In a 2002 interview with Jeet Heer of The National Post, Canadian poet David Solway says that Anne Carson "is either very plainspoken -- that is to say, she writes something between prose and speech -- or she is very esoteric, so you don't understand what the hell she's saying." Justly or not, Carson is frequently accused of being esoteric. Her poetry delves into the remote past, combines lyricism with literary criticism, and often seems to imply that our theories of interpretation are as real, and as suitable a subject for poetry, as the world that they interpret. In other words, Carson draws few distinctions between the world itself and the world as others have written about it.
Yet esotericism is not the same thing as pretentiousness. Carson is too playful to be called pretentious, and although she is eccentric, she never deliberately keeps her reader at bay. Quite the opposite, in fact: she exposes a complex, private realm to the reader's scrutiny. The willingness to write about genuine mysteries, and, at the same time, to be fully understood, is a trait that has always distinguished great poets from those who are merely adequate. In Decreation, Carson might as well be describing her own poetry (and maybe she is describing her own poetry) when she writes that Penelope's riddling of Odysseus is "an act of seduction that he cannot outwit -- that he will not wish to outwit. She invites him into the way her mind works." There is no question that we are forced to be indulgent of Carson as she leads us through the ideas of Beckett, Longinus, Kant, etc., but we make these excursions in the company of Carson's own warm intelligence. Carson begins Autobiography of Red by saying of Stesichoros, a Greek writer of the 7th century B.C., "He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet."
Decreation, Carson's most recent collection of poetry and essays, is a sustained meditation on rapture: that state wherein we surrender our capacity for analysis -- which, if one's personhood, or identity, can be thought of as the sum of one's cognitive parameters, amounts to a surrender our own selves -- in order to glimpse, or live within, the sublime. Carson borrows the term "decreation" from the French philosopher Simone Weil, who describes it as "undoing the creature in us." Carson quotes Weil as follows: "the self is only a shadow projected by sin and error, which blocks God's light, and which I take for a being." The borders of the self not only define us, but define what we are not, and, as a consequence, constrain us. By relinquishing our identity as a thing, in Carson's terms, we become at once no thing and every thing. Documenting the phenomenon of the solar eclipse, Carson writes:
As the moon's shadow passes over you ... some lines [are] removed and others brightened. You are now inside the moon's shadow, which is a hundred miles wide and travels at two thousand miles an hour ... It seems to declare a contest with everything you have experienced of light and colour hitherto.
Carson compares decreation to ecstasy, or ekstasis, "...literally," Carson writes, "standing outside oneself, a condition regarded by the Greeks as typical of mad persons, geniuses and lovers, and ascribed to poets by Aristotle." Carson sets all of these ecstatics -- both the religious and the secular -- on equal footing, and Decreation teems with metaphors that link madness to faith, faith to love, love to madness, and so on. In "The Day Antonioni Came to the Asylum: a Rhapsody," the narrator, an asylum inmate, tells us, "The patients worship life-giving Aphrodite every chance they get."
If we return to Carson's list of ecstatics, we may notice that the final member of the group -- the member who occupies the place of honour -- is the poet. Thus, Carson writes herself into her theory of the sublime: a paradoxical move, really, if one accesses the sublime only through self-negation! Elsewhere, Carson states:
To be a writer is to construct a big, loud, shiny centre of self from which the writing is given voice and any claim to be intent on annihilating this self while still continuing to write and give voice to writing must involve the writer in some important acts of subterfuge or contradiction.
This may irritate some readers, or strike them as a conjuring trick. However, paradoxes, real and imagined, are at the heart of Carson's writing, and the very act of combining poetry with essays illustrates a larger tension between Carson's intuitive and dialectic impulses. One sequence of poems in Decreation is entitled "Sublimes," and another, "Gnostisms," or literally, "knowledges." From a certain perspective, Decreation could be read as an epic self-portrait, as a literary manifesto, or as an ars poetica, but such readings belie the scope of Carson's interests. It would be more generous and more accurate to say that Decreation, like the rest of Carson's work, explains itself.
It is well known that Anne Carson was for many years a classicist at McGill (she is now at the University of Michigan, teaching creative writing) and that nearly all of her books refer to the writers of ancient Greece and Rome. However, Carson introduces these third parties not by way of allusion, per se, but more as characters, alter-egos, and co-authors. Carson approaches any writer, ancient or modern, as an individual whose life can be reconstructed through whatever testimony he or she has left behind. Carson appears to think of these writers as intimate, partially invisible friends. There is a sense, moreover, that if Carson cannot recover the authors, she is very happy to invent them. For example, she describes Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West thus:
It was 1930. Marriage was going well with the Sapphic Vita, marriage was going well with the virginal Virginia. Besides that, they were enjoying their affair, looking forward to spending the weekend after the eclipse together at Long Barn ... I wonder if they paused to look at each other, these mated and unmated people, on the exposed plane of an ordinary moment of that curious, heavy, historic, wrong day. Sudden feeling of oldness.
Carson draws these impressions from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, yet they percolate through Carson's own frame of reference. The real Virginia Woof, having disappeared and left only her writing -- or having disappeared into her writing -- is irrecoverable, and her writing belongs to the reader, as much as to anyone. Carson tells us, "To loot someone else's life or sentences and make off with a point of view, which is called 'objective' because you can make anything into an object by treating it this way, is exciting and dangerous." Here we have a mix of humility and conceit (though Carson prefers the term "bravado"). At least one poem in Decreation, "Beckett's Theory of Comedy," is composed entirely of someone else's lines (Beckett's).
