For years I have loved The Great Wastepaper Theatre Anthology (1978), the record of a poets theater troupe, because for that same duration I have suspected and been working to accumulate proof that when it comes to poetry it is more than okay, likely preferable, to not take oneself seriously. Or more precisely, to seriously take oneself not seriously. Sure, on the page, go ahead, be serious. There it’s generally the absence of the conscious self. At least it had better be. But time spent not on a page of poetry and yet in service of poetry’s redoubt, which is to say in service of saying no—to productivity and the noise pollution of vaingloriousness and to all rationality on the menu—in service of saying, “oh sorry, I have a professional obligation to apprehend what is more tender than fact and more vulnerable than opinion”?[1] How to spend that time? Alone, of course. But when solitude becomes like a trampoline park with extra low ceilings and your reality and particular brand of awkwardness preclude smoking a cigarette in a clutch of poets outside The Poetry Project? Then what else can there be but to invent, again, poets theater? When I tried to describe its amateurism and clumsiness to some students, one said that it sounded like adults being kids—not intended as the compliment it is, but she is close enough to childhood to be still grasping at, and even honoring, logic, whereas I am desperately trying to escape the straitjacket of logic that so-called maturity keeps cinching tighter. Thus, poets theater—a large percentage of my experience of which has consisted of asking my friend, a serious writer whose poetry is both austere and bafflingly, beautifully paronomastic (the word pun utterly fails her work), to don a large pink polyester bouffant wig and walk in ducklike ways. I have mostly been bowed over in laughter at the majestic idiocy of what she is doing, and yet I have felt that these bows were also a genuflection to poetry.
Poets theater, says the Kenning Editions anthology dedicated to the form, “is a social scene, but it is also, crucially, a geographical scene, and the two are complexly interwoven.”[2] About four decades too late for the Wastepaper Theatre social scene, I sit in a happy overlap with its geography: Providence, Rhode Island. The group was “spawned April 25, 1973, by James Schevill, Edwin Honig, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop—to investigate new possibilities of poetry in the theatre.”[3] Its performances took place at Edwin Honig’s “mansion” on Narragansett Bay, and at a piano teacher’s studio on the east side of Providence, and sometimes at the RISD museum. Performances were free and advertised by posters on the Brown campus and elsewhere, posters suspected by Rosmarie to still exist in the tumult of Keith Waldrop’s home office.
I was born two years into this project, and not into a family that would have been near Brown or poetry. Yet I am cheered in thinking that some tendrils of poetic absurdity were in the air in Rhode Island at that time, and that I must have breathed them in. Rosmarie has a play in the WTA, “Remember Gasoline?,” in which a man sweeps “mounting sand”—à la Woman in the Dunes—while a woman lies sphinxlike. Every so often a physicist on a bicycle comes to the gas station and the man serves him a drink from the gas pump—tea, hot chocolate, Postum…. There’s the feeling of centuries passing, and much of the dialogue is born from physics talk or from banal exchanges:
WOMAN: I’m not sleeping.
MAN: Then what the hell are you doing?
WOMAN: Thinking.
MAN: Thinking! You make me sick. You make me want to cry.
WOMAN: OK. Keep weeping.
MAN: I’m not weeping. I just want to.
WOMAN: OK. Keep sweeping then.[4]
When I read this play, which is a handful of pages, I like it for its bigness—in addition to Kōbō Abe and temporal physics, it’s Camus’s Sisyphus, it’s—only opaquely!—OPEC, it’s a mood of slowness, nearly eternity, and the woman, despite a lionhearted effort, gets denied sex at the end, and then there’s this stupidly funny inclusion of every word that rhymes with “sweeping”…. I picture my dad at this gas pump, the very one from Rosmarie’s imagination, with me and my sisters in a heap in the back seat of his Plymouth Fury. He was often aggrieved. But in all weather the back windows of that station wagon were down, and that must have been when the prevailing winds blew some of that transubstantiating air from “Remember Gasoline?” to me in the back seat twelve miles away…turning the gas crisis into an existential one, the petroleum pump into a spigot….
