Zippo Songs: Poems From The Front
with Theo Bleckmann

“Zippo Songs [poems from the front] originated when I found out about poems American GIs scratched on their lighters in Vietnam. These inscriptions contain a world of emotion that spoke purely and directly to me without the baggage tag of political commentary. I saw the poems as a vital little body of literature and began to think of a way to work with them as dramatic material, not propaganda.” - Phil Kline.

Zippo Songs (2003) sets texts that American GIs engraved on their Zippo lighters in Vietnam. The songs follow like a harrowing series of haiku, expressing the gamut of emotions young men feel under the threat of imminent oblivion. Alex Ross of The New Yorker calls it “One of the most brutally frank song cycles ever penned.” Recent seasons have included performances at the Detroit Institute of Art, the Kimmel Center, Connecticut College and the Flynn Theatre.

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