The Miraculous Season E-Book

V.R. 'Bunny' Lang

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Classics
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 179

Beschreibung

A Poetry Book Society Spring Special Commendation 2024 In the archives of the Houghton Library at Harvard blazes the incandescent work of V.R. 'Bunny' Lang (1924–56), the American poet and playwright whose name has been all but erased from literary history. The fiery nerve centre of the literary scene around mid-century Harvard, and best friend of the iconic New York School poet Frank O'Hara – who referred to her as 'one of our finest poets' – Lang herself has languished in the shadows of American poetry for too long. This book brings into print some of Lang's most startling, strange, and beautiful poetry, much of which has never been published before, drawing her into the spotlight at last. It includes an editor's introduction by scholar and writer Rosa Campbell, on Lang's fascinating and often hilariously eccentric life, devastatingly early death, and her rightful place in the canon of twentieth-century American poetry. The Miraculous Season, published in Lang's centenary year, is a revelation of the true breadth and brilliance of her poetry, rediscovered and made available in print for the first time since 1975.

Leseprobe

THE MIRACULOUS SEASON

V.R. “Bunny” Lang (1924–56) was a poet, playwright, actress and director born in Boston, the youngest of six daughters. She was a founding member of the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachussetts in 1950, where she staged two verse dramas, Fire Exit (1952) and I Too Have Live in Arcadia (1954), and starred in multiple other productions, including the original performance of Frank O’Hara’s Try! Try! (1951). Her poetry was widely published in her lifetime, particularly in POETRY, and she was, for a time, editor of the Chicago Review. She died of Hodgkin’s disease at the age of thirty-two.

Rosa Campbell lives in Edinburgh, and is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St Andrews, where she also teaches modern and contemporary literature. Her poetry has appeared in various places, including Oxford Poetry, fourteen poems, Perverse, Ambit, Gutter and SPAM. Her first book, Pothos, a memoir-ish lyric essay about grief and houseplants, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021.

image: V.R. Lang, Houghton Library, Harvard, MS Am 1951 (65)

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by

Carcanet

Alliance House, 30 Cross Street

Manchester, m2 7aq

www.carcanet.co.uk

Text copyright © V.R. Lang 2024

The right of V.R. Lang to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act of 1988; all rights reserved.

The right of Rosa Campbell to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act of 1988; all rights reserved.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Ebook ISBN: 978 1 80017 338 5

The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Poem (“Darling, they have discovered Dynamite”)

Poem (“Darling, they have discovered Dynamite”)

Already Ripening Barberries Are Red

Poem (“Lately by language”)

Poem (“Well this is another city”)

The Pitch

Poem (“You didn’t mail the letters”)

Nantucket After Dark

Eurydice to Orpheus

Two Cats Have Killed a Bird

Poem (“Here in rehearsal”)

Discredited Things (Waiting and Peeking)

Poem (“Girl, what a song you were”)

Poem (“I waited all that time for a bird I wanted”)

Poem (“How to move you?”)

Pique-Dame

Poem (“You kill me”)

The Book of Destiny

Poem (“White of eye, blond of bone”)

A Meeting of Several Hands

Poem (“Who strained this fuzzy air”)

Poem (“Wait”)

Poem (“I think I die within the year”)

Dear Steve,

Poem (“Oh with the sparrows falling and dying”)

Poem (“Rage, but a degenerate rage”)

Poem (“I waited five hundred centuries for the White Crow”)

Poem (“We passed by the irrelevant echo”)

Fuller Explanation

No. 3 CWAC (B) TC

Things I Have Learned in Canada

The Honey-Bee

Poem (“Here was the fright, the flight, the brilliant stretch”)

The Suicide

Subject Properties

Hobbes was the most, the end, the wildest

Poem (“I will give you my wheel”)

Poem (“Then all the listening cries of nature”)

American Idealism

Poem (“… the result”)

Love Song (The Rebuff)

The Children Will Live With Their Mother (Lyric for the Father of a Girl)

Suicide Note

Poem (“When the light went out at my feet”)

How to Tell a Diamond from a Burning Baby

How to Tell a Diamond from a Burning Baby

Poem (“Editors, beat your wings”)

Poem (“It can free us”)

Poem (“If I lay thinking about the heat”)

