What a strange response! May your own life's work be dismissed so
cavalierly by those who don't bother to read it.

For the record, Owens has been accused of a lot of things, but never of
political correctness.

Mark

At 04:30 PM 6/2/2001 -0400, Frederick Pollack wrote:
>Mark Weiss wrote:
>>
>> In furtherance of my shameless pursuit of book sales, the following from
>> Marjorie Perloff:
>>
>> INTRODUCTION to Rochelle Owens' _Luca: Discourse on Life and Death_
>>
>> In 1919 Marcel Duchamp bought on the Rue de Rivoli a cheap postcard
>> reproduction of the Mona Lisa and decided to give Leonardo's famous
>> enigmatic face a black-penciled mustache, curling up at the corners, and a
>> neat small goatee. Underneath the portrait Duchamp inscribed the letters
>> LHOOQ, a sequence which, read aloud in French, equals elle a chaud au cul
>> (she has a hot ass). But his was not just a crude joke; as he explained it
>> many years later, "The curious thing about that mustache and goatee is that
>> when you look at the Mona Lisa it becomes a man. It is not a woman
>> disguised as a man; it is a real man, and that was my discovery, without
>> realizing it at the time."
>> Here Duchamp implies playfully what Freud, in his famous study
of Leonardo
>> da Vinci, took very seriously–namely the artist's latent homosexuality. In
>> both cases the model herself (a local merchant's wife) is seen as mere
>> object–"the occasion for these ruses," to use Frank O'Hara's phrase in "In
>> Memory of My Feelings." And of course art historians have taken this object
>> status as given: Ernst Gombrich, for example, argues that the universal
>> appeal of the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile may be attributed to "Leonardo's
>> famous invention which the Italians call sfumato–the blurred outline and
>> mellow colors that allow one form to merge with another and always leave
>> something to the imagination."
>> Indeed, the painting's sfumato does leave something to the
imagination,
>> and in her brilliantly inventive Luca: Discourse on Life and Death Rochelle
>> Owens has imaginatively recreated Mona Lisa from multiple perspectives,
>> including Mona Lisa's own.
>> Owens' is a profound meditation on how Leonardo's painting–the very
>> epitome of Renaissance art–was really produced and disseminated, and what
>> the process meant to the women (Mona and her friend Flora, who appears in
>> so many of Leonardo's works) as well as the children who served as models
>> for Jesus and St. John the Baptist in various paintings. Owens'
>> "narrative"–which is complexly disjunctive, weaving in and out of
>> Renaissance Florence, our own time, and the more distant past of
>> pre-Columbian cultures–circles around three characters: "Lenny" (Leonardo)
>> the artist/scientist, the artist's model Mona Lisa, referred to here as
>> Mona or "La Gioconda" ("the smiling woman"), as the painting is also
>> called, and Siggy or Sigmund Freud, whose rationalist analysis destroys the
>> heart and soul of the culture it "murders to dissect." In the course of the
>> narrative Mona and Flora become part of a larger company of women,
>> especially poor women from various Indian tribes, who continue to be
>> oppressed in the Americas of the present:
>>
>> Leo na r do had not heard you you answer
>> correctly you calculate the edge reflect
>>
>> Reflect on the sketch
>>
>> of Indian women
>>
>> The conjunction of time frames and situations makes for a bravura
>> performance–that rare long poetic sequence that holds the reader's
>> attention from beginning to end even though it is by no means a linear
>> narrative.
>> Just as Marx will never seem the same after one reads Owens'
Karl Marx
>> Play (1973), so "Lenny" emerges as a complex character, obsessed with
>> anatomy and hence the dissection of cadavers, much taken with young boys,
>> alternately giggly and abstracted–and always consumed by his work. Sigmund
>> is his alter ego–hard, cold, "triumphantly smil[ing] on reading / a
>> pathological review of a great man." In "The First Person," for example, we
>> read:
>>
>> you said
>> the smile of Gioconda floats upon
>>
>> her features you hook your neck
>> pursing your lips saturate your dry
>> eyelids with oil and very lightly
>>
>> brush in this preherstory widening
>> your fibrous memory
>>
>> This passage gives us a good idea of the diction and tone that
distinguish
>> Luca from most poetry written today. Owens' theme, here as in The Joe Poems
>> or Futz, is that of violation–the violation of one person's space by those
>> who want to control or absorb it, who will not let it be. Freud's "fibrous
>> memory" won't let the Leonardo story be; he has to explain childhood
>> memories as homosexual fantasies and find explanatory mechanisms for the
>> artist's sublimation. But Owens doesn't relate these things
