Craft: V.R. Lang
V.R. “Bunny” Lang (Violet Ranney) (1924-56) was a New York School poet and playwright, and close friend of Frank O’Hara’s. In the early 1950s she staged several plays at the Poets’ Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, including Fire Exit (1952) and I Too Have Lived in Arcadia (1954), and starred in Frank O’Hara’s Try! Try! (1951). O’Hara mentions her in numerous poems, and she was a feature of the cultural and aesthetic world his poems evoke. Her circle included Edward Gorey, John Ashbery, Joan Mitchell, Jane Freilicher, Robert Bly, Gregory Corso, and Mary Manning Howe (Susan and Fanny’s mother). A new edition of her selected poems, The Miraculous Season, has just been published by New York Review Books.
Lang grew up in a patrician Boston family and was the youngest of six sisters. She went to the University of Chicago, but left in 1942 to join the Canadian Women’s Army Corps, then returned and became editor of the Chicago Review. However, she dropped out before graduating and instead did a variety of work as a bridal
