Post on Anne Carson

I've just posted "Being / A Self in a Song" on the Verse Novels blog, a couple of initial ideas about Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red.

Verse Novels / Versromane

I've started a blog for my course on "Contemporary Verse Novels / Zeitgenössiche Versromane". The students and I will all write posts for it. Feel free to drop by and comment if you like!

The books in question:

Ciaran Carson, For All We Know
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Durs Grünbein, Vom Schnee, oder Descartes in Deutschland
Christoph Ransmayr, Der fliegende Berg

This is a bilingual blog. The first post is already in German (my first set of notes on Ransmayr).

The Glass Essay

In my first round of reading Anne Carson back in 1998, I loved her verse novel Autobiography of Red—but the poem that truly floored me was "The Glass Essay," her depiction of recovering from the end of a long-term relationship while reading Emily Brontë's works (I have Carson's poem in the Cape collection from Britain, Glass and God). It does not diminish with re-reading:

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
She shifted to a question about airports.

This theme gets picked up again later, when the speaker is talking with her therapist, Dr. Haw:

When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them?
Why keep watching? Why not

go away? I was amazed.
Go away where? I said.
This still seems to me a good question.

And then that question gets picked up again:

Why keep watching?
Some people watch, that's all I can say.
There is nowhere else to go,

no ledge to climb up to.

I noticed these connections on rereading. But the image that had stuck with me from my first reading of the poem—for over a decade, that is—was this:

Everything I know about love and its necessities
I learned in that one moment
when I found myself

thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon
at a man who no longer cherished me.

Rereading the poem now, I found a gentler version of the same point:

it would be sweet to have a friend to tell things to at night,
without the terrible sex price to pay.

In 1998, I thought "The Glass Essay" was utterly unique and extraordinary. Today, I still do.

Men in the Off Hours

Anne Carson's "Essay on What I Think About Most" (in her collection Men in the Off Hours) contains a much better statement of what I was trying to get at at the end of my post on her book The Beauty of the Husband:

The fourth thing I like
about Alkman's poem
is the impression it gives

of blurting out the truth in spite of itself.
Many a poet aspires
to this tone of inadvertent lucidity
but few realize it so simply as Alkman.
Of course his simplicity is a fake.
Alkman is not simple at all,
he is a master contriver ...

"Inadvertent lucidity" that is the result not of "simplicity" but of a mastery of contrivance that looks like simplicity—the trap I fell into was to talk about "transparency" without talking about "artifice."

Of the many other passages that struck me in re-reading Men in the Off Hours earlier this month, I'll just mention one, from "TV Men: Lazarus," in which Carson puts forward a striking theory about Plato's allegory of the cave:

I have grasped certain fundamental notions first advanced by Plato,
e.g., that our reality is just a TV set

inside a TV set inside a TV set, with nobody watching
but Sokrates,
who changed
the channel in 399 B.C.

Television as the realization of Plato's cave! (I suspect this is something like what Alexander Nehamas argues about television, but I'm just guessing!)

The Beauty of the Husband and poetry's "layered elusiveness"

To say Beauty is Truth and stop. Rather than to eat it. But even if beauty is truth, the beautiful person—here, in Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband, "the husband"—may still be a liar, even a compulsive liar. "All poets are liars," Carson quotes the ancient Greeks: And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things? But it is not the lies of poets that are the issue here, but the lies of the husband: My husband lied about everything. And the horror of the compulsive liar is that he cannot recognize his lies as lies (as reported to the narrator by her husband's friend Ray): Ray please I never lied to her. When need arose I may have used words that lied. The lie is not in the speaker, then, but in the words, according to this theory. From this perspective, the poet's lies are in the words, too, not in the poet. But this way madness lies, or at least the abyss of irony: Poets (be generous) prefer to conceal the truth beneath strata of irony because this is the look of truth: layered and elusive. Or beneath the strata of figurative language: Waiting coils inside her and licks and licks its paws. Or this: A cold ship moves out of harbor somewhere way inside the wife and slides off toward the flat gray horizon, not a bird not a breath in sight. Or this: But words

