Experiencing Anne Carson

What stood out to me most about both Anna Carson's reading and her colloquium was her very intense desire to mix genre, form, and media. In her reading, she combined poetry and the essay form in one piece. In both, she played with translation. In the colloquium, the poetry became imbued with performance and visual art. Hardly at all did we get poetry in its conventional forms, but instead Carson blurs the lines of all the constructed demarcations and categories we make in art.

What came out of this chaotic jumble is rarely meaning, and in fact I would be willing to bet that Carson made a conscious effort to withhold meaning from those that attended, at least the kind of meaning that we have come to expect from poetry. In two of the poems read at the colloquium, multiple readers spoke over each other such that there were words, phrases, even whole lines of the poem that listeners just never hear. Without a written text in front of them, listeners could not comprehend the poem in its entirety, which results in the meaning of the poem being occluded. What someone extracts from that reading will necessarily be fragmented and incomplete.

So what does the listener get out of this? Why do people continue to rave about Carson's readings? Well the first thing is that it's new. It's a new approach to poetry. So many of us are taught in high school to “figure out” poetry, to see it as an intellectual test to see whether or not you can discern what a poem “means.” Carson throws that entire approach out the window, and replaces it, in my view, with an experiential approach. And this is another reason Carson is exciting to people, although it also has the potential for alienation. She constructs experiences for her attendees. She said as much when she explained why she included all the brackets in her translations of Sappho – to simulate the experience of pause, and waiting, and suspension.

But rather than trying to convey an experience solely through a poem, she creates an original one in the real world. But what can make these confusing and, frankly, a bit absurdist is that the experience she creates does not align with the experience contained within the poem. In other words, the mission is not always to bring the experience of the poem to life. Instead, the two have no immediate or easily discoverable connection, and a new experience comes out of the clash between the two.