To some, Carson's "looting" may seem like a chic repackaging of reader-response theory (that is, the idea that no piece of writing has a fixed, "objective" meaning, but that each reader creates an idiosyncratic interpretation, particular to his or her own frame of reference). After Carson won the T.S. Eliot Prize, an English literary critic, Robert Potts, accused her of "fashionable philosophizing." However, in Decreation Carson is using critical theory to her own ends. What interests Carson is not only the reader's freedom to interpret, but the poet's freedom to relinquish control: to disappear.
The actual Anne Carson is both everywhere and nowhere in Decreation, for Carson maintains a clinical distance from her subject matter, even when she appears to be writing about matters as personal as her mother's death: "Her on the bed as bent twigs. / Me, as ever, gone." In the moments when Carson has disappeared, we are tantalized by the implication of her presence. Which poems, if any, are we to read autobiographically? Interviewers of Anne Carson invariably characterize her as being intensely private, yet in the poem "Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions," Carson writes "My personal poetry is a failure. / I do not want to be a person." Are these lines being spoken by Carson-the-poet? By a fictional extension of Carson? Or by someone else entirely? The lines are a nest of double meanings; they could be understood to imply i.) that the narrator's poetry about herself is worthless, and therefore, she wishes not to exist, ii.) that the narrator is unable to write about herself at all, and therefore, she wishes not to exist, iii.) that the narrator cannot write well about herself because she has failed to relinquish her selfhood, or iv.) that because the narrator seeks to relinquish her selfhood, her poetry cannot be called "personal."
One of the "Sublimes," "Mia Moglie (Longinus' Red Desert)," interweaves the lives and sentences of several of Decreation's principals: Longinus, Sappho, Demosthenes, Michelangelo Antonioni (director of Il Deserto Rosso, or The Red Desert), Monica Vitti (lead actress in The Red Desert), Giuliana (Vitti's character), and the inmates of an asylum. To these ecstatics, one might add Carson and her ex-husband; the collapse of Carson's marriage was the subject of a previous book, The Beauty of the Husband. Since "mia moglie" is Italian for "my wife," we may even be tempted to read the poem as an oblique self-portrait. The point, however, is that Carson's own life and suffering enjoy no special prominence in her poem because she "does not want to be a person." Braided between the poem's stanzas are the following lines: "greener / than / grass / and / dead / almost / / seem / to me," which are incomprehensible until, 91 pages later, we encounter the following lines from a fragment by Sappho, translated (or looted) by Carson herself: "greener than grass / I am and dead -- or almost / I seem to me." Notice that the "I am," "or," and "I" have been elided from the "Sublime," though the second absent "I" exists in vestige, in the form of empty space. Presumably, this refers to Weil's injunction that we acquiesce before the sublime: "We possess nothing in this world other than the power to say 'I.' This is what we must yield up to God." I have no idea why Carson drops the "or."
Too clever? Too literal? Perhaps. Carson the poet struggles against her analytical bent throughout Decreation. Many of the poems would be inscrutable if the essays were not there to explain them, and so we must accept that not all of the poems are discrete literary objects; some of them are servants to the meaning of the book as a whole. Is this a feasible definition of a "poem"? I am not certain, but Carson very intentionally pushes this question. When her poems succeed, they make dizzying, associative leaps that the prose formalizes into metaphor. Those poems that fail seem to be illustrations of a theory. At times, Carson depends upon the same premise as the conceptual artists of the '60s and '70s: that an artwork's beauty may consist of as little as the beauty of its idea.
It would be wrong to say, however, that Carson has no interest in the formal construction of her poems. The lineated poetry in Decreation tends to be typographically organized (i.e. "visual"), and Carson most often uses her line breaks as a way of controlling the rate at which the reader encounters the poem. The effect is often delicate. In "Lines," Carson's theme is the acceleration and deceleration of time:
Out
the window snow is falling straight down in lines. To my mother,
love
of my life, I describe what I had for brunch. The lines are falling
faster
now. Fate has put little weights on the ends (to speed us up) I
want
to tell her -- sign of God's pity. She won't keep me
she says, she
won't run up my bill...
Many of Carson's poems are collages of "looted" lines, and it is here, where pastiche enforces a constraint similar to that of translation, that Carson's poetry is most assured. The closing lines of "Methinks the Poor Town has been Troubled too Long," adapted from Sackville and Swinburne, are magnificent: "... Weak suns yet alive / are as virtue to the suns of that other day. / For the poor town dreams / of surrender, mother / never untender, / mother gallant / and gay."
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JAMES ARTHUR has published poetry in The New Republic, The Nation, Brick, The Iowa Review, and AGNI. He has received fellowships at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, as well as a Discovery/The Nation Prize. He is the 2006-2007 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholar.
Canadians have an odd relationship to the U.S. We define ourselves against them, first of all. Many of us in urban centres find guns appalling, our history is closer to compromise than conflict, possibly born out of the need to accommodate both French and English, and the same need has introduced a greater love -- at least in theory -- of diversity, and a recognition diversity is a strength, not a weakness. There is a distinct Canadian identity that Canadians...continue reading
Your second collection of poems, The Cold Panes of Surfaces, is out now. Your first book, Bonfires, won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award in 2004. Did winning a national award for your first book bolster your artistic confidence while working on your second, or did you find it daunting, as though you had more to live up to than other poets working on a second collection?
I think it certainly gave me a boost of confidence and the permission I needed to do what I wanted to do artistically with the second book. I didn't feel any outside pressure because of winning the CAA award, or feel that I had any expectations to live up to. Winning the award was terrific, and it was good publicity, but it was also an education on how fleeting such praise can be, and how it leaves your writing life virtually...continue reading