Rochelle Owens: Fragmentations and Unifications of Vision

Rochelle Owens has made a name for herself for her avant-garde plays and her poetry which take the reader into uncomfortable territory of taboo, flesh, violation, body fluids, and life.  The graphic nature of her imagery has been the “shiny object” that generally captures the critic’s attention, and unfortunately the sometimes shocking nature sometimes blinds them to the work’s philosophical complexity and her subtle commentary on how we see reality, beingness, and becoming in a world that contains intersections of imaging technology and the body / person herself.

Hermaphropoetics: Drifting Geometries is a collection of poems describing a series of stills in videos depicting the same object (a person).  To summarize, Hermaphropoetics is about the fragmentation of unity and/or the deconstruction or deliberate disassembling of unity.

The various poems illustrate how there are many ways to see the same thing. Owens takes a series of still photos that comprise a video and describes them individually. However she does not say where exactly they fit within that series of images. Observing one still after the other creates a historical continuum from the first videographers, the Lumiere Brothers, to today’s high-tech videographers. Rochelle’s emphasis on the fragmentation of video and the dissolution of a recorded event also brings to mind today’s more or less omnipresence video making abilities in the form of smart phones.  We are reminded that the technology has made us tend to forget that video still is a series of single frame images.

The parallel with language is clear. Language creates a reality and the words (parole) are the individual stills. Take them out of sequence and the reality they create is mediated – always – by the reader / audience.  On a cellular level we like to think that the raw images create reality.

Rochelle Owens shows us that once you stop the flow  - image after image after image, you suddenly find yourself unable to actually connect with the reality until you place it within a narrative which by definition includes language. That language does not necessarily have to be verbal but there is a language nonetheless.

So Owens considers video stills. We can say that they must exist in a certain order to gel into meaning(s). The stills constitute the words and the parole of the grammar of visual discourse.

The sequence of video stills demonstrates that all meaning is in essence a construct that is constantly being deconstructed and reconstructed.

The repetitions of images are like incantations. They rip open and expose the heart and a sense of life. When Rochelle discusses exposed flesh she’s also talking about the private laid bare in the raw, painful moments where one is subjected to the indignity of the gaze.

The camera is invasive. It creates in the subject a profound level of humiliation that has to do with one’s autonomy. The individual in fact is a being, and that beingness is suddenly stripped away and placed in the hands of the individual who has the capability of ordering the series for sequences of images and also to create a narrative that describes what is happening.

In addition to creating sequences, Rochelle Owens creates fragments and in doing so reveals how it is possible to cast the meaning-making process into indeterminacy.

In doing so, she seizes upon the nature of what it is to create art. There is the artifice of becoming and the frames seem to be becoming something, but the frames can never become anything without the reader’s externally imposed narrative.

We crave explanations and we want a sense of the whole but the parts do not and cannot add up because the video stills that come together to make a narrative are inadequate to keep the mind of the post-postmodern reader in a single track.

The objectification of that frozen moment of death, nakedness, vulnerability and exposure is what Rochelle Owens has created.  Owens's avant-garde plays and poetry have always had a way of making reader feel vulnerable and awkward. On one level, that emotional response is in part about the process of coming to grips with indeterminacy.

The camera is in essence the technology of object-making. The accompanying consumption occurs by creating the tools by which the reader enters and then slowly moves into a state of self-fragmentation. Self-fragmentation is painful at first, but after 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 repetitions profound desensitization occurs and one enters into almost an almost trance-like state.

Each camera technique offers its own slow trajectory. Life’s puzzle pieces are meaningless when scattered out of order. Repetition, despite J Hillis Miller and his notion that there is no meaning without repetition, does not necessarily hold water. Simple repetition does not make meaning. Patterns are patterns.

The assignation of value that is to assign value to the pattern -  whether denotative or aesthetic - is arbitrary. Nevertheless, there can be a sense of urgency if the pattern has some kind of consequence in the phenomenal world, such as being run over by a car or the likelihood of certain aggressive behaviors of dangerous people.

Rochelle Owens shows the absolute arbitrariness of life force elements that we generally consigned to the sacred.

