Rochelle Owens

Biographical Note
A central figure in the international avant-garde for over forty years, Rochelle Owens is a playwright, poet, translator, and video artist. She is the author of four collections of plays, Futz and What Came After, The Karl Marx Play and Others, Futz and Who Do You Want Peire Vidal? and more recently Plays by Rochelle Owens. She also edited Spontaneous Combustion: Eight New American Plays. She has published seventeen books of poetry, among them New and Selected Poems 1961-1996, Luca, Discourse On Life and Death, and a novel Journey to Purity. A pioneer in the experimental Off-Off Broadway theatre movement, she is widely known as one of the most innovative and controversial writers of her generation, whose groundbreaking work has influenced subsequent experimental playwrights and poets. Since its first publication in 1961, her play Futz has become a classic of the American avant-garde theatre and an international success. In 1969, it was made into a film, which has attained a cult following. Her plays have been presented worldwide and in festivals in Edinburgh, Avignon, Paris, and Berlin, and have been translated into various languages. Owens has been a participant in the Festival Franco-Anglais de Poésie, and has translated Liliane Atlan’s novel Les passants, The Passersby (Henry Holt, 1989). A recipient of five Village Voice Obie awards and honors from the New York Drama Critics Circle, she has held fellowships from the NEA, Ford, Guggenheim, Rockefeller (Bellagio), and numerous other foundations. A member of ASCAP and the Dramatists Guild, she has taught at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Oklahoma and has held residencies at Brown University and the University of Southwestern Louisiana. She has lectured and read widely in the United States, Europe, and Israel.

Voici le poème que j'ai écrit à partir de méditation et d'exploration mentale sur l'oeuvre de Roee Suffrin:

SOLITARY WORKWOMAN

“Havayah and Elokim are all ONE”
Life is marked by rituals and ceremonies
they honor us and guard us against the powers of ruin
The story of your life is like beautifully
formed lettering, a calligraphy
A solitary workwoman positions the rigid bar
of the work lamp illuminating her version
Everyday bears the data
its internal structure can fade and disappear
in the evolving terrain
What we know is that in an instant of daily life
the shape of an apple, the mouth
of a broken water jug, the gobs of melting
candle wax
are signs and wonders
*
The good rural housewife carrying
a peacock-blue insulated tote bag keeping beer
cold on hot summer days, the ice cream
won’t melt and frozen food won’t thaw and the milk
won’t curdle
“Hast thou not poured me out like milk
and curdled me like cheese?”
The good rural housewife holding a magnifying
glass, chanting a prayer in Aramaic, seeing
enlarged words, letters of black fire, moving her lips
and swaying her body reading Proverbs
From the inside of a water jug you receive Revelation
and looking out a window turning your face
side to side Illumination
At daybreak when the landscape is still a single
waning line separating the blue from the gray
when the brain and breath expand
to receive Light and transformation, to receive merit
and reward and to receive kindness and favors
Let voice be exalted with a litany, let it be a treasure
a river of fish the color of buttercups
Let the litany be a warning against evil, against
a high heart, let it comfort and cure
The good rural housewife insulates herself
in the wisdom of the orange colored tiger lilies
in front of her house
A scholar’s masterly command of sources
and the storyteller’s craft, like strong twine looping
around a button, secures her subject
and like a harness around a donkey’s neck
and the reins controlled by a pilgrim
empties Place and Space
The good rural housewife reflecting on skills
of a former age while clipping an ingrown toenail
the scissors curving blade slipping safely
under a nail, feeling tranquil, trustful and alert
to her need to bless and wanting blessing
delicately sweeping
with crooked fingers the nail parings into her palm
The earth all a Psalm
*
Business carried on darkness covers over
You give the woman Hagar a sweet cooling drink
She who offers a sweet cooling drink
to the sufferer will see the colors of the rivers
of Gan Eden
Flexible is the human face, Gnosis says a scholar
Faces of wonder, peaceful, scornful, jealous, cheerful
faces, the pious and impious, faces of tourists
hustlers, bureaucrats, altruists, soldiers, prostitutes
students, transit workers, business faces, teachers
hotel workers, cooks, scholars, tattoo artists
the worthy and the unworthy
the miserable and the joyful, the moral
and the depraved, able to reveal a myriad of feelings
Flexible is the human face, molecules and cells
multiplying in your mammalian brain
Flexible is the human face, Gnosis says a scholar
A ritual of bending swaying stretching arms forth
Nose and mouth drawing forcing air
the blood, body cells forming and reforming
the spectrum of One Face
The crowd moving swaying circling
Image begets image begets image begets image
circles rings zodiac signs crowns of gold gemstones
Behold the Data of existence—prophesy is born
And they are the winged cherubim
with the faces of children
*
A scholar says—a foreigner visits a city
A solitary workwoman says-- a foreigner being that
and something more
A traveler crosses the seas, her arrival causes wonder
dispute, she goes from fair to fair
Let all come to the Holy Ladder, meet the clairvoyant
from a distant land, hear the wisdom of a woman
the woman from the east
hear her prayers from burnt books
*
Under Numbers “he shall come up like a lion”
Beyond red and pale sun gold verses alternating
600,000 souls superimposed
Seven maidens crossing the sea of Kenneret
Face of an old woman, Hagar
Cast me not off in the time of old age when
my strength fails, forsake me not
Hagar bending body turning towards you
You will write verses include minute matters
of daily life, waiting for water to boil
You will measure slowly Remez Drush Sod
Also the spinal cord, its hardness, curved parts
linking a thousand years
You will form a landscape, your cranial bones
organizing shape of letters, sacred verses
saturated honey gold ruby red peacock blue
letters of black fire core to core rooted
embedded, vegetal to vegetal, letters
burned into word Tree, the trunk and branches
superimposed, customs of daily life
measure your solitary life, like malt, wine, oats
morning and evening, dark into absent
minute by minute––tell this detail––
every day bears the data, cold air or warm air
breathed in and out
The time of Mayhem has come
The solitary workwoman switches thoughts
switches thoughts of rain or shine, cold air or warm
expanding the lungs, breathed in or out
The time of Mayhem has come, Insatiable the mouth
of death—“Your ruiners and your destroyers
will go out from you”
That which your lips know they shall speak
Your version your profane text written purely
left to right in the shape of undergrowth, bunches
of grapes, juice dripping from mouth to chin
A solitary workwoman unrolling scrolls unrolling
scrolls of multiple colors, infused with Light
Genesis thinks a solitary workwoman
You are Abel when with your raised hands
stand against wrath
A solitary workwoman circles around facts
finds out what she searches for in Space and Place
--Rochelle Owens