideologies, and artistic practices, even as they stay close to play texts themselves for what they can tell us about the rhetoric and practice of textuality and performance. In the long-overdue intersection of theater scholarship and poetry criticism created by these four essays, we can also identify a shared pedagogical interest: poet’s theater as an alternative, and often innovative, social-experiential model. This is postwar poet’s theater’s activist character, emerging out of the contemporary notion of performance itself as a critical paradigm. And yet this is only a partial account. There are, no doubt, many more critical approaches to be tried on and histories to be fleshed out via closer attention to postwar poet’s theater. Many of the most active critics of postwar poet’s theater are, in fact, new or emerging scholars whose critical facility with poet’s theater has been enabled by training that is increasingly interdisciplinary. We therefore see this collection as an opening, one that perhaps could only become apparent in this critical junction, and we look forward to both a broadening and a deepening of poet’s theater as a space of, and catalyst for, critical activity.