Anne Carson's Colloquium

       The first of Anne Carson's pieces was about a string (at least I think it was). The class she's been teaching at Stanford is about "attention," so when the man up front pulled a string attached to a TV monitor above the stage around the room, pulling it around chairs, other performers, and even behind the audience so that everyone could look down the length of the string to its fixed point above the speaker, I couldn't help but think that this is where she wanted our attentions to focus. This was troubling, of course, because I'd come to the colloquium to hear Anne Carson read, to focus on her, but there she was, reading her poetry, in competition with the string.
       While listening to the reading, I heard mostly disjoint phrases, metaphors or just details that stood out in her speaking, and not complete stanzas. One phrase in particular, "wildly constant," stuck in my brain as I followed the man's string around the room, wondering where the loose end would go next. When the string's loose end moved around the audience and back to Carson, I was able to refocus on the speaker, although now with a much more visual focus. I saw her face and couldn't take my eyes off it while she read.
       It was even more difficult to narrow my attention in the next piece, entitled "in(attention)," which was given by many speakers who stood up within the audience (Carson's students). It began with one speaker, then another spoke over the first, and more and more joined in until I could not make out any complete sentences anymore, similar to my experience with the first piece. I only heard a mixture of consonants and vowels, and even words were difficult to make out. When the cacophony died down, I couldn't help but focus on the sounds of the words, rather than their meaning. While at first frustrating, my inattention became the focus of my attention. Carson's pieces had a way of focalizing on the act of listening and seeing for the audience member, and less on the act of writing or creating. It felt like a privilege to be a member of the audience, a member of the performance, a listener and a performer at once.
       The third piece consisted of a combination of Sappho's fragments. The entire piece was interspersed with "brackets," both auditory and visual (i.e. one of the speakers said only the word "bracket," at seemingly random times, and the screen above the speakers was covered in small white brackets of various sizes, moving slowly during the performance). Sappho's poetry is incredibly mellifluous, but the lyricism of the translation was interrupted by the brackets, and the occasional editorial footnote read by another speaker over the reading of the poetry. In many ways, the meaning behind Sappho's words is obscured by time and lack of context, so the footnote added necessary context, but in Carson's reading, footnotes added yet another layer of cacophony to the brackets that split up Sappho's verse. They interrupted the flow of images that made Sappho's fragments so evocative. Again, I focused on myself, on my own process of listening, and it was difficult to hear Sappho through all my thoughts. But I still heard the brief phrases, the metaphors, and the details that struck me through all the noise.