$18.50
available through
soundofpoetry.com
or cdbaby.com/orvino.
Reviewed by Bill Noble
(05/08/02)
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?
Jennie Orvino's voice -- sure, incandescent with barely controlled sexual heat -- opens this remarkable CD with her short poem, "The General's Dream." Behind her, Pablo Rodriguez weaves a spiraling vocal obbligato.
Without a break, she moves into "Worship Service," a meditation on a blowjob:
As I stroke, his moistened skin becomes translucent.
I hold him against my cheek, press him to my closed lids.
After that, to John Simon's jazz, she purrs the down-and-dirty "Main Squeeze Blues:"
Nobody's key fits my lock the way yours does, baby.
Nobody has that long, slow slide.
The music in Jennie's CD shifts, chameleon-like, from track to track. One narration is backed by clear, almost classical guitar. "Make Love Not War" echoes Simon and Garfunkel's "7 O'Clock News/Silent Night" with a jazzy riff flickering through it. At times the mood goes bluesy, at others it drifts into New Age soundscapes. And it all works -- Jennie Orvino can be as raunchy as a hard fuck, as sensual as dreamy tantra, as original and unexpected as any erotic poetry I've ever heard, and as militantly mournful as La Llorona. Always, the music is in service to the words.
In the middle of the CD, the mood shifts to passionately political: an elegy for September 11, imbued with an almost unbearable sensual awareness of the world; "Afternoon, Muslim Holy Day;" and a fierce slam piece, "Juggernaut."
The most powerful of these for me is a poem I heard Jennie recite just before the Millennium, "The Dream of Undoing."
I'm on a white balcony with louvered doors, overlooking
the town square in Novi Sad, 11:59 p.m. on the eve of the year 2000.
She describes a war-ravaged landscape, and a slow, miraculous transition as the land and buildings begin to repair themselves and rise. Color returns, and hope, and the poem concludes with lines that still make me weep with every reading:
...charred meadows turn verdant, fouled waters run clear,
legs and arms blown off by shrapnel gather themselves to be once more
Sanja Milenovic, who carries her basket of turnips home from market.
Then we jump to the a capella "Coffee Date," which will change forever the way you think about encounters at Starbucks. Next comes a bravura masturbation poem, "If You Want Something Done Right," juggling wordplay and urgency, with an accompaniment that sounds like gamelan. Then "Triangle" grants an irresistible glimpse up a denim skirt.
I could tell you that the long jazz piece "Moon Dance" is about anal sex, but that wouldn't begin to describe the physical immediacy or the lyric, explicit transcendence of this piece:
...he pours vanilla-scented almond oil in the crease between her buttocks, catching the excess to rub on himself. She is presenting her body insistently, backing toward him with her face on the bed, hips lifted to meet his oiled erection.
Can we mix the erotic and the political this way?
We must. It's hard to pretend anymore that we're insulated from the Right's sexual agenda -- in front of clinics, in assaults on gay soldiers, in increasingly bizarre sex laws -- and it's equally hard to separate those things from the vast mechanized violence created by those same ideologues, by the bland, relentless, demagogic talking heads.
Sex exists in the world, not apart from it. It's sweaty and smelly; it's spiritual in the profoundest sense of the word; and using it for love can be just the beginning of passion, not its end. Jennie Orvino knows that in her bones.