The Wastepaper Theatre got its name because initially Honig and Schevill had the idea to write short plays about current events—plays made from yesterday’s newsprint—but Rosmarie says that she and Keith immediately groaned at that idea and then ignored it. And ultimately they didn’t sweep or sleep or weep away the news but side-eyed it. At the second Wastepaper program, according to the WTA, the Waldrops “grossed out the audience with ‘The Tragic End of Mythology’ by K. I. Gałczyński.”[5] Keith played Jove, “a noted sex fiend” who fries the eggs that contain the embryos of his three mythological children with Leda because “we can’t expect anything worthwhile from Castor and Pollux, and as for Helen, everybody knows the consequences.”[6] Polish poet Gałczyński’s one-page plays written for his Little Theatre of the Green Goose have been described as a “meticulous buffoonade,” a phrase that could apply to a good seven-eighths of the WTA plays.[7] Like Gałczyński’s, the WT’s were not made from the news but still retained the news’s cruelty: “In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.”[8] And Providence itself in the 1970s was a prime site of decline. (Some of us longtime residents feel the need to share the fact that when Bette Midler, of all people, passed through the city in the ’70s, she called it “the pits.”[9])
Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop are poets, to me the most serious of poets, and when I walked the few Providence blocks between my house and theirs to ask them about the WTA, they answered all of my questions, but whatever answers they gave were preceded by them laughing. Honig and Schevill, both now deceased, were poets and traditional playwrights. Why would playwrights attend to a theater of no budget, no real actors, no stage? Why would poets put so much energy in service of language that would (or should—more on that later) never live beyond a night? These questions are sort of faux-naïf…. It’s true that my experience of poetry keeps becoming clotted with institutions, professionalization. But it’s also true that an important kernel of my self knows better than to believe in them. (Says the WT manifesto: “If an institution appears on our non-stage, we will poetically abolish it.”[10]) So I know why I participate in poets theater (or as Schevill’s theme song for the WT goes, “When you admire your face / and love your disgrace; / when you polish your ego / for friends in a free show…”).[11] And here for you is one historical fact regarding each WT founding member that explains their possible seducement by this insubstantial genre:
Heavenly God, do you wish me
once again to dream of grandeur
which time must rip asunder?
Do you wish me once again
to glimpse half-lit among the shadows
that pomp and majesty
which vanish with the wind?[12]
And so perhaps these lines swept into EH, because what better unreal, ephemeral medium than poets theater to deliberately, happily pursue anything but grandeur? Plus, there’s apparently a whiff of amateurism about Calderón, as EH mentions in his foreword to the play: “A French diplomat, reporting a conversation with the old playwright in 1669, concluded that Calderón knew next to nothing generally, and perhaps least of all about the rules of drama, which he mocked.”[13]
Keith Waldrop, while in grad school at the University of Michigan, had put up several theatricalish productions, including the “proto-absurdist” play Comedy, Satire, Irony & Deeper Meaning by Christian Dietrich Grabbe, and in the stage directions of that play, a character makes a deal with the devil:
The Devil makes an offer to the Margrave Murdrock, to whose home they have brought him frozen in the month of August. He will procure for him the young Baroness Liddy on two conditions: first, that Murdrock will make his eldest son study philosophy, and second, that he will put thirteen journeyman tailors to death.[14]
As far as I can tell, the play does not call for actually putting thirteen journeyman tailors to death on the stage, but Keith made a directorial choice to do so, enlisting twelve professors to play the parts of the journeyman tailors, staging each individual death, and then a department chair to play the thirteenth (and apparently most gruesomely killed) journeyman tailor. Whenever I long for a tenure-track job near Providence, I think of Keith killing thirteen tenured professors onstage with such delight.
