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