Surprise Party

Anne, a Chorus Girl Quitting the Line, to Society

Address to the Redcoats

The Art of Photographers

At the Meeting of Two Families

Woman Listening

The Recidivists

Poem (“My marvelous, my monster squats”)

Argument

Poem (“Who, if I cried”)

Poem (“With all these justifiable fears”)

25 Years

Poem (“I have estimated that the value of the glass”)

A Spirited Chorus for Prudents

A Sunday Indignity

Poem (“Friday I took you my elderly verities”)

Poem (“I’ll write a letter from one to ten”)

The Girl Who Wanted to Be a Tree

Incantation to an Age of Stone

From a Fanciful Map in the Children’s Room

Plaint Upon Jack

Hugh and the Pigeons on Fogg Court (Working with Strangers)

Anyone looking at you sees—

Poem (“As commedia players”)

But You Can Fool the Camera

Old Belle

Poem (“excuses, excuses”)

Dummy in the Crowd

Poem (“Where lovers lay around like great horned owls”)

Death of Another Swan—Miami 1953

Death of Another Swan—Miami

Who Is the Real Oscar Mole?

Lines for Mrs. C.

Love and the Social Worker

Poem (“Drum eat drum”)

From the Car

Poem (“I’ve come a long way for your sake”)

Poem (“Cats walked the walls”)

Obstacles, Loyalties, Deceits

George and the Different Kinds of Light

Poem (“This day came up as a fat squall”)

Poem (“Hard stamping wind”)

Poem (“Doctors, lilies of the plain”)

Poem (“Came up the long stairs after a long time into the dark”)

To Frank’s Guardian Angel (To the Guardian Angel of an Aesthete Going to the Middle West to College)

Poem (“At last the Indians have their summer”)

Born Old

A Child’s Fantasy

Poem (“Now you will make penance”)

Poem (“When I came back up out of the dark”)

Poem (“Went down a warren of his own”)

A Jingle for a Man Who Held My Hand

Poem (“I can’t do anything for George”)

To Our Friend Who Married a Bore and Who is No Longer One of Us by Choice

Children at the Zoo

Poem (“What should I do in Illyria?”)

Jungle

Old Beauty

Old Beauty

Poem (“O the little latex man”)

Philosopher-King

Poem (“What is is what was”)

Poem (“The rain shall rain small and hot”)

The Bear

Poem (“Why else do you have an English Horn”)

Whisper

Poem (“Well and you lay between the clamorous warnings”)

Poem (“What hours, love”)

At Harvard Bridge

Poem (“So lean to your caress”)

Reaching Out Our Hands to One Another (Bedbugs)

Torturing

And Hang a Calfskin on Those Recreant Limbs

Poem (“To rhythmically grind our jaws”)

Poem (“This time, what are the conditions of cowardice?”)

Notes on Solitude

Poem (“Somewhere he not anywhere no”)

Travelling South

Poem (“Would she improve”)

Poem (“I have no memory for beginnings”)

Poem (“The pines pull up from their needles”)

Letter from Grandma Morning

Ultra-Violet

Money and Time

Poem (“Shall we remember this year”)

Poems to Preserve the Years at Home

Poem (“A terror to love what death can take”)

Poem (“If you passed unharmed through the miraculous season”)

Acknowledgements

Index of Poem Titles

“She is calling us long-distance in these poems, telling us how it is with her, how bright things can be, how terrible things are. She was a wonderful person. She is one of our finest poets. We are so lucky to have something of her still!”

—Frank O’Hara

Introduction

This is Miss Lang, Miss V.R. Lang. The Poet, or

The Poetess... 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,

It’s a private religion. Who’s that over there?

You probably haven’t heard of Bunny Lang. Or, if you have, it’s because you’re a Frank O’Hara fan, and can recall poems dedicated to her: “V.R. Lang,” “An 18th Century Letter,” “A Letter to Bunny.” Or perhaps you remember the sudden shift in “A Step Away From Them,” when O’Hara pivots from the joys of cheeseburgers, Coca-Cola, and hot shirtless labourers on the streets of Manhattan to the lines: “First / Bunny died, then John Latouche / then Jackson Pollock. But is the / earth as full as life was full, of them?” To learn that someone has died before you’ve even been introduced properly seems unfair—to you, to them. Yet this is perhaps how most people first meet V.R. “Bunny” Lang, who lived for a brief and extraordinary flash between 1924 and 1956, during which time she wrote, directed and starred in numerous plays, edited a literary magazine, co-founded the first “poets’ theatre” in the United States, and wrote reams and reams of startling, fervent, visionary poetry. As O’Hara says—placing her on the same cultural pedestal as the musical theatre icon Latouche and arguably the most famous American painter of the twentieth century—“life was full” of Lang. For those that knew her, she was a “Cambridge legend of the arts,” “a formidable presence,” a “ball of fire.”

