Anne Carson

           Anne Carson spun me alive with her brilliance. I cannot claim to be an expert on poetry, and I sure as hell didn't know what to expect, but what I can say with certainty is that she cast a spell on me tonight. She climbed the stairs, the applause died down, and we left her walking to the podium in silence - but no, applaud more, her hands said, and I saw - no, felt - a certain understated quality in her mien, neither proud nor nervous, simply self-assured. And then she did it all - made me laugh out loud with her sharp, wry, soft-spoken wit; held me rapt and visually compelled with her limpid imagery; progressively funneled me into the intricacies and shades of Proust; shunned me into a literary stupor as I stumbled out into the night, feeling it was all too brief. One of my preconceptions of poetry readings, formed by bitter experience, is of feeling mentally numb at some point, of letting the train of thought run ahead for a second and losing it for good. This was not the case with Carson, who with her steady, deliberate voice guided me like a beacon of truth through her fresh depths. She truly has the gift of unification, tightly compressing intricate feelings and complex thoughts into brief phrases that trigger a trail of sparks in the mind. Jolts you into thinking, she really does. 

           I particularly enjoyed her 59-paragraph essay on Proust. Her meditation on the relationship between Albertine and the narrator was incredibly poignant at certain points, streaming Ophelia in as comparison; namely, the image that stuck with me most was that of the water plants, and their morphing into darker plants of the sexual, sleeping Albertine. Her take on Marcel's unwavering denial of her homosexuality was hilarious, and the structure itself, ringing brightly with the numbering, allowed every observation to build on the previous one, weaving and conflating one theme with the next, to culminate with the towering, somewhat sad denuding of Proust's own love affair with his chauffer, Alfred Agostinelli, as a testament to the possibility of transposition - the inevitable intermingling of fact and fiction. Seven assiduous years of Proust in French - "assiduous!" - clearly well-spent.
           Concerning her poetry, I experienced her recurring, cyclical structures with the pristine urgency and freshness of a series of sudden remarks. A tranquil immediacy permeated some of the lines, especially with her depiction of time as a fluctuating, impossible notion: "Time still, gazing at you. Time, gazeless. Time cannot gaze." There was something so clean about it, transparent, yet so profound - the dog in the alleyway bathed in your flashlight, the oxen, the surprised turkeys skidding over ice, the woman and the glasses - her power of invention seemed endless. Everywhere I was looking into depths.