Reference

Owens, Rochelle. Hermaphropoetics: Drifting Geometries. San Diego: Singing Horse Press, 2017. 173 pages. ISBN: 978-0-9356-58-5

Interview with Anne Higgins, Author of Reconnaissance (Texture Press, 2014)

Poetry connects to readers in many ways, and the sources of inspiration can come from experiences, ideas, relationships, and emotions. Welcome to an interview with Anne Higgins, whose latest book, Reconnaissance, has just been published by Texture Press. As sample of her work can be found here.

What is your name, and your primary occupation / avocation(s)?

Anne Higgins. My primary occupation is teaching.  I’ve been teaching English for roughly 40 years, from middle school level through college. My avocation is writing poetry and watching birds.  I also have a religious vocation; at the age of 30 I joined a religious community, the Daughters of Charity.

Anne Higgins 

Anne Higgins in 1970 - Ireland

Anne Higgins in 1978 as a novitiate

 What are some of your thoughts about the role of poetry in today's society?

It’s ever ancient, ever new. Today’s society needs it for the inner life. I agree with William Carlos Williams when he said “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

How do you see poetry in relation to other discourses?

It has equal importance, though not many think so.

What do you consider to be the difference between poetry and poetics?

Poetics is the study of the way poetry is written; poetry is the work itself.

How would you describe your own sense of poetics?

I would describe it the way literary theorist Jonathan Culler does: Poetics is the study of linguistic techniques in poetry; it’s concerned with the understanding of how a text's different elements come together and produce certain effects on the reader.

I have never studied literary theory per se: my study of poetry (back in the sixties) focused on form criticism, and I am still mostly interested in the words and how they are put together in the poem.

Your recent book is Reconnaissance.  What would you like a reader to know about it?  How would you like readers to read the text(s)?  What kinds of interpretive strategies / meaning-making processes would you recommend?  How can the work make connections with readers?

I titled the book Reconnaissance, because to me the word means “to know again.”  One of the dictionary definitions is:  preliminary survey to gain information; especially : an exploratory military survey of enemy territory. From the  French, literally, recognition.

So the poems are about knowing things again; especially, seeing things with new eyes.

I am a lover of spy novels, especially the work of John Le Carre. Because of the underlying motif of surveillance that the word reconnaissance implies, I used words associated with spies and spying for the divider pages: Binoculars, Debriefing Magritte, Interrogations, and Safe House.

Magritte - Girl Eating Bird

The title of the book also comes from a painting from Rene Magritte: Le Reconnaissance Infinie.  The wonderful and ingenious cover was created by Arlene Ang, incorporating the sky from the Magritte painting, framed by a camera lens, and visited by a “hated housefly” from my poem “Like the Eyes of Insects.”

 

Le Reconnaissance Infinie

I try to write accessible poems, though I know some of the ones in this book are more riddle-like.  I love to play with words, and would encourage readers to just play along with me. Readers should also be able to connect with many of the subjects of the poems: traffic, aging, illness, families, etc.

Magritte - Companions of Fear

 Most of the poems are open form, but I did include one sestina – the one about the terrible fire in Our Lady of the Angels elementary school in Chicago in the 1950’s.

Fire at Our Lady of the Angels elementary school - 1950s

Please describe what you would consider to be your prevailing philosophy of life.

To me, life is full of mystery , synchronicity, and irony. 

MOOCs for Creative Writing: Interview with Lynn Levin

MOOCs for creative writing require innovative instructional strategies, and textbooks that combine prompts, examples, and flowcharts. Certain presses (such as Texture Press) are making innovative textbooks available, in both as a free e-book (Writing for Human Relations), and at low-cost printed format (Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets). Welcome to an interview with Lynn Levin, Drexel University, and co-author with Valerie Fox, with Poems for the Writing. 

  
1. What is your name and your relationship to writing and writing instruction?

My name is Lynn Levin, and I teach a variety of English classes at Drexel University and creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. I am principally a poet and have published four collections of poems, most recently Miss Plastique (Ragged Sky Press, 2013), and a craft-of-poetry textbook, Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets, with co-author Valerie Fox (Texture Press, 2013). My previous poetry collections are Fair Creatures of an Hour (Loonfeather Press, 2009), Imaginarium (Loonfeather Press, 2005), and A Few Questions about Paradise (Loonfeather Press, 2000). My poems have appeared in Boulevard, Ploughshares, The Hopkins Review, and other journals. I also write creative nonfiction, fiction, and I am a literary translator of poetry (mostly from Spanish, sometimes from French).

