Poets’ Theatre

Abstract

Abstract Poets’ Theatre was an important route for the European modernist avant-gardes in the 1920s to be rediscovered by American poets of the 1960s. Their experiments in multiply voiced poems which position the audience within the action offered novel possibilities for immersive poetry readings. This chapter traces the influence of the Cambridge Poets’ Theatre on Dylan Thomas’s debut of Under Milk Wood and the Living Theatre’s impact on John Ashbery, whose ‘environmental’ readings make the poem seem to be describing the audience listening to it. Amiri Baraka’s time with the New York Poets’ Theatre also comes through in the explosive poems of his under-acknowledged collection, Black Magic. During his most heated declarations of the black poet’s independence and need for control, Baraka’s part-improvised reading at UCLA in 1967 sets the listeners as if in the centre of a riotous protest, making his own resonant voice a theatre for the angry contest of white and black to play out.