are a strange docile wheat are they not, they bend

to the ground. Carson's Autobiography of Red is a masterpiece of similes; here, the comparisons are rarer, and metaphor abounds—the poet's "lies" to counteract the husband's, each apparently compulsive, the latter's surely more damaging, as more truly lies. "No doubt you think this a harmless document," the narrator says of the (now ex-)husband's brief letter accompanying Ray's obituary: "Why does it melt my lungs with rage?" * One of the passages quoted above deserves some further consideration: Poets (be generous) prefer to conceal the truth beneath strata of irony because this is the look of truth: layered and elusive. Or to abbreviate the claim in a perhaps oversimplifying way: "Poets prefer to be layered and elusive." This might provide a tool for understanding differences between poets about what poetry's aims should be. All poets with any kind of ambition (from Ted Kooser to Ron Silliman, say) want to produce work with several "layers," work that "eludes" the reader in some way ("resists the intelligence almost successfully," as Wallace Stevens put it, though I might be misquoting the phrase). One important difference between poets lies right on the surface: how "elusive" is the immediate sense of the words? Many poets (and I number myself among them) want the top "layer" of the poems they write to be relatively transparent; their ideal is to create the "elusiveness" of poetry by allowing for further "layers" in the poem that can be explored further on the basis of that initial transparency. Many other poets (and Dieter M. Gräf, whose work I translate, is surely among them) produce a top "layer" that is in itself elusive. Instead of producing a transparent surface that can be seen through in elusive ways, they produce an opaque surface whose meanings are immediately elusive. For me, the key issue with the poets whose top "layer" is transparent is whether or not the poem generates any elusive "depth" at all. If all there is to it is the immediate meaning of the words, without any "strata" (whether of irony or of something else), then the poem is a banal failure. In contrast, for me, the key issue with the poets whose top "layer" is itself elusive is whether or not that immediate "layer" provides any sort of compensation for the absence of such immediacy of meaning, be it musical (metrical energy, alliteration, rhyming), paradoxical (counterintuitive moments, for example), allusive (distorted but recognizable variations on cliches or quotations, say), or formal in the most general sense (Ernst Jandl's "ottos mops," say, whose only vowel is "o"). In either case, if the poem does not offer some kind of immediacy to me, then it cannot draw me into its layers; it cannot lead me to chase down what eludes me. It is not enough for the surface to promise depth; the surface itself needs to make me interested in pursuing whatever depth is there. That's why—to choose a poet famous for his "obscurity," and one of my favorite poets—I love the poetry of Paul Celan: the surface meaning of a Celan poem may not be immediately apparent, but his poems always offer some sort of immediacy to the reader, as in the opening of "Corona" (with Michael Hamburger's translation): Aus der Hand frißt der Herbst mir sein Blatt: wir sind Freunde. Wir schälen die Zeit aus den Nüssen und lehren sie gehn: die Zeit kehrt zurück in die Schale. Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends. From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk: then time returns to the shell. The immediate "meaning" of the lines may, in a narrow sense, be obscure, but the poem offers so much to the reader at an immediate level: the vivid, powerful image of "autumn" seen as an animal eating from the speaker's hand; the alliteration of "frißt" and "Freunde", of "Hand" und "Herbst"; the assonance of "lehren" and "kehrt"; the cyclical quality of the image doubling the cyclical implication of any reference to seasons. I may not immediately know what Celan is talking about, but I am immediately drawn into the poem, and I want to pursue what initially eludes me. Or to put it another way, I feel something when I read the poem, and the feeling derives from its "immediacies," and the feeling is what makes me want to understand the poem with my intelligence. But as a reader, it's often enough to just be able to feel it, to sense that the poem promises more without necessarily actually pinning down what that more is. And since responses to poems are grounded in feelings (which includes the feelings one has when using one's reason), the "layered elusiveness" of any given poem rarely opens up for all its readers. "From the nuts, we shell time": before we shell a poem, it has to make us want to shell it, and all readers choose different poems to shell. And the best poems of all are like Celan's "time": after we have "taught them to walk," they "return to the shell."

Sappho, translated by Willis Barnstone

After Horace came Sappho. Not historically, of course, but after I read Horace, I wanted more classics, and it came down to the Aeneid (which I am saving for the summer) or Sappho (since I didn't want to reread Homer or Ovid's Metamorphoses, the other Greeks and Romans on my shelves).

Willis Barnstone's translations of the Sapphic fragments are simply beautiful, and Sappho is (surprise!) a truly exhilarating writer:

Some say cavalry and others claim
infantry or a fleet of long oars
is the supreme sight on the black earth.
I say it is

the one you love.

But the bits of her work that are left are all touched with the melancholy of fragments. The few apparently complete poems that have survived 2,500 years are, like the one I just quoted, so brilliant that I cannot help but be saddened by the loss of all the other brilliant poems she must have written. Barnstone calls one of the most famous poems "Seizure":

To me he seems like a god
as he sits facing you and
hears you near as you speak
softly and laugh

in a sweet echo that jolts
the heart in my ribs. For now
as I look at you my voice
is empty and

can say nothing as my tongue
cracks and slender fire is quick
under my skin. My eyes are dead
to light, my ears

pound, and sweat pours over me.
I convulse, greener than grass,
and feel my mind slip as I
go close to death,

yet, being poor, must suffer
everything.

