‘Darling, they have discovered Dynamite’

For decades the so-called New York School of painters – associated chiefly with abstract expressionism – has been synonymous with a group of male artists, with Jackson Pollock at its molten centre. Something similar is true of the New York School poets, a mid-century coterie whose membership includes John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara, whose fluid, dashed-off Lunch Poems (1964) have come to typify the movement. Recently several exhibitions have sought to bring the pioneering women of abstract expressionism into greater prominence: the blockbuster retrospective for Lee Krasner at the Barbican in 2019, for instance, and the Whitechapel Gallery’s Action, Gesture, Paint in 2023. Now it is poetry’s turn. With The Miraculous Season, V. R. “Bunny” Lang’s writing is drawn into the limelight. The editor, Rosa Campbell, hopes this volume will restoring Lang’s explosive, short-lived contribution to its rightful place within the New York School mythology.

“You probably haven’t heard of Bunny Lang”, she admits. “Or, if you have, it’s because you’re a Frank O’Hara fan.” Meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1946, Lang and O’Hara quickly formed “a potent sibling-like bond”, exchanging poems and ideas daily. Yet, unlike O’Hara, whose poetry is all but canonized, “Lang has languished in the margins of American literary history”. Building on previous attempts to curate her work for publication, last meaningfully achieved in 1975, The Miraculous Season makes extensive use of Lang’s archival papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard, rediscovering a number of important poems that are here made available in print for the first time. “She is one of our finest poets”, O’Hara wrote after Lang’s death in 1956 from Hodgkin lymphoma, aged thirty-two: “We are so lucky to have something of her still!”

Hyperactive and unruly, Lang’s poetry sparks with undeniable energy, shifting rapidly through different voices and arrangements. “Children at the Zoo” evokes youngsters pinballing between enclosures, too bored and excited to stay in one place: “The seals were no good, / Are there some elephants? […] We hated the elephants, / Where are the lions?” It is no surprise to find these poems strewn with “broken bits” of “lovely glass”, “cracked bowl[s]” and fierce thunderstorms (“the world broke / Everywhere”). “Darling, they have discovered Dynamite”, the book begins; “Now we will never be so happy again.” This establishes a territory primed with explosives and “firecracker spontaneous / Feelings”, even bursting, in one poem, with a kind of “proud insanity”.

At times this makes for disjointed reading. At its most frustrating Lang’s poetry can be uneven in a way that seems self-parodic, as though it is not quite sure of what it wants to be, injecting moments of apparent nonsense and surrealism simply for the hell of it. At the same time reading Lang is never dull. Nearly every poem produces flashes of intensity and sideways humour. “It has got to be something / Bewildering. Complicated. Preferably / Mysterious to the self at time of writing”, reads a passage from “Poems to Preserve the Years at Home”, arguably the volume’s highlight, the poet at her most assured.

Lang’s poetry is strongest when it borders on the theatrical, betraying the influence of her work as a playwright. She co-founded the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, which produced a number of her plays alongside works by Samuel Beckett and Ted Hughes, and hosted Dylan Thomas’s first reading of Under Milk Wood in America. Several of the poems in The Miraculous Season speak in brilliantly distinctive voices, hinting at narratives we don’t have ready access to: “Who ate the poisoned chicken, you?” Lang’s cast of tragicomic eccentrics – “maidens, cretins, counterpatriots” – exist at the onset of moments of crisis and anxiety. “Use your ears and you will be able to speak a variety of languages”, she writes. “Speak them and forget your own.”

The vitality of her writing is matched by that of her life, glimpsed in a series of outrageous episodes set out in Campbell’s introduction; such is the fiery, filmic and frequently hilarious nature of her story, it sometimes seems to outshine the poems themselves. “That’s Bunny Lang”, O’Hara remembers someone saying to him the evening when they met: “I’d like to give her a good slap.” Yet the tragedy of her early death leaves “The embroidery unfinished”, to cite the poem from which The Miraculous Season takes its title. While there is plenty here to surprise and excite, the overriding sense is that the poet simply did not live long enough to write her best work. As Rosa Campbell puts it, she was “meteoric in the truest sense, burning painfully bright, and flaming out”.

Rowland Bagnall’s second collection of poems is Near-Life Experience, 2024

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