I AM THE BABE OF JOSEPH STALIN’S DAUGHTER: POEMS 1961-1971
by ROCHELLE OWENS
recovered by MATHIAS SVALINA
The Kulchur Foundation, 1972.
Right from the cover I was hooked. It’s a scrawled line drawing of a woman staring back at me. There’s some kind of circle behind her, like the iconic halos in paintings of saints. And she’s wearing happy-face earrings. It’s not an impressive drawing. It reminds me of those Picasso line drawings of flowers & birds that I associate with the college dorm walls of pleasant teenage hippies. Below this, in bold, all caps, the title:
I AM THE BABE OF JOSEPH STALIN’S DAUGHTER.
The qualifying element of the title is so weird. I expect it to be “I am the child of Joseph Stalin.” But there’s an askew feminist swerve right in the title. It leaves me having to reread the title, attempting a family tree in my head.
I was holding the book at a used bookstore, one that has a lot of crappy poetry books & then a few gems. I wanted this to be a gem. Like finding strange records at thrift stores, there is a balance in looking at the aesthetics of a cover of a book from the 60s. A zany cover might open up to sloppy wannabe beat poems. The cover has to be terrible-terrific.
The first poem I read was “Jesse Owens & Mean Hitler”:
hitler’s dead & Jesse’s alive
hitler’s dead & Jesse’s alive
hitler’s dead & Jesse Owens
my father is alivc!
my father jesse owens
in the year of 1936
in the year that I was born
won the Olympics for America
& my father Jesse Owens
rubbed mean Hitler wrong
& Hitler hated my father
Jesse Owens for winning
the star-gold medal
of supreme (lest the sons
of Hitler forget)
violent running for
the master black race!
hitler’s dead & Jesse’s alive
hitler’s dead & Jesse’s alive
hitler’s dead & jesse Owens
my father is alive!
my father jesse’s philosophy
won over mean inconsequential
asshole Hitler
hitler’s dead & Jesse’s alive
hitler’s dead & Jesse’s alive
hitler’s dead & Jesse Owens
my father is alive!
my father Jesse Owens has just
finished writing his 134th book about
how he won the star-gold medal
of supreme (lest the sons
of Hitler forget)
violent running for
the master black race!
my father Jesse Owens
is alive & well &
Adolph Hitler is
tap-dancing in hell!
It’s a wonderful poem, the snaking verse-like repetitions, the child-like voice offset by the phrase “master black race.” It’s goofy & loud but making meaning both through this exuberance & in the ironic engagement that one reads through the exuberance. She has the ability to make the blank statement create space around itself. And yes, I think that last line, “tap-dancing in hell,” is kind of terrible but it seems to reinforce that the meaning of the poems happens with the ways the knots itself.
Her poems can use a deadpan syntax to imply both the innocence of the speaker & to make a wild leap in association. Witness what she does in the opening section of a longer poem:
Lesson in Songmaking, Song of Kim
I
i live in Yorkville
i love Kim Novak. she says
the things that touch
just right. she & I should
set up house-keeping
together.
At night we finger
the keys
a long time
before we go in
& make love.
We both think the same & she enjoys me,
my name, the way I look
in my raincoat.
My trenchcoat. When I turn my back
the back of my head says the Jews cause unemployment.
My first thought was that this was the connecting link between Ginsberg & Nada Gordon’s & Anne Boyer’s exclamatory political engagement. Most of the poems in this book sprawl across the page, mixing loud-mouthed statements with direct, badass feminism, innocent love of Marxism & some genuinely endearing strangeness. This poem is unnervingly lovely:
Song of Meat, Madness & Travel
1.
dried meat
O glorious is driead meat.
my wife’s breast in my hand
we stare at dried meat
is it not strange?2.
I pity her
now I pity her the woman the woman
who calls
in a voice of white madness
Let me fetch you, let me fetch you!3.
I desired to go north
as a great singer and dancer
my ears my ears
there is singing in them
The big caribou cows and the big bulls
and men
watch for me.
There is something unsettling in her leaps in this kind of poem. The kind of unsettling that Anne Sexton must have been to the first readers of her poems. Her poems allow the transition from exuberance to the physicality of the body, the hope & the rot contained in the same moment.
There is some awful writing in here, some definite “No you di-int” moments. But it seems somehow necessary in here as well. It’s poetry of excess & wildness. It’s messy & exciting. More than anything else these poems are shockingly fun. Every page I open to has some kind of strangeness that makes me excited but also makes me fit her work into my own personal system of poetic history.
That night I had the feeling that I might have discovered some crazed artist no one had heard of. That’s an exciting feeling, one of being able to explore the house that’s been boarded up with all the furniture & papers inside. But I was wrong. Owens has not been forgotten & is still active in the literary world. She has had a long history in experimental theater & poetry & has published a good number of books over the years. Almost all of them are out of print, or somewhat difficult to come by.
Owens’ work has been celebrated by some people I respect. Maureen Owen reviewed a book of hers here: http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/owens/lro-mo.htm
There is a collection of papers on her work from a conference in the 70s that have been collected here: http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/owens/lro-cont.htm
And the is a full Pennsound reading by Owens here: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Owens.html
She’s a poet I had never heard of, but one whom I recognized the moment I read a poem of hers. She is the 60s feminist-lesbian radical poet with a wild sense of humor that I didn’t know I wanted in my life. But I do & I’m glad she’s here with me now.