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This article is taken from PN Review 274, Volume 50 Number 2, November - December 2023.

Unfinished/Ungoverned: An Introduction to V.R. ‘Bunny’ Lang Rosa Campbell
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 the sudden shift in ‘A Step Away from Them’, when he 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 ...


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