Anne Carson Response

I took my grandmother to the Anne Carson Reading. As normally happens when I bring a guest to an event that he or she wouldn't usually attend, I was hypersensitive to words spoken, concerned how my grandmother would react. When the Creative Writing Department faculty member introduced Carson with the quote: "You could / take the entirety of the / common sense of humans / and put it in the palm of / your hand and still have / room for your dick,” I felt a minor sense of foreboding on behalf of my grandmother's conservative sensibilities. Yet the moment Carson rose from her seat, walked on stage, and started to speak, my anxiety began to fade. She balanced exquisitely hilarity with perception, academic exposition with human understanding. As she took us to uncomfortable places of reflection in her reading, dry wit and self-deprecating humor made the audience––even my grandmother––feel at ease. And when she read "Red Doc" and concluded the poem with the quote that she was introduced with, I felt like she reclaimed that quote from the land of the bawdy and crude, and placed it back firmly in the land of critical war commentary. In fact, I wondered if she chose to read that particular poem in response to her introduction out of a desire to contextualize the quote; it certainly resonated better within the arc of the poem than alone.

Her essay on the character of Albertine and the work of Proust showed me the true potential of an essay. Subverting traditional form by crafting the essay into 59 numbered paragraphs each comprised of one sentence, Carson boldly read each word with a precision and finality that cut to the core. Her words rang true and aimed deep. Although she did not shy away from academic terminology (read: jargon) she also did not let these terms overwhelm the meaning in the essay. Carson dissected the 'transpositional' theory––that Proust's love for his chauffeur projected onto his writing––in a circuitous manner wholly unusual to the standard essay. She put all of the puzzle pieces of evidence into play at different intervals, and, like a great magic trick, pulled them all together at the end with a persuasive grand finale. It was absolutely stunning.

Ultimately, I walked out of Cemex Hall feeling like Anne Carson had uplifted language. It felt like I had glimpsed a sliver of the possibility of carefully crafted words from a master of the art. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I'll be honest: it felt like a blessing.