So far, though, Lang has languished in the margins of American literary history; a footnote to the rise and rise of the New York School of poets, a curio, and—persistently—Frank O’Hara’s “muse.” This is often the fate of women who happen to be connected to famous male artists and writers, regardless of their own professions or talents; relegated to the status of auxiliary, passive inspiration, they freeze into silence. The muse is not a speaking role. Yet in Lang’s archives, housed at the Houghton Library at Harvard, amongst the correspondence, juvenilia, diaries, legal documents, photographs, sketches, and half-finished playscripts, there are hundreds of poems, almost all of which have lain dormant for seventy years. It turns out she had a lot to say.

Violet Ranney Lang was born in Boston on the 11th of May, 1924, the youngest of five sisters. The Langs were a well-to-do family—old money and a good name housed in a four-storey brownstone on Bay State Road, right on the Charles River. She was a debutante who was expected to marry—like her sisters did—a respectable man of her class, and settle into the life of a socialite, wife and mother. Instead, the young woman most commonly known as “Bunny” became a renegade writer and theatre impresario, gathering around her a litany of now-famous names, including Harold Brodkey, Donald Hall, Mary Manning Howe, Edward Gorey, John Ashbery, Alison Lurie, Joan Mitchell, Jane Freilicher, Gregory Corso, Michael Goldberg, and—of course—Frank O’Hara.

The version of Lang that chimes with the expectations of her background (boarding at the Hannah More Academy; summers spent at a girls’ camp in New Hampshire; formal presentation to society in 1941; member of the Vincent Club, President of the Charlotte Cushman Club) seems to lie fundamentally at odds with some of the less conventional particulars of her life. During the Second World War, aged seventeen, she joined the Canadian Women’s Army Corps, because the American armed forces wouldn’t take under-eighteens. She attended the University of Chicago, where she was editor of the Chicago Review, but dropped out and returned to Boston, where she moved through a string of miscellaneous jobs, often pulled from the Help Wanted columns: bridal consultant at Fabian Bachrach’s photography studio, cosmetics demonstrator at a department store, researcher interviewing Pontiac owners, and—most infamously—burlesque dancer at the slightly seedy Old Howard Theatre. When she writes as “Anne, a Chorus Girl Quitting the Line, to Society,” it’s not—or not entirely—a persona. By 1949, with her mother dead and her sisters all married, she continued to live with her father (the organist and piano teacher Malcolm Burrage Lang) in her once-grand childhood home, now rather shabby, the family wealth not what it once was. Here she threw parties, some “wonderful,” some “terrible,” housed her Siamese cats, and in her room on the top floor wrote and rewrote, typed and re-typed her poems and plays. As Nora Sayre—who knew Lang in the 1950s—writes, “she became a legend […] a witty outlaw whose passions overflowed the confines of New England gentility.” Lang was the fiery, frantic core of the Boston and Cambridge literary scene: a poet, a playwright, an actress, a director and, according to Susan Howe, “a Valkyrie.” She died in 1956 of Hodgkin lymphoma; she was thirty-two.

