I walked
into the poetry reading in Cemex tonight as the kind of literary heathen who
had never read anything by Anne Carson.
I walked out as the kind who does not plan to read any more.
This is not
to say that I did not enjoy the reading.
For one thing, Ms. Carson is an amazing speaker. My brother once described a friend as “the
kind of person who speaks so well that you feel like someone should write down everything
they say,” and that is how I felt about Ms. Carson even when she was not
reading her poems. Her voice has the
perfect mix of slow, careful deliberation that makes you listen and a dry,
crackling wit under the surface that makes you laugh when you least expect
it. I rarely enjoy listening to people
read aloud, but I was held rapt throughout this evening.
I also
admired the skill in Ms. Carson’s writing.
The essay about Proust was a lovely piece of literary examination and
criticism while being literature in its own right. By numbering the paragraphs, almost like
bullet points, Ms. Carson gave the reader of being let in behind her own
writing even as she dropped us behind Proust’s.
It was almost as if we were reading an outline to a larger essay, but,
like with Proust, seeing the bones of the work does not detract from its
greatness. I believe that if I ever read
Proust, I will enjoy it more for having heard it’s real-life backstory and the
literary history that feeds into it.
My favorite
poem was the section of her novel Red.<
where G describes the herd of musk oxen.
The looping structure of the parallel between pine trees, queens, and
oxen was hypnotic, invoking the sense of being lost in thought in a tired
night. If there was a period in that
section, I did not hear it, so the whole piece flowed from one metaphor to the
next but always looped back around to the central images. The disjointed time in her description of G’s
experience with war and homecoming was definitely an example of trauma
narrative, especially with the constant return to the image of the shot woman
and her eyeglasses.
While I
liked her “Short Talks,” they felt to me more like things that have to be read
than heard. I wanted to call her back
and ask her to say it again so that I could mull it over a little more. (The audience’s chuckles also muddled her
voice so I think I missed some key words.)
Their abbreviation makes the listener almost shocked, as we are used to
far longer works; I believe repetition would have allowed me to adjust to this
break from convention.
So why, you
may ask, did I walk out of Cemex determined not to read any more Anne Carson? The answer is simply that I do not believe
that I could fully absorb her poems on my own, at least not at the stage of
life I am at now. The line “You could
hold all of human wisdom in the palm of your hand and still have room for your
dick” (paraphrase) would have jarred me out of the experience of reading the
work. I would have felt prudish and
disconcerted, uncomfortable with that line in the larger, more meditative
context of the poem. Ms. Carson’s voice
and delivery walked me through the line in the reading so that I could
appreciate it for the clever turn it is, but I could not have understood it on
my own. Perhaps when I am feeling older
and more peaceful, not full of spring air and problem sets, I will be able to
sit down with Anne Carson’s work and read it properly, but for now, I’d best
just let it be.
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