MARY HAWLEY AND MATTHEW OWENS
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The evening was divided into three parts, two solos and a duet. Hawley performed first, reading new poems as well as older ones from her book, Double Tongues. Her style is subtle, spare, delicate yet lethally direct. Hawley is a good reader, projecting beautifully (without a microphone) and maintaining the audience’s interest. One especially haunting poem, “La Judicial,” tells how Hawley witnessed the police in a waiting room in Veracruz, Mexico, dancing with one another, radio blaring, in order to distract people from the screams of prisoners being tortured in an adjoining room. Hawley has a way of throwing curveballs in her writing: circumstances or emotions that begin one way seldom end up that way. (This quality also turned up in her collaboration with Owens.) By mingling ironies and opposites, by describing a reality at odds with itself, her writing closely duplicates the way thinking, memory, and experience work together in the mind. One senses that an impulse toward sentimentality was long ago dashed, and what remains is incredulity at tragedy and cruelty, which animates whatever Hawley describes.
Owens’s solo was a strange little piece called Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes (which he describes in the program as a product of chronic insomnia). He sings Gilbert and Sullivan’s song of the same title while wearing a pair of fake eyes attached to his own eyelids. With his top hat, morning coat, and floppy pants, the effect is comical and strange. He sings a phrase, then pauses, then sings the next phrase–and by pausing after each line surreally deconstructs the intent behind the words. What constitutes a “lucky man”? “A pair of sparkling eyes . . . a pair of ruby lips . . . a tender hand.” The idea that possession of these assorted pieces of anatomy would mark one as “lucky” brought much laughter. The darker point is the tendency in our society to see a woman as an “object of affection,” in terms of isolated parts instead of as a living, breathing whole. Owens underlines this with the fake eyes, as though emphasizing men’s helpless culpability in this process of objectification–as though they’ve been at the mercy of their own unblinking, unthinking, unsleeping eyes. Compared to Hawley’s cool, intellectual approach, Owens’s is extremely visual and physical, almost slapstick–a vaudevillian sharing the stage with a poet.