Lang was, by all accounts, a brilliant and difficult person. Her accolades are many: “strong, opinionated, passionate,” “a superb comedienne” and “overwhelmingly funny, smart, ambitious.” O’Hara’s friend, roommate, and sometime lover Joe LeSueur met Lang for the first time as an unannounced visitor, finding her naked in the “grimy, grayish bathtub” of their New York apartment, from which she suggested that he make them both a drink. “I was never so quickly won over by anyone,” he writes; she was “someone to reckon with and adore.” Yet “formidable” is perhaps the word used most often by those that knew her. She was possessed of an “angry loyalty to everyone she accepted for her friends and lovers,” but caustic in her criticism, brutal in her reprisals; “once when she felt that Ted Gorey had betrayed her she sent him a Christmas card so obscene, insulting, and spiteful that he would not speak to her for a year.” At one point she became the subject of a Poets’ Theatre working group to “Stop Bunny,” as a result of her tendency to be overbearing and drastically over budget (she showed up at the meeting and declared them all her enemies). Once—in an anecdote that seems to typify both her incredible wrath and her impetuous creativity—she printed a thousand pink labels that read MY NAME IS STANLEY AND I AM A PIG in order to seek revenge on a man she had briefly dated, who she felt had slighted her. He found them pasted all over his New York neighbourhood; in his subway station, on the door of his apartment building, in his favourite bar, the bathrooms of his Madison Avenue office. For some time afterwards, she would sporadically send him postcards, often from abroad, the leftover labels pasted onto them. It is perhaps no surprise to find, in the middle of her poem “Address to the Redcoats,” Paul Gauguin’s maxim: “Life / Being what it is, one dreams of revenge.”

In 1946, one of the first classes of Second World War veterans descended on Cambridge to attend Harvard on the GI Bill. Among them was a young man in a Navy workshirt who would later become one of the brightest stars in the constellation known as the New York School. It would be easy to suggest that Frank O’Hara, with his current status as a cult icon of American poetry, must have been a significant influence on his now lesser-known friend. At the time, however, O’Hara was an aspiring musician, focused on piano concertos and Elementary Harmony, whilst Lang was in possession of relative local fame and a much more established literary career; she had already been the editor of the Chicago Review, and her poems had been published by POETRY, i.e. The Cambridge Review, and Folder. Indeed, Lang’s reputation clearly preceded her; seeing her for the first time at a bookstore cocktail party, O’Hara remembered that “as if it were a movie, she was glamorous and aloof. The girl I was talking to said: ‘That’s Bunny Lang. I’d like to give her a good slap.’” They became inseparable.

It was together that Lang and O’Hara worked out how to be poets. O’Hara recalled how they “sounded each other out for hours over beers, talking incessantly,” and argued over influences: “We both loved Rimbaud and Auden; she thought I loved Rimbaud too much, and I thought the same about Auden and her.” It was an intense and symbiotic relationship, sustained by their shared unwavering commitment to poetry and a potent sibling-like bond (a letter from Lang to O’Hara greets him as “Brother,” while another is addressed to “Trick” and signed “Treat”). The two poets began a routine of “coffee talks,” daily telephone calls to talk about “everything we had thought of since we had parted the night before, including any dreams we may have had in the meantime.” At the top of the Bay State Road house, according to O’Hara’s biographer, Brad Gooch, they “sat together writing joke poems, collaborating on alternate lines, or correcting each other’s work so that it was difficult to tell whose was whose.” Indeed, Lang’s poem “To Frank’s Guardian Angel” was mistakenly included in the first edition of O’Hara’s Collected Poems, after being found by Kenneth Koch, Bill Berkson, and other friends tasked with collating his poems after he died in 1966. Perhaps if Koch et al had seen the original title of the poem, they might not have been so sure it was O’Hara’s; instead of the seemingly self-reflexive naming gesture evident elsewhere in O’Hara’s work (“Some day I’ll love Frank O’Hara,” he writes in the poem “Katy”), another draft of the poem sports the rather more teasing title “To the Guardian Angel of an Aesthete Going to the Middle West to College.” Critics have occasionally used this editorial mishap to suggest that Lang, therefore, must necessarily have been influenced by, and sound like, O’Hara. It is too easy a rebuttal to suggest that O’Hara perhaps sounds like Lang, so instead we could turn to Bill Corbett, who claimed that the renowned New York School poet Bernadette Mayer’s response to reading Lang’s work was “I like her poems better than O’Hara’s.”

