James Penzi (born July 17, 1952) is an American poet and playwright. Difficult to classify, he is loosely associated with neo-surrealism, concrete poetry, lyrical mysticism and the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets. He was drawn to the work of such diverse contemporaries as Susan Howe, Frank Samperi, Jeremy Reed, Paul Auster and Alfred Starr Hamilton. His poetic influences include Mallarmé, Paul Celan and Andre DuBouchet. In playwriting, he was a student of Jacov Lind, Maurice Maeterlinck, August Strindberg and Jean Genet. Other influences in his artistic approach were Heraclitus, Jakob Boehme, Michel Butor, as well as such painters as Forrest Bess and Giorgio Morandi, and, in music, the work and theories of Alexander Scriabin.
Biography
editPenzi was born in Philadelphia to a single mother, Florence Lucas, who worked in a factory and had not gone beyond the seventh grade. Penzi has described his own education as “self-inflicted.” Although he studied Classical Greek and linguistics by sitting-in on classes at the University of Pennsylvania, the only accredited college class he attended was a 2-credit course on “German Art & Film of Berlin in the 1920’s.” In 1982, he received the Lila Acheson Wallace fellowship to Juilliard – one of six awarded nationwide for the first playwriting section at the Juilliard School. He later received an accredited BA through college level equivalency exams and by applying his non-accredited fellowship along with his “life experiences” (publication credits and productions) towards college credits. In 1993, despite any formal academic education, he was accepted into Temple School of Law in Philadelphia, graduating in 1996. There, he was Articles Editor on the Temple International & Comparative Law Journal and published “Libel Actions in England: A Game of Truth or Dare? Considering the Recent. Upjohn Cases and the Consequences of ‘Speaking Out.’” He also was the recipient of the Robert E. Lamberton Award in Constitutional Law as well as other distinctions.
Around 1992, he ceased writing and entered law school.
Writing Style
editIn his poetry, he attempted a synesthesia of art forms and thought. His poems were written as open portals, fluid not fixed, with words used for properties other than their meaning, and structured ultimately in his later work as a mobile rather than linear form allowing for multiple readings and a communion of the subjective and objective, the author and the reader.
“Salt Fever” (1976) reflected a neo-surrealistic style that later evolved to an evocative lyricism in “Scene/s in Bk & Wht” (1982) and then into a minimalist mysticism in “C(AIR)NS,” (1984) poems that were set to music by composer Glenn Branca. His last manuscript, “Runes,” (1982?) was never published. Although unpublished, the manuscript can be found in the archives of the Sun & Moon Press, the Charles Bernstein, and/or Susan Howe papers at the University of San Diego. His poems had been published in numerous small press periodicals and literary journals, including Mundus Artium (Univ. of Texas), kayak, Montana Gothic, Caligula Press (England), Contact II, among others.
Addressing the difference between poetry and plays, he wrote, “Poetry is God speaking to man; playwriting is man speaking to God.” His plays are the linear balance to his poetry and both, together and separately, illustrate his artistic struggle towards a Oneness.
As a playwright, he had ‘gophered’ at the Actor’s Studio as an assistant to Israel Horowitz who headed the playwrights’ lab. He later was awarded the Lila Acheson Wallace fellowship in Playwriting at the Juilliard School. Subsequently, he was invited into the playwrights’ group of the Circle Repertory Company for his first one-act play, “The Weather Report.” After writing his first full-length play, “The Gentlemen of Fifth Avenue,” he was accepted for representation by International Creative Management where he described himself as a “little fish in a big, muddy pond.”
His plays revolved around the theme of disconnectedness. “The Gentlemen of Fifth Avenue” (1983) was about the hermetic, interdependent Collyer brothers who were found in their Fifth Avenue mansion dead among 140 tons of debris; it was accepted by the Philadelphia Drama Guild for its Playwrights of Philadelphia (POP) Festival. It was also one of three plays selected for the [[Old Globe of San Diego’s Best New Plays Festival, a national competition. His second full-length play, “Doesn’t The Sky Look Green Today?” (1985), a play about a doomed ménage a trois, was a semi-finalist in the FDG/CBS new plays competition. “Double Solitaire” and “The Wife of Diego Rivera,” neither of which were produced, followed. “Double Solitaire,” loosely based on a true story, was about adolescent Bahamian twins living in England, communicating as one, yet struggling with asserting their own identities before tragically facing criminal charges for murder. “The Wife of Diego Rivera” was a play about Frida Kahlo. All his plays explored the outsider theme. Some of his plays can be found in the Billy Rose Theatre Division of New York Public Library in the “Inventory of the Circle Repertory Company Records, 1965-1996 and the Guide to Lucille Lortel Papers, 1902-2000.
He received story credit for a horror film, “Night of the Demons 2” – a cult classic series created by screenwriter Joe Augustyn, with whom he also collaborated on another script, “Beautiful Dreamer.”
Personal Life
editJames Penzi presently lives in Philadelphia where he practices law.