In a different kind of anti-institutional gesture, James Schevill refused to sign a 1950 loyalty oath to UC Berkeley and thus lost his teaching job there. Assigned to an army unit meant to “re-educate” German prisoners during WWII, he worked with Germans whose rejections of Hitler’s loyalty oaths sent them to concentration camps…. In a letter to the then UC President, he asked, “Can I now in all conscience consent to an oath which was considered a dishonorable act during the war?”[15] Thus Schevill, having so understood the horrors of totalitarianism, was more than primed to undertake absurdity.
Rosmarie Waldrop, as the only one of the four founding members of the WT who is still actively writing and publishing, must remain inscrutable. In her own account, Rosmarie did not particularly want to join the Wastepaper Theatre, but they needed her for balance, to keep the poets theater as much poet as theater. And, she says, in poets theater there was a spatial element: unlike in poems, you could have two things at the same time. And so she did.
§
Each poet was responsible for staging their own play. They memorized the lines (Rosmarie: “It was a lot of lines”), except in Keith’s plays, which were pretty much improvised. There would be a framework, the play would start, and the actors, such as they were, often would not know, after their first scene, when to go back on. “I wouldn’t either,” Keith said, and laughed. “That was the point.” In the anthology’s pages you’ll see that a young Gayatri Spivak, now a towering literary theorist, was directed to “triumphantly” deliver the last line in Honig’s “Rehearsing Emily Dickinson’s Puppies”: “YO HE HO OH.”[16] Providence poet Michael Gizzi pops up in many productions as “Husband,” “Thriftshop Owner,” and “Nazi 1.” Hannah Weiner—a Providence native presumably back in town to visit family—makes a showing: in her version of Romeo and Juliet, Hannah played Romeo, Keith played Juliet, and Rosmarie played a character named Mike. Each line of dialogue was supposed to be delivered alongside a particular hand signal from the International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations, but RW recalls, “we didn’t learn them, we just waved our hands in whatever way.” I loved the casual way Rosmarie waved her hands as she explained how she would wave away the stage directions. I love the last play in the anthology, written by Keith, in which he starred as “A Man” who waves away words: “Words carry one away from energy, away from meaning, farther and farther. They fold inward. They conceal. They take the truth and make it…mm…I forget what they make it, but anyway. That is very clear in scientific language. The technical, Latin name for the common American robin is, as you may be aware, ‘Turdus migratorius.’ Or, being translated, ‘Shite errant.’”[17]
How did all this lovely shite get set down in book form? It shouldn’t have, right? Antithetical to its spirit to publish! But for Peter Kaplan. Fifteen years old and kicked out of his house, Kaplan started hanging around with Providence poets. At first, they found him somewhat obnoxious, but, and this part of the sentence is conjecture, they made room for him eventually because he tenaciously loved poetry. He killed himself when he was nineteen. In a tribute book that Kaplan’s friends put together, Honig wrote, “Peter was an immense friend of poets, he had a passion for most of them personally and especially for what they wrote…. He knew and read the famous, the most obscure. And he loved poetry books, all sorts, physically and literally, he even published a few.”[18] When Peter was around sixteen years old, he moved to Woods Hole, became either a dishwasher or a waiter, and started a press—Pourboire—named for the tips he hoped to make. Pourboire Press, in the form of Peter Kaplan (enfant terrible of the poetry scene is what then–Grolier Poetry Book Shop proprietor Louisa Solano called him) approached the Wastepaper Theatre about publishing an anthology of their productions. He died before he could see it through, but his friends, poets all, made it happen. They also brought Pourboire back to Providence for its last publication, a tribute book under the Pourboire imprint: Pourboire 16: Peter Kaplan’s Book.
In going more deeply into the WTA for this piece, I have gone down so many rabbit holes! So many poets dead and only very faintly, if at all, etched into today! Peter Kaplan’s Book is the deepest hole, hard to want to climb out of. In a way, such a slight book, meant only for its contributors—yet here I am reading and reading. It mentions that Kaplan took part in the Wastepaper Theatre on occasion, but I can’t find his name in the WTA…. On page 47 of the Kaplan book, Robert Francis ends his encomium: “Among the many stories about Peter his encounter with Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank, in the Fishmonger’s Cafe is one that should not be lost sight of.” And then, after some white space, there’s an editor’s note: “This anecdote, certainly one of the most exquisite, appears nowhere in this volume.”[19] Ha. The poet friends who edited Kaplan’s book knew the right balance of setting down facts and letting them disappear…. What I think about the WTA is that it shouldn’t really exist, it’s so odd that it exists. It’s so great and yet the best parts of it speak to what isn’t here.