It wasn’t just Lang and O’Hara, however. Robert Bly, another Harvard student at the time, described a coterie made up of “an astonishing collection of intense maniacs,” often crowded into a booth at Cronin’s bar, with Lang holding court as “the Circe of that circle.” This group included Lyon Phelps, George Montgomery, Hugh Amory, Sarah Braveman, Hal Fondren, Lawrence Osgood and—later—Gregory Corso, who would go on to be a major poet of the Beat Generation. Lang had met him penniless in New York and brought him back to Cambridge, insisting that he be moved into Peter Sourian’s room in Harvard’s Eliot House, and given a job sweeping the newly-established Poets’ Theatre. It was this theatre that formed the hub of the New England literary scene at mid-century. In 1950, together with Mary Manning (Molly) Howe (mother of the poets Fanny and Susan Howe), Thornton Wilder, and Lyon Phelps, Lang co-founded the theatre, with the support and blessing of the town’s poetic grandees, Richard Eberhart, John Ciardi, and Richard Wilbur. An experiment in medium, form, and organisation, the Poets’ Theatre was to become a significant testing ground for young writers, actors, artists and designers, prefiguring the Artists’ Theatre, set up in 1953 in New York by John Bernard Myers and Herbert Machiz (who would later stage Lang’s Fire Exit in 1954), and the New York Poets Theatre, which was founded in 1961 by a group of poets including Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) and Diane di Prima.

Originally holding the position of Secretary, and later becoming Vice-President, Lang was the only founding member of the theatre to have no formal connection to Harvard. Yet as Don Share points out, she “was surpassed—slightly—in her publishing record only by the senior members of the theatre, Richard Wilbur, John Ciardi, and Richard Eberhart.” All of the theatre’s early productions featured Lang as writer, director, or actor, or occasionally all three. The Poets’ Theatre was more than a workshop for writers trying their hand at verse drama; it saw itself as the vanguard of an innovation in American literature. It was also a crucible for gossip, feuds, and vendettas—both artistic and personal. It was DIY, underground, and often broke—no thanks to Lang, who had been known to run up colossal debts for her productions. Shows could involve Victorian gothic sets by Edward Gorey and strange costumes hand-dyed by Lang in her basement, while actors bickered over the casting of roles; it had an air of “intentional delinquency.” Yet it also had lofty ambitions that were realised with surprising frequency; original works by Samuel Beckett, Cid Corman, and Ted Hughes were staged there; it hosted the first American reading by Dylan Thomas of Under Milk Wood; and the first reading of Djuna Barnes’s play The Antiphon took place in Lang’s sister-in-law’s Berkeley Street mansion, attended by Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Edwin Muir, I.A. Richards, and—somewhat astonishingly—T.S. Eliot, whom Lang, never one to be overawed, had personally invited. Yet Nora Sayre remembers that “above all, the company had an exciting aura of a counterculture, which was very hard to locate in the Fifties.”

Echoes of the Poets’ Theatre—and poetic drama more generally—can be seen throughout Lang’s poetry. Not just in poems like “Whisper,” “I give you my wheel and my skate,” and “Lines for Mrs C,” which are composed as dialogues (or, in the case of the last, a monologue with accompanying cat-yowls), but also in the declarative grandstanding of poems such as “Address to the Redcoats,” which was written to be delivered as part of a reading in May 1954, not long after Lang had been diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma. Alison Lurie describes how she arrived to give the reading “looking ghastly pale and haggard, dressed in low-cut black velvet like Madame Bovary.” Elsewhere in her work, Lang creates high drama and spectacular characters, so that we are swept up in the theatre of a poem like “Pique-Dame”—courts and assassins and Ice Lakes and “every tree breaking”—before we register that “Pique-Dame” is the Queen of Spades and lines like “Pique-Dame, I am losing. / Save me, and I will play you” could be read entirely literally as a card game. On the other hand, it is difficult to let such mundanity get in the way of the invocation of Calliope (the muse of epic poetry), and the way the poem explodes itself by the end, bursting outwards into teeming chaos:

EVERYONE UP      EVERYTHING

VERY LOUD AND BEAUTIFUL  crying red and yellow

Calliope, calliope    every tree breaking

Ponds leaping wild    wheels      trees bracelets birds

The plums are wild    with what is coming

Everything a Wonder    all open hands

Listen!   you’ve got to listen    PIQUE-DAME! PIQUE-DAME!

The movement in “Pique-Dame” from tight lines and traditional conceit to an eruption of fragmentary, impressionistic, semi-surrealist modernity is a reflection of the range of Lang’s writing more generally, something this selection aims to reveal. By experiencing her work as an oeuvre—albeit a necessarily incomplete one—the true breadth of Lang’s accomplishment becomes apparent. She is as good at pith (“Heard at the P.O.: Hate. Nobody likes their mail”) as she is at pathos (“I think I die within the year”), as skilled a formalist (“Surprise Party”) as she is an experimentalist