The work of visiting writer and artist Cecilia Vicuña inspired two Tucson writers and scholars to create an ephemeral multimedia piece of stirring beauty. Don't miss your chance to be inspired by Vicuña’s Site-Specific Installation, which you can encounter at Poetry Off the Page.
At Poets Theater at The Rogue in Tucson, a Poetry Off the Page event, Brent Cunningham will present three short, experimental plays that engage directly with the audience. Mark McLemore talked with poet and UA professor Ander Monson in the AZPM radio studio, where they were joined by poet and Brent Cunningham (by telephone from Berkeley, CA) to discuss the symposium.
About Poets Theater
by Brent Cunningham
The roots of "Poets' Theater" as a sub-genre can be traced back to at least 1950 when The Poets' Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was formed. William Carlos Williams and Thornton Wilder were among its first board members, and its most active participants included Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Alison Lurie, V.R. "Bunny" Lang, Edward Gorey, Paul Goodman, Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur and Archibald Macleish. Of course The Poets' Theater was not the first time poets had written and staged plays; nevertheless, its project (along with similar experiments at Black Mountain and elsewhere) would remain a touchstone for poets exploring the possibilities of theater over the decades that followed. While any aesthetic lineage can be debated, any history of Poets Theater would have to mention the Black Arts theater pieces of Amiri Baraka, as well as the Poets Theater events staged by Language Poets in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In the Bay Area, there has been at least one Poets Theater event, usually more, every January for the last decade. This tradition was initially organized by some of the board members at Small Press Traffic (which still hosts P.T. in the Bay), including Kevin Killian, Taylor Brady, Elizabeth Treadwell, and Brent Cunningham, as well as Camile Roy working with New Langton Arts. Killian's own plays, which he had been staging with a loose but consistent troupe of poets, artists, and friends throughout the 1990s, were arguably the most immediate and dominant influence on the tenor of those evenings. Since then, a new generation of Bay Area poets have grown up wondering if "Poets Theater" is merely any play written by a poet, or whether there is an alchemical formula that makes a play not just theater, but poets theater.
The Poetry Center is excited to announce that voca, its audio video library, has been enhanced with a user registration process that allows visitors to tag and comment on readings. It’s easy to get started—simply register for free at voca.arizona.edu. This is your chance to share your knowledge, reminiscences, and literary acumen with others, contributing to the rich historical, cultural, and scholarly value of this resource.
Did you know? By adding your tags, you enrich knowledge, help others search this resource, and even contribute to our common language!
This project was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The University of Arizona Poetry Center presents its third biennial symposium, which will showcase some of today’s most intriguing and adventurous poets, they who forge new literary territory with the help of modern technologies;those daring to make new work that is best “read” off the page or performed in collaboration or in tandem. Presenting diverse and electric performances, this symposium is based in spectacle and community engagement.
Dynamic exhibitions are on display at the Poetry Center, all in dialogue with our upcoming symposium, Poetry Off the Page, including: ARTISTEXTS: artist books in dialogue between design and writing; Between Page and Screen, a book "written" in geometric shapes that leap into three-dimensional space via an innovative web interface; and (pictured) Narrative Nests: ceramic swallow nests and hives containing "failed" excerpts from the artist's manuscripts.
Poet Julie Carr and dancer K.J. Holmes will perform, as part of an evening event at the Rogue Theater in Tucson, Arizona, a collaboration of text and dance called "This is where we are (or take arms against a sea of troubles)." Poetry Center staff member Allie Leach is both a writer and a dancer herself. She questioned Holmes and Carr about their process of collaboration, and here she illuminates for us what we can expect in encountering this collaboration on May 19.
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