In this selection of plays, Jesse Glass‘ imagination rages, leaps and staggers from the Challenger disaster of 1986 to the hallucinated lucubrations of Thomas Holley Chivers (friend and rival of Edgar Allan Poe), and manages to cover the arrival of a cosmic, sexual vermiform lemure of the Kabbalistic Bohu-Tohu in a reportorial manner worthy of Philip Glass on N.P.R., while ringing the changes on a young man’s sexual angst in the face of the ambiguities of the Summerland.  Visionary, gutteral, Artaudian, relentless, filled with the televised promise of a black & white yesterday and the anguished cry of tomorrow‘s  prize-winning Flamenco singer, Glass' plays disengage, disencumber, debride, devour and deflower even while they detonate on the Senecan tongue in the midst of intoning.  They scale their own Everests, plant their own flags, and play Stanley to the Livingstone of our bugeoning post-post-post-post-modrnity.

 

I enjoyed your elvishly weird play ["Dove Hunting"] in 'Grimoire VI.'  Very haunting and Magical.

—Helen Adam

"A rabid and venereal imagination...."

—Herbert Blau, author of Blooded Thought and The Impossible Theater.


“The central, vital paradox of theatre,” wrote poet/playwright James Schevill, “is that it is both the most social and the most rebellious of the arts.” The disunifying principle of these astonishing plays is collage—what Jerome Rothenberg called “the defining art form of the twentieth century.” Jesse Glass understands that it is only in the play and collision of disparate elements that we may be led beyond “thought” into thinking. These works, which the author calls “screams,” are attempts—in the words of the ironically-named character, Faustus—to allow us to “walk unchained across the surface of the earth.” Who but a poet would have thought to write a play that sends Edgar Allan Poe’s friend Thomas H. Chivers—Poe called him “one of the best and one of the worst poets in America”—up your spine! These "Four Plays" are foreplay to what? To the pleasure of knowing something you didn’t know before, to the revelation of spirit amid the vast clatter of “history.”

—Jack Foley


Diminished by the unforgiving landscapes of hyperreal America, trapped inside the fantastical laboratory of one Edgar Allan Poe, outrageous, ultrasexual and blunt, Jesse Glass’ characters emerge from darkness like a procession of lost souls in a Fellini movie.  A medium, a forgotten man, an aspiring poet, a little girl conserved in alcohol – one by one they detach themselves from the page, alive with the hope of a new world order, uncertain about the future – theirs, ours – waiting for a  crash, a war, a revolution, anything that might remove them from the eternal present of their discontent. Reminiscent of Beckett’s tramps, Pinter’s intruders and Edward Bond’s violent offenders, Glass’ characters face us unapologetically, bleeding from the head, engaged in battles with demons of their own making – memorable, angry, raw.

—Dayana Stetco

"These plays were written over three decades, but sound as though exhaled in a single furnace blast. The blast is Mission Control explaining to America's Favorite School Teacher why she must be immolated in a space ship for the corporatocracy. It's Poe's emanated astral self dictating a coded travelogue of Hell through the porthole of a labia-pink coffin, and King Worm being hailed erect on his golden throne in Bohu Tohu. What we hear, of course, is the blast of Jesse Glass. He has the lyricism of a sociopath, the invention of a polymath, and the pipes of some horrendous chthonian bully deity."

—Tom Bradley, author of Vital Fluid and Put it Down in a Book


"It's a travesty of special importance that we no longer have Jesse Glass in our hemisphere.  But maybe it takes his visionary eye to catch, from 6,000 miles away--and fix for all time-- the blur in the encaustic of our esemplastic Zeitgeist.  In these plays, like an ax, a whip, striking intelligence renders what it splits.  Poe. Chivers. The Man on the Street.  The Man in the Top Hat.  The Challenger high above the memory of what once was America.  Jesse Glass.  (All hail this new Sir Render!) To (quest)ion is to read."

—Jared Schickling

 

“resting comfortably beneath her stone” STOP infomercial for Son of Sam STOP “I’ll spit in my palms and their dicks will fall off” STOP Altzheimer’s as witness STOP “THE OLD WOMAN IS TALKING BABY TALK TO THE DEAD MAN ON THE FLOOR” STOP teaservice full of bloody clouds STOP the suspicion, nuanced as the grave, that desire has been wrongly, even insanely, configured STOP a lunatic tossing off into the genius’s skull in the name of “got’s what’s comin’!” STOP “This guy’s a waste of tissue” STOP bark! bark! bark! bark! bark! STOP the nightmare you swore you’d not remember STOP cradle sprung from verge STOP “They are learning the relationship of the individual to the state” STOP Your sandbox buddy grown tire irons and an attitude that would fry Dillinger’s nuts STOP “the bleeding will never stop” STOP a phallic aria against the starless maw STOP her casket pours into his skull, its alcohol miming angel souls in obvious display STOP what’s not going away

—Skip Fox

 

“The bizzaro plays of Jesse Glass abound with enigmatic operatic worms, Jesus McThology, corn songs, the neo-clones of Edgar Allan Poe, praise for dismemberment, brains pickled in alcohol, and ultimately, the mad dog flames of the Incinerated Horse Universe. Lost Poetis a pure readable funtasm that focuses on relationships—between humans, shadows, the Meatwheel turning in the sky. In short, this book understands the nature of spontaneous combustion—so watch out, human: it might just explode in your hands!”

—Mark Spitzer

 

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A native of Carroll County, Maryland, Jesse Glass now makes his home in Tokyo, where he teaches American literature and history at Meikai (Bright Sea) University. His books include Gaha Noas Zorge (New Sins Press, 2009), and The Passion of Phineas Gage & Selected Poems (West House/ Ahadada, 2006.) Praised by Geraldine Monk, Jerome Rothenberg, Michael Heller, William Bronk, and other major voices of contemporary experimental poetry, Glass is an internationally acclaimed performer of his own work and features prominently at Penn Sound, Ubu Web, and in dozens of other anthologies and magazines devoted to “the sweet science.“ He is currently developing a puppetry and poetry theater with the aid of his students. Glass‘ literary manuscripts are archived in Special Collections at the University of Maryland Libraries, College Park and ten of his hand-made, painted books are in the collection of the Tate Gallery, London..