Anne Carson's Quiet Charisma

Walking out of Cemex auditorium this evening, my roommate turned to me and said, “I want to be like that when I’m old.”  I agreed with her, but I wasn’t necessarily sure what she meant. In what ways could one grow up to be like Anne Carson? She definitely has as a quiet charisma, which can be described perfectly by her entrance to the stage. She walked out to applause, and it stopped before she reached the podium, at which point she very quietly said, “keep clapping.” The applause resumed (and she added a quiet, “just kidding”).

Before this evening, I read her famous piece “The Glass Essay”. I liked it enough that for a day I was convinced I wanted to write just like that. It was one of those times where I read something and instantly I wish I had wrote it. We turn to poetry to learn impressions of others and to feel things. In that area, I believe Carson excels. She has an uncanny understanding of emotions, and can transform emotions on a dime. Her piece on Albertine, a character from Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, teetered on this weird tightrope between hilarity and sorrow. The way she delicately revealed different facts about the similarities between Albertine and Alfred made me want to laugh at the thought of Proust as she rendered him, doing these ridiculous things for this man that he was in love with, and attempting to disguise him in this woman, but of course also cry at the beauty and abandon he possessed. My appreciation for Carson’s Proust is similar to my appreciation of Carson’s Brontë. She transforms literary figures into people, and enmeshes them with these people that are kind of like us, kind of like normal people, and the effect (to me) is dazzling.

The excerpts from Red Doc were disorienting, but perhaps that’s what Ken Fields meant about Carson commanding all sorts of attention. When she read the section of the protagonist at his mother’s deathbed, I was startled by how sad I felt. I may have been a little angry because I wanted to cry but I was sitting in a bright auditorium full of people, certain that it was near the end and not wanting to have to walk out wiping my eyes. When she said she didn’t want to leave us sad, and she delivered a few laughs, my feeling wasn’t too little too late. I felt that she could have hit harder.