On the Anne Carson Reading

            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.