Literary Event: Anne Carson

It's difficult for me to begin this post, talking about Carson, in no small part because of what she means to me.  She means a great deal.  A friend gave me her slim first volume, Short Talks, as a gift in my junior year of high school.  One might say "I read it like the bible," but I don't read the bible.  I'll say instead I read it like my email, refreshing it frequently -- or rather, finding what was fresh in it over continuous reading.  I have read several of her books, most recently "Red Doc>."  Her work confuses me and rewards me when I don't expect it.  Different lines mean differently, or are of varying importance, at different times in my life.  A lot of her work I won't understand sheerly based on where I am in my life right now.  What I can understand, and for which I must reestablish my understanding, produces what Nabokov called "the indescribable tingle of the spine."  His phrase requires, I think, no explanation.

At her reading, Carson read from Short Talks.  She read the one on Gertrude Stein and also one of my favorites, on driving across the Rockies with her family while reading Madam Bovary, looking up at the pine trees.  The 'punchline' of that story is that now any time she sees hair on the arms of a woman, she thinks "deciduous."  This concept Carson alludes to, of the mind jumping great distances to form associations between one thing to the next, to form coherency -- the mind's instinctive allegiance to narrative and narrative construction -- is what most distinctly defines Carson's work for me, and what attracts me to it.  It is this notion that (with plainspeech) the beauty of writing is not so much what the writer has put down on the page, but rather, the work the reader performs in filling in the gaps from what the writer left out.  The story is co-constructed by the writer and the reader who narrativizes with whatever material's been given.  The story might not even exist in fact, by definition, if there weren't an audience.  We own what we read with more authority than we often afford ourselves.

Perhaps why I love Carson most is the way she compels me to do work, to fill in the gaps given the knowledge she provides.  These gaps are filled with inference and with observations from my own life.  This not only makes the poetry more personable, something of my own chalice, but also ensures that the meaning will change as my life changes.  I can never fill the gaps with exactly the same cement twice.  

My favorite short talk, one of my shifting chalices, is from the end of the collection.  She did not read it.  However, it most strongly colors my reading of Carson and my impressions of her from her visit here, so I will share it below.  It is called "On Hedonism":

Beauty makes me hopeless. I don’t care
why anymore I just want to get away. 
When I look at the city of Paris I long
to wrap my legs around it. When I
watch you dancing there is a heartless
immensity like a sailor in a dead calm
sea. Desires as round as peaches
bloom in me all night, I no longer
gather what falls.


I feel like I have filled my life around the blank spaces in the poem, in the line breaks, between the punctuation.  Something blooms in me when I read Carson, but I do not collect it, it is dark, I can't tell what it is.