V.R. 'Bunny' Lang (1924-1956) 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 Lived 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.
'Poems of darkness and forbode echo through this collection... Bunny Lang brings her own veritas, her own incantations and ringing church bells.'
Roy McFarlane, The Poetry Society Bulletin
'These are young poems by a poet who got to stay young, and shared her youth with poets we know but her youthful playfulness and unswerving fate and unabashed and forceful ear excite me because suddenly I'm on an unknown road in the annals of poetry history. It's a little familiar. It's great. It's like she just walked in. And made the whole story true. We have someone new to talk with and a different history, Bunny Lang just rewrote it.'
Eileen Myles
'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
'These poems, which are not exactly personal, do convey the brilliant personality of V.R. "Bunny" Lang, poet, dramatist, and founding figure of 1950s Boston avant-garde theater. They are dramatic speeches, exclamations, soliloquies, addresses for personae, in a described "setting" and hinting at a story. That is, they are theatrical! They are bitchy, allusive to events off-stage, to a personality, even, that's off-stage. Always alive, still alive (despite an early, tragic death), Lang is perhaps the first woman poet in history to despair of her actual monetary debts. These are tone-of-voice works, totally vocal, startingly rhymed, choppy syntax, spare punctuation, interesting pronouns â Auden's complicit "we," the resented "you," the masklike "I." Something that remains very modern starts here.'
Alice Notley
Awards won by V.R. 'Bunny' Lang
Commended, 2024 A Poetry Book Society Spring Special Commendation
(The Miraculous Season)