2.  How do you view the process of writing?

I view the process of writing as a series of promising starts which often turn out to be false starts, which are hopefully followed by restarts, some of which gain purchase on the page and eventually lead to a finished poem, essay, or story. When I have a work in progress, I feel most alive...even with all those starts, false starts, and restarts.

3. What are some of the approaches that you have found yield interesting writing?

More than anything, reading the work of others leads to better writing and better thinking. I also believe in capturing random observations and turns of phrase that fly into my mind when I least expect them. Many of those airy notions may trigger poems and stories. It is also true that a majority of these ideas do not retain the charm I first saw in them, but some do blossom. I also stand guilty of failing to revisit many of my numerous jottings.

In another way, I find poetry prompts to be immensely helpful. They nudge me out of my usual ways of building poems. The prompts in Poems for the Writing do that for me, and, I hope, for other poets, too. They help me experiment with new ways of organizing, rearranging, or shopping for thoughts.

4. What do you consider to be “interesting” or “effective” in writing—and why does it matter?

I value the idea of making the familiar seem strange. It goes along with conveying a sense of wonder or marvel at the world. When it comes to making a literary work effective and interesting, I think of strangeness and wonder. But there’s also the human or moral level. A writer has to show compassion to his or her characters. Strangeness isn’t everything.

I have also become more aware of the importance of the beginning of the poem or the first sentences of a prose piece. The beginning establishes a voice that propels the rest of the work.

5. When, how, and why is creative self-expression important in today’s social media world, where almost all voices are likely to be drowned out or simply be a part of the general tsunami of texts, images, and voices?

That’s a great question. It does seem harder and harder for an individual artist of any genre to stand out in the welter.

Creative self-expression is thriving. Now that so many people are blogging, that is, publishing their own journals of opinion, there’s more to read than ever. It’s overwhelming. Twitter, Facebook, and all those other social media sites that I haven’t discovered are part of the same phenomenon. It’s like there are six billion media channels out there. Everyone’s crying, “Read me!” Yes, certainly voices will be drowned out. On the other hand, so many people are writing thoughtful, insightful, and witty pieces. I would never want anyone to quit writing just because of the huge wave of other voices. But then, whom should one read?

This brings up the phenomenon of narrow-casting or friend-casting (as opposed to broadcasting). I hear that audiences are becoming more and more compartmentalized. For example, a lot of people get their news from their Facebook and Twitter feeds, but not from general-interest news sources. That’s worrisome to me on one hand because it decreases one’s exposure to diverse points of view. On another hand, this gives independent opinion writers an appreciative and attentive audience of like-minded readers.

I think this proliferation of voices makes the role of the editor and publisher more important than ever. Someone has to be the arbiter of literary quality.
Someone has to do the hard and heartbreaking work of picking and choosing which voices to promote.

Then there are the loneliness and celebrity factors. People are lonely and they crave attention. Social media serves those needs brilliantly. Hence more voices calling out.

I don’t know how well these ruminations of mine answered your question, but you bring up one of the key issues of our time.

6.  Please describe the book that you wrote with Valerie Fox.

Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets (Texture Press, 2013) is a craft-of-writing textbook that presents fourteen classroom- and workshop-tested writing prompts for both beginning and experienced poets. The prompts range from simple concepts, such as the cameo cinquain and the rules poem, to more elaborate intertextual  prompts, such as the fake translation and bibliomancy. The book is very friendly and easy to use, and it is aimed at students (both high school and college), working poets, and teachers of creative writing. The first part of the book comprises the prompts and the second part of the book presents sample poems generated by the prompts. Those sample poems are written by college creative writing students and established poets alike. The incredible selection of sample poems not only proves that the prompts are effective, it shows how widely the prompts can be interpreted.

7.  What is your next step?

Right now, I am writing some short stories and new poems. And I am working my way through a stack of books and magazines I’ve promised myself I’d read. I am determined to read through my numerous notebooks of airy jottings. Maybe I’ll glean some phrases worth making into poems.

Thank you!