by Rochelle Ratner
O side by side wild-man rocked
hisself & swallowed a fruit or a flower
a thistle, clover & a vine, a this meat or that
fish, a that water & this wine, all the nature of
nature He SAW in his trance
it swirled
in his spleen
it whirled
in his gut
it skipped
in his blood
it whacked
in his fat
it shook in
his lymph
it stank in
his piss
it laughed
in his grease
it jumped in
his pus
it kissed his
marrow &
grimaced at
his sorrow
it sneered
& howled
at the origin
of the world
& so on & so forth!
where is the wealth?
is it a moth? my body Act? my own
strange light? my hair? my food
in my Holy Digestive Tract? my peacefulness?
my snot? my sighs
my eyes? my spit?
my all things my
pure self?
Also an accomplished playwright, Owens shows her sense of action in the
motion of the poems on the page. For her, the creation of a voice means that
the new voice must be free to wander about, with each persona's impulsive
character demonstrated in part by his or her mobility. Lines weave back and
forth, for brief periods becoming regular, as in the end of the whirling
dervish ceremony, where the speaker is centered on his own ground, the voice
almost tender compared to the hard-edged and often erotic images which began
the poem. It's the tender moments in these poems, or certain whole poems,
such as #35 or #47 in The Joe Chronicles, which I feel show Owens at her
best:
I remember first
your nose-jewel
glinting
like the ruby rain blood
of the crucifix
sit across
from me
& the heart
will tremble
from the grin
of king lugalannemundu
Book One introduces "Wild-Man" and "Wild-Woman"; the next two volumes move the personae into a somewhat higher consciousness, the archetypes made flesh. He is transformed into King Lugalannemundu in Book Two and she becomes Shemuel in Book Three, both personae molded on biblical figures. Here we are set squarely in the civilized world of pride and ownership, of man imitating God. In The Joe Chronicles man merely followed nature; now there is a knowledge of mystical traditions: Kabbalah, alchemy, homeopathy, Egyptian and Babylonian creation texts, the Old Testament, etc. Owens is relating an esoteric shorthand that the reader could easily overlook, as in her continual use of the phrase Evil Yezer (her translation of the Hebrew yetzer hara, or evil impulse) which she says is "just killjoy Frightening us". Even without a complete understanding, the poems have an increasing power and a very definite humor.
The final part of Book One brings an unexpected digression: the death of the Father, and the beginning of Knowledge. The innocence gone, this section approaches grief, albeit still from the primitive perspective. The theme will be picked up only slightly, at the beginning of the second volume where King Lugalannemundu notes that "today/I Am A Man" (shades of the Bar-Mitzvah declaration) and later in the same poem: "Not for a while have you/Stopped Sucking/the tits of the Angel of Death". In a creation sequence, such as this is, it is hard to escape the implication that this imagery is meant to represent the symbolic death of God. But it does not seem powerful enough; the concept of Father as human is stronger. The one poem which attempts to relate to "a primitive/Name/Elohim" is weak compared to poems which surround it. Also, there was no acknowledgment of a God-figure earlier in The Joe Chronicles; Wild-Man seemed to work under the assumption that he created himself.
Both King Lugalannemundu and Shemuel are reasoning creatures, even if their reasoning is at times more ironic than was their innocence. King Lugalannemundu is from "a good class", linked at one point to the biblical King David. He is a Christian boy or a prince from Guyana, born for the joys of this world; he loves carp and red beets. We see him courting various women -- lover and poem joined by the desire to transform him (and at the same time themselves and each other). The poem is the breath in his throat. But above all this is a man, any man, in search of himself:
I affirm God
or a Peacock with a mark
Even birds sow Wild Oats
joyfully
in Public Schools
without Any snobbery
Sometimes I bounce
With High Praise, the best
clothes alter my course
one word Makes Me Poetical
the first line of My
Self is a Heavenly trumpet
to the atmosphere the
Strength of a ship lying
against peril the stomach
of earth Ripe & the last
punishment Single-handed
a meat-axe in the dark
like Shakespeare Hungry
for New words & the Same
old King Lugalannemundu
a good fellow a rhyming
hyena doing one thing &
Saying another.
King Lugalannemundu is a sexual deviant, "making woo" with animals, men, and
all sorts of women, but even in these deviations he emerges as the ironic
innocent (one thinks here of Owens' masterful play, Futz) . In the
final third of the book, King Lugalannemundu falls in love with a Greek woman
at the supermarket, who turns out to be Demeter. The last four poems are in
her voice, and she chooses to end on the triumphant note of having deceived
this believing king. It is perhaps Demeter in another incarnation, the wise peasant woman (in Book Two she was the broom-maker's wife), who speaks as Shemuel in Book Three. Presenting an even more marked contrast between the biblical period and the present day, Shemuel is the queen and temple prostitute whose shrine is Woolworth's. The book's refrains are "he hit her & she hit him", depicting the violence of the working-class, and the plight of the brutalized, often pregnant, woman. Shemuel, though, is far from defenseless.
Owens never lets us forget that she's a woman in the midst of 20th century America. This works better in some poems than in others, and on the whole is much more natural to the poems in Shemuel than it is in The Joe Chronicles. While many of the poems in this volume are in the third person, it is the poems directly from Shemuel's lips which stand out for their lyric qualities. Her voice is more memorable than was King Lugalannemundu's in Book Two, perhaps because Shemuel is the latter of the two books, or because the female voice has forced Owens to speak more directly in a rhythm approaching her own voice.
It is only in Shemuel that "Joe" is given a concrete (if temporary) form -- he is G. I. Joe, the American hero. So we see that Owens, despite the extended persona, could not avoid political issues for long. G. I. Joe is a superb choice, considering the brutality which forms the structure of this book, and the whole concept of Wild-Man and Wild-Woman made real. Descendant of the Hebrews, these two aboriginals live in modern America side by side with the idol-worshiping men from Uz and the children of Ishmael. ("Joe's city is new york," she tells us in #64). In describing the city without God, and in attempting to warn the people to change their ways, Shemuel becomes the prophet. "Make my poems into prayers," King Lugalannemundu says. For Owens, one cannot be a poet unless he is also a psalmist or holy singer.
The Joe Chronicles are far from completed, and they have increasingly opened themselves to the influences of the current time. Owens herself has physically left New York City, and the movement through time and history which her personae have already established should permit them a parallel mobility. It will be interesting to see how they (or their descendants -- as King Lugalannemundu and Shemuel are descendants of Wild-Man and Wild-Woman) will reflect our times, and establish themselves in their preordained roles, as the volumes continue. Owens is slowly but surely developing a major work in several volumes of the nature and scope of Pound's Cantos or Olson's Maximus.
An earlier draft of this essay appeared as a chapter of Trying To Understand What It Means To Be A Feminist by Rochlle Ratner, Contact II Press, 1984.
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Copyright © 1984 and 1996 by Rochelle Ratner.
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