Perloff's Re-Po statement

I want to suggest, tenderly and respectfully, an option for how to interpret  Marjorie Perloff's statement regarding the victim and rapist, in such a crime, when she was talking about V. Place's work, Statement of Fact, at the Rethinking Poetics conference held recently at Columbia.

Here we go:

Last semester, the Spring one, Vanessa Place came to SUNY Buffalo, and the seminar I was in with Steve McCaffery. One evening while in town, she gave a reading, and it was out of Statement of Fact. Not only the way she read it, but also the language of it, betrayed no favoring of victim or rapist, no less description of one than the other, and eerily placed them on a level playing field. It was a very disturbing experience to hear it read because, in fact, the victim easily could sound as bad as the rapist. 

I think there was something in the language used in the transcripts, which, combined with my decades long media training (just part of living in Western Culture) created a very slippery yet concise line dividing my judgment. It was next to impossible to listen without forming, even if only for a second, a thought about the victim and/or perpetrator. Add to this an almost invisible yet sharp dividing line between judgments, and one can flip from side to side at staggering rates. Quite an amazing experience, and certainly, as I said, disturbing.

I want to softly suggest that perhaps this is what Marjorie Perloff was referring to.

I realize I could be way way off, and that this could just be a testament to how much I did not want Perloff's comment to mean what it could possibly mean. I'm completely willing to live with that. But I did want to share my experience of hearing some of this piece read, and also suggest that Perloff's comment was very precisely about the work of text, not the act of sexual assault itself.