>> dispassionately: in her macabre vision Freud is seen "hook[ing] [his] neck"
>> and, in a horrific image, "saturating [his] dry/ eyelids with oil."
>> Owens does not shrink from the violence and horror she finds
everywhere
>> around her and which she projects back, most convincingly, into what was
>> supposed to be, according to Burckhardt and Berenson, the ordered and
>> measured world of Renaissance Florence. This poet enters her narrative and
>> calls the shots as she sees them:
>>
>> At times it seemed
>> to her she looked like other women
>> wearing a baffled look her brain
>> retained an image the very long
>> teeth due to gum deterioration her
>>
>> exhaling suddenly looking in the
>> middle instead holding her head to the
>> side.
>>
>> The sardonic suggestion that Mona Lisa's fabled smile is the
result of gum
>> deterioration is characteristic of Owens' x-ray vision. Her packed, heavily
>> accented free verse erupts like a volcano, as in this description, early in
>> the poem, of Mona's illness:
>>
>> Thin body of fiber
>>
>> Desperately sick for want
>> of a cleaner wound the woman followed
>> Mona's orders as if there is any
>> doubt water salt sugar protein
>>
>> potassium calcium urinate spon-
>>
>> taneously then the exposed & opened
>> entire lens would rupture the rule
>> in most cases the patient adjusts
>> following this three to
>>
>> seven fine sutures of silk or dog-gut.
>>
>> Notice the strange collision of highly concrete nouns as in
lines 5-6
>> above, with the indeterminacy of reference produced by syntactic ellipsis
>> and a quirky absence of punctuation. In lines 8-9 one expects a period
>> after "rupture," and the next phrase should read, "the rule / in most cases
>> [is that] the patient adjusts, / following this three to seven fine sutures
>> of silk or dog-gut." And even the adjectival modifier here is non-sensical.
>> A surgeon might say, "Give him three to seven sutures" or "He will need
>> three to seven sutures," but in what situation would one say, "following
>> this three to seven fine sutures?" If one knew that Y followed X one would
>> not be in the uncertainty about X that is registered here. And sound
>> repetition tells the same story. The predominant sound is that of
>> syllables ending with an emphatic /t/ stop: want, salt, protein, urinate/
>> potassium, rupture, patient, sutures, dog-gut. The poet's voice fairly
>> chokes as it vividly recounts the many threads of the Mona/Flora
>> story–threads that come together later in the poem when the Renaissance
>> motifs are seen through an Aztec prism–words like "Aztec" and "Tlaloc"
>> reinforcing the sound structure of the earlier passages and ironizing the
>> claims of the conquistadores, whose plunder of American soil parallels
>> Lenny's earlier plunder of the very bodies and souls of his female models
>> in the interest of anatomical study as well as the art of painting.
>> Rochelle Owens' writing, here as elsewhere, is sui generis. She
is, in
>> many ways, a proto-language poet, her marked ellipses, syntactic oddities,
>> and dense and clashing verbal surfaces recalling the long poems of Bruce
>> Andrews and Ron Silliman. But Owens is angrier, more energetic, and more
>> assertive than most of her Language counterparts, male and female, and she
>> presents herself as curiously non-introspective. Hers is a universe of
>> stark gesture, lightning flash, and uncompromising judgement: it is
>> imperative, in her poetic world, to face up to the horror, even as the
>> point of view is flexible enough to avoid all dogmatism.
>> Immensely learned, sophisticated, and witty in its conceits, this
>> Discourse on Life and Death demands two kinds of reading. First, it should
>> be read through from beginning to end as if it were a novel; in this
>> instance, our concern is with character and the interchange between people,
>> and we watch carefully as Mona and Flora and the children evolve before our
>> eyes.
>> But a second reading is required to note the poem's
microstructure–its
>> superb modulation of rhythms and internal rhymes, its ironies and
>> paradoxes. It is the layering of cultures and especially of myths,
>> including our own contemporary myths of the Great Creative Genius (always
>> male), creating beauty out of the detritus around him, that makes Luca so
>> distinctive. Watch out, Owens seems to be saying, for those high-minded
>> claims and take another look at the evidence of actual life–"a stream of
>> molten lava burning," "doses of nitrogen muscle saliva," or even "the
>> seams/ of a discarded wallet."
>> Owens has no easy answers for the pain and sorrow she presents
for our
>> contemplation, but her insistent questioning is itself a gift.
>> Marjorie Perloff
>>
>
>Oh God I hate this guilt-ridden guilt-mongering politically-correct
>self-righteous unhistorical genetic-fallacied tendentious whining
>garbage.
>