Bursach: You’re talking about my profession, now.
Chalana: What, neutering cats?
Bursach: Can’t I get up one day, and feel the celebratory power of poetry, without feeling foolish?

Dear friends and supporters,

Sometimes a book arrives in one’s life at the exact right moment. A line arrests you like a message from an unseen angel, with the timing of uncanny coincidence and the power to set you back on the intended course which you did not realize until that moment that you had lost. I remember the first time I encountered Jay Wright’s poetry nine years ago, thanks to Flood Editions and their description of his new book.

Drifting from New Mexico with lawman Elfego Baca to Ricardo Molinari’s Buenos Aires all the way back to ancient Alexandria, Disorientations: Groundings offers an erudite and at times dizzying exploration of our mortal limits. Metaphysical in both content and manner of metaphor, these poems are in constant dialogue with the physical sciences, mathematics, and number theory. The result is a startling, quixotic, and truly original poetry.

In the years since then, it has become apparent that not everyone shares my enthusiasm and admiration for this writing, but at the time, when my copy of the book arrived, I felt, as I still feel, that it opened to a language of immense treasure. The particularities of American geography and historical figures, the lightness of structural allocations to number, the possibility of metaphysical manifestations within the work of metaphor, all spoke of poetry’s most vibrant potentiality. The words and their forms, the ecstatic nature of their challenges and rewards, issued from a truly post-colonial poetry of the Americas; which is also to say, deploying a biconditional logic this poet taught me much later: postcolonial ⇔ precolonial (postcolonial if and only if precolonial); the access to a postcolonial thought constructed of the deepest research into precolonial ritual, image, and geography, contending with the traumas of colonialism as well as its legacy of forced cultural imports and resonant hybridity.

Reading Disorientations: Groundings necessitated turning to earlier works, and in this way I came to The Presentable Art of Reading Absence, from five years prior. The middle of this book-length poem, recounting an epic personal journey or pilgrimage, presents a strangely mathematical encounter with three bullfighters, rendered in the conventions of theater as a complete micro-play. The poetry now performed with dramaturgical complexity. One had to look outside of its frame to grasp it, yet it sang in the strangest harmonies. Every house has a door staged The Three Matadores play in 2017.

With our production, we commenced an ongoing correspondence with Jay and Lois, his wife and literary manager. They attended performances of The Three Matadores at the Knockdown Center in Queens, New York, where Jay joined us on stage at the end for a bow. Judith Leemann took this photo of Jay talking to me and Lin later that night, October 6, 2017.

We soon learned of the many plays that had been variously published in journals or existed unpublished in manuscript form. With the pandemic’s descent and its accompanying quiet, when live performance for a time retreated to a strict remove, certain alternative projects presented themselves. We conceived of a publication to collect the plays and invited Will Daddario as project editor. Will and I had completed our co-written book Pitch and Revelation—Reconfigurations of Reading, Poetry, and Philosophy through the Work of Jay Wright, published through the Three Ecologies imprint of Punctum Books. Now Jay approved our overseeing the publication of his plays, and he proposed a series in three volumes. We approached Kenning Editions, and that respected small press welcomed the collaboration on this first large-scale publication project from Every house. Jay selected the first volume’s six plays, Lois selected the seven plays in the second volume, and a third volume will follow next year (the timing was Will’s idea) of essays by invited writers in response to the plays in the first two volumes. Crisis designed the covers for the series, and this dream project has become a reality.

It makes a so-called difficult writer appear either more difficult or less so when one recognizes that he writes across forms. These plays animate the poetry’s concerns with theatrical flair, choreographing flamboyant characters and labyrinthine dialogue laced with wit, eccentric approaches to stagecraft, the same geography-specific sense of place that might mutate into dream, elasticity of time, a rich musicality of language that regularly undercuts itself with low humor, and a thorough disregard for the self-imposed limits of the stage. The currency of theatrical convention (set, prop, costume, lighting, sound, even conflict) meets unbalancing abstraction in an American grain with vivid echoes of history. The plays often impart a sense of structure on the verge of collapse, which might be a way to say that they suggest improvisation. They speak a language less of metaphysics than of the movement away from it, drawing words back to their everyday use, but in that oscillation leaving a language ghosted by the metaphysics from which it has been drawn and withdrawn. These plays, in their own decisive way, affirm an American writing  radiant with optimism.

On Saturday November 12th we will launch these volumes with a staged reading of the first ten pages of the first play in the first volume, Passage, from which I have excerpted the dialogue at this newsletter’s start. These ten pages required a little dramaturgical research on John Duns Scotus, the medieval philosopher and theologian, the contemporary Mexican writer Francisco Hernández, and a poem in Spanish by Antonio Machado, but I will leave those details for the intrepid. We have assembled performers Jenny Polus, who has contributed music to many Every house performances, Sebastián Calderón Bentin, who appeared as Matador 1 in The Three Matadores, and Kenya Fulton, who often performs under the musical stage name Kao Ra Zen. Lin directs of course. I will read the stage directions and provide a dramaturgical introduction that will not go on too long. Will Daddario will be there to speak about the project as well. We are grateful to present this event at the acclaimed Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery, whose name Jay greeted with delighted laughter when I first spoke it over the telephone, recognizing, as he of course would, the classic boxing reference. The poet cannot be present for the event, since travel from Vermont to Illinois presents even more obstacles than usual for those of us advanced in years. We will know his presence through the dramatic radiance, dedication, and pure affirmation of his words, with their vigilant power to renew those of us with ears attuned to the finest tones that we might receive of our divergent pasts, shared present, and celebratory future.

Matthew Goulish, dramaturg