Response to the Anne Carson Colloquium

And Anne Carson blows my expectations off  the table and into a sea of monkeys yet again. And, I don't exactly know how to respond. But here it goes:
After the absence of a Q&A at Anne Carson's Reading, I though for sure that we would get the chance to ask questions and have a discussion with her at today's colloquium. I was definitely mistaken. And yet I seem to have even more respect for Anne Carson as an artist. In her first poem, I found the idea of a library for glacier water most compelling. She had some wonderful lines about imagining a library of melted books with the letters running onto the floor. I honestly had no idea what the purpose of the string being wound and unwound around the room was for. Although I had no clue what Anne Carson had in mind when deciding to use string while performing this piece, it did get me thinking about the performance of poetry as opposed to just the reading or writing of it. When she read her poem titled "Bracko" I continued to think about performance, and wondered whether she set out to write "Bracko" as a poem to be performed rather than read. The performance was really something :) If anyone's interested, I highly recommend watching it (I found a performance of it online here: http://www.cornell.edu/video/anne-carson-performs-bracko-and-cassandra-float-can ). The poem reminded me of poems for two and three voices that I used to read aloud with my friends in elementary school. I was obsessed with poems for two voices. One of my favorite poems came from Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices by Paul Flieschman. It was entitled "Book Lice." After the colloquium, I revisited the poem and began to remember why I enjoyed it so much. I loved it not only because it was a poem about books, but because poems for two voices seemed so much more musical than any other poem. When read aloud with two voices, the poem came to life - two readers interacting to create one song. Carson's poem intensely musical and powerful and meaningful because it drew on the concept of fragmented poetry, namely Sappho's poetry. I thought the use of silence and four voices overlapping were brilliant ways to capture some essence of Sappho. I particularly enjoyed footnote 94.1 which discussed Sappho and death. At the end of the footnote, every line ended, and there was silence with the last poignant word being "death". Overall, "Bracko" was a phenomenal piece, and I am still left wondering what it looks like on paper.
Anne Carson's work is truly unique and innovative and it was a joy to experience  that at both her reading and her colloquium. I wonder if I'll ever get the chance to ask her any of my questions...