In memory of Keith Waldrop (1932–2023)
Notes:
[1] Anne Boyer (@anne_boyer_thirteen), Instagram post, February 23, 2023. “Last night’s sky. Realizing that just like journalists have ethical claims to ‘objectivity’ poets have equal ethical claims to ‘subjectivity.’ Which is very funny. Which I dare you to try to explain to a journalist. Which is ‘oh sorry, I have a professional obligation to apprehend what is more tender than fact and more vulnerable than opinion.’ & then to try to explain the infinity of this vs the daily finitude.”
[2] Kevin Killian and David Brazil, “Introduction: Why Poets Theater?” in The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945–1985, eds. Kevin Killian and David Brazil (Chicago: Kenning Editions, 2010), i.
[3] Rosmarie Waldrop et al., “Wastepaper Theatre,” in The Great Wastepaper Theatre Anthology: Das einzige Standardwerk (Providence: Pourboire Press, 1978), 4.
[4] Rosmarie Waldrop, “Remember Gasoline?,” in Waldrop et al., The Great Wastepaper Theatre Anthology, 125.
[5] Rosmarie Waldrop et al., The Great Wastepaper Theatre Anthology, 27.
[6] Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, “The Little Theatre of the Green Goose Has the Honor of Presenting Its Author Wielding a Terrible Pen ‘The Tragic End of Mythology,’” in The Conspiracy of Feelings and The Little Theatre of the Green Goose, ed. and trans. Daniel Gerould (London: Routledge, 2002), 96.
[7] Tadeusz Stefańczyk, “Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński,” Culture.pl, 2006, https://culture.pl/pl/tworca/konstanty-ildefons-galczynski. Cited and translated in Mikołaj Gliński, “The Vices and Virtues of Versemaker Gałczyński,” Culture.pl, December 12, 2013, https://culture.pl/en/article/the-vices-and-virtues-of-versemaker-galczynski.
[8] Antonin Artaud, “The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto),” in The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 99.
[9] Tim Whitmire, “Dying City Rises Again in an Act of Providence,” Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1996, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-04-21-mn-60929-story.html.
[10] Waldrop et al., “Wastepaper Theatre,” 4.
[11] Waldrop et al., “Wastepaper Theatre,” 4.
[12] Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Life Is a Dream, 82–83.
[13] Edwin Honig, “Foreword,” in Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Life Is a Dream, trans. Edwin Honig (New York: Hill & Wang, 1970), ix–x.
[14] Christian Dietrich Grabbe, in Anthology of Black Humor, ed. André Breton, trans. Mark Polizzotti (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), 70.
[15] James E. Schevill to UC President Robert Sproul, October 30, 1950, in “The University Loyalty Oath: A 50th Anniversary Retrospective,” University of California History Project, accessed July 8, 2023, https://www.lib.berkeley. edu/uchistory/archives_exhibits/loyaltyoath/symposium/schevill.html.
[16] Edwin Honig, “Rehearsing Emily Dickinson’s Puppies,” in Waldrop et al., The Great Wastepaper Theatre Anthology, 81–87.
[17] Keith Waldrop, “Hungarian Diversion,” in Waldrop et al., The Great Wastepaper Theatre Anthology, 146–47.
[18] Edwin Honig, “Peter Kaplan, Friend,” in Pourboire 16: Peter Kaplan’s Book, eds. Jaimy Gordon and Ray Ragosta (Providence: Pourboire Press, 1978), 54–55.
[19] Robert Francis, “Peter Kaplan,” in Gordon and Ragosta, Pourboire 16, 47, original italics.