“What if the compulsion to war
was really a longing to be touched
to forfeit vengeance
by teasing a nipple to hardness
to find righteousness
in a woman's orgasmic cry?”
Thus begins performance poet Jennie Orvino's CD Make
Love Not War, a spoken word collaboration with some of
the San Francisco Bay Area's most accomplished musicians. These poems
of peace and passion combine open-hearted
sensuality and a challenge to the political status quo, with a soundscape
that ranges from jazz band and blues piano to
Native American flute. Jennie says her creative mission is to ”transform
tyranny by inviting tyranny to greater pleasure.”
Jennie's not riding a wave, she's causing one, and it
has a powerful
cleansing action that the Maytag Man could only wet dream about.
—Jim Strand, Sonoma County artist and musician
Jennie Orvino's “Moon Dance” was like a sock
in the solar plexus; it clean took my breath away! Truly, “nobody's
key quite fits my lock” like Jennie's does, baby!
—Christopher
Saint, marketing consultant
Imagine the Love Child of Anais Nin and Molly Ivins.
Orvino translates the wisdom centered in the body into compelling language
that challenges our assumptions about how the world truly works. Who says
down-and-dirty erotica can't illuminate 21st century politics?
—Bart
Rawlinson, writer and teacher
It occurs to me that the culture is terribly polarized
by puritanical and pornographic attitudes towards sexuality and I find
Jennie's work refreshingly free of both.
