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 ...