I wonder, wonder, wonder what the rest of this poem said:

Come, holy tortoise shell, my lyre,
speak to me and find your voice.

Or this, which, like so many passages in Horace, reveals so much about the world Sappho lived in, without trying to tell us anything in that "informational" way at all:

Dika, take some shoots of dill and loop them
with your tender hands about your lovely hair.
The blessed Graces love her who wears flowers
but turn their backs on one who goes plain.

I mentioned Horace's reference to the purple dyes of Sidon; Sappho refers to them, too:

My mother always said
that in her youth she was
exceedingly in fashion

wearing a purple ribbon
looped in her hair.
But the girl whose hair is yellower

than torchlight need wear no
colorful ribbons from Sardis
or some Ionian city. A

garland of fresh flowers will do.

These are just a few examples of the wonderful moments in Barstone's versions. I'll just put one more in, because it turned out to play such a central role in the next book I read after Sappho, Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet:

Like a sweet apple reddening on the high
tip of the topmost branch and forgotten
by the pickers-no, beyond their reach.

Like a hyacinth crushed in the mountains
by shepherds; lying trampled on the earth
yet blooming purple.

For All We Know

The maitre d’ was looking at us in a funny way
as if he caught the drift I sought between the lines you spoke.

Here, in "Second Time Around," the first poem in Ciaran Carson's For All We Know (a perfect example of a verse novel, but one the author has not called that himself), Carson's narrator pursues various ways in which meaning can be elsewhere (anywhere but here, that is): "between the lines you spoke" (a traditional example of meaning being elsewhere), but "the drift I sought" there (trying to find the meaning in what another person says), while the waiter seems to have "caught [that] drift" (trying to find the meaning in a conversation one overhears).

Carson continues with words "insinuating something else," again embedded in the dialogue between the speaker and his conversation partner:

For one word never came across as just itself, but you
would put it over as insinuating something else.

The particular "insinuations" of this couple's conversations are the issue here, not the general philosophical-literary-linguistic problem of slippery language. This is made even clearer in the image that follows:

Then slowly, slowly we would draw in on one another
until everything was implicated like wool spooled

from my yawning hands as you wound the yarn into a ball.

This "drawing in on one another" complicates the previous image of "you" talking and "me" listening, in the process rendering another cliché vivid: after "between the lines," the idea of a story as a "yarn" is suddenly much more complex, involving wool, hands, and the winding of a ball of yarn.

This imagery begins a story that is "told slant," to echo Emily Dickinson. The central event is the couple's first meeting, which does not get presented until halfway through the first section of the book, in "Fall," where they have just "exchanged names" when "the bomb went off at the end of the block":

... and drowned all

conversation. All the more difficult to find the words
for what things have been disrupted by aftershock and shock,

a fall of glass still toppling from the astonished windows,
difficult to ponder how we met, if it was for this.

The line about the "fall of glass" took my breath away while I was reading and was my initial reason to quote this passage, but of course it also plays into the theme of uncertain, ambiguous meaning that opens the book.

Shortly thereafter, "Birthright" explores the identities one tries to establish for oneself and the identity that one is finally unable to abandon:

For all that you assumed a sevenfold identity
the mark of your people's people blazes on your forehead.

The malleability of meanings ends up running into the immutable identity one receives at birth: being Irish, being Catholic or Protestant. Still, "whatever happens to you next is nothing personal."

When you begin Part Two of For All We Know, something will seem familiar: the title of the first poem, which is again called "Second Time Around." In fact, the poems in the second part of the book have the same titles as those in the first, in the same sequence. This doubling allows Carson to explore what is "between the lines" further, as the second poem always reflects (if often only indirectly) back on the first.

That does not keep the individual poems from standing out on their own terms. In the second poem called "Treaty," for example, the poem's "you" tells the narrator about growing up "between languages": "My mother spoke one tongue to me, my father another." This resonates with me, though not because of my own upbringing—my wife and I are raising bilingual children. And the resonance is increased when the speaker later adds: "When I learned to write, that was another language again." My children learn English and German at home, and Basel German dialect at day care, then learn to write in German at school, so their layering is similar to that of the speaker's experience here.

The doublings of the poems through the repetitions of the titles is most explicit in the pair of poems called "The Shadow." Echoing a scene from the beginning of the film "The Lives of Others," in which Ulrich Mühe is lecturing to future Stasi officers, the first poem begins:

You know how you know when someone's telling lies? you said. They
get their story right every time, down to the last word.

Whereas when they tell the truth, it's never the same twice. They
reformulate.

The poem later refers to Herman Hesse's The Glass-Bead Game, which becomes the central topic of the longer, second poem called "The Shadow":

It's like this, you said. Those who play the Glass Bead Game don't know
there's a war on they're so wrapped up in themselves and their game.

I've discussed this book at some length in order to more than simply say "get this, it's brilliant." But that's what I want to say in a nutshell. Like his namesake Anne Carson in Autobiography of Red, Ciaran Carson has used the narrative form to channel his playful, explosive side into a shape whose power only increases as one continues reading. In the past, I have always been impressed by C. Carson's work, but not moved. This book is deeply moving, and it concludes with an allusion to a deeply moving film that is just as elusive, Hiroshima mon amour:

You woke up one morning and said, I must go to Nevers.

All that's left after this second poem called "Je reviens" is the concluding poem, "Zugzwang," built, like the first "Zugzwang," around a long, Dante-esque simile. Six times the speaker begins couplets with "as" before concluding:

so I return to the question of those staggered repeats
as my memories of you recede into the future.

*

For All We Know is the Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2008. I've read the recommendations already, too:

Jen Hadfield, Nigh-No-Name
Julie O'Callaghan, Tell Me This Is Normal
Stephen Romer, The Yellow Studio
Kathryn Simmonds, Sunday at the Skin Launderette

Hadfield's book (the first one I read) struck me as quite flat, except for two excellent cat poems at the end. That was a disappointing start, but things got better through the rest of the Recommendations and then Carson's book.

Stephen Romer is another expat, an English poet who is a professor in Tours. His Yellow Studio is a book full of excellent details, along with a goodly number of strong individual poems. There's a fullness to his writing that makes it resonant even with the poems that are not as strong individually.

there were tears, along with tequilas ... ("Recognition")

He requires a definition // and all we can give him are instances... ("A Bridgehead of Sorts")

O'Callaghan's book is a "New and Selected," so it would have been quite startling to have the book seem as flat Hadfield's collection; after all, you should have a certain degree of quality to reach the stage of a "selected poems"! And her book is quite strong. The poems are often quite humorous: "Life is way too short / for blasé colours" ("Spring Robe"). Or a description of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing, in "Saturday Afternoon in Dublin":

Dietrich, meanwhile, has moved on to a beautiful, sad,
song with harps—I'm glad I don't know any German—
it's even sadder hearing words sung
that make no sense.
He says, "Ja, ja," better than anyone.

O'Callaghan was born and raised in Chicago, but lives in Ireland, so it's no surprise, I guess, that she has some expatriate poems that move this expatriate (born in Detroit, living in Switzerland), such as "Home," which you can read all of here (scroll down a bit). The reverse of being an expat is the experience of being back where you raised and finding things different, if only in the slightest ways, as in the poem "Sipper Lids," where O'Callaghan describes not having known what to do with the sipper lid on her hot cup of coffee to go!

In her debut Sunday at the Skin Launderette, Kathryn Simmonds demonstrates that she is a great lister—in fact, though her lists are always convincing and interesting, she demonstrates her skill with lists a tad too often. Still, when her lists are not the whole poem, but are fully embedded in scenes, then the poems work exceedingly well, as in "The Men I Wish I'd Kissed," or even more so in "The Woman Who Worries Herself to Death" and "Handbag Thief." And "Tate Modern" is a memorable poem about contemporary art, as the speaker discovers at the end of the poem that the installation she had liked best (with its abandoned coffee cup, stepladder, and tools, among other things) was a room that was "out of use," that is, closed for renovation.

All in all, not a bad set of Choice and Recommendations: a superb Choice (Carson), two very strong collections (O'Callaghan's and Romer's), one promising debut (Simmonds), and only one book that left me flat (Hadfield's).

(One thing I've noticed: write about a collection by an American poet, and you're bound to find lots of on-line poems to link to. British and Irish poets do not publish as many poems in advance, so many fewer end up on-line as possible links for a blog review!)

Everwine; Idling

I liked this poem, "Aubade in Autumn," by Peter Everwine, in the October 15, 2007, issue of The New Yorker. They've got something going about handymen right now (as with Cornelius Eady's "Handymen"). Alice Quinn's farewell theme? :-)

*

The same issue contained a "Talk of the Town" item about letting your car idle, "Idle Hands." It includes a reference to car-engine idling in Switzerland (or the supposed lack thereof):

'“In Switzerland you have to turn your engine off if you’re more than four cars behind the stoplight,” Rebecca Kalin, the group’s founder, said the other day. “Idling is rude there. It’s like burping—you just don’t do it.”'

Well, actually, idling is not illegal in Basel-Stadt, the canton I live in. But it is in Geneva, which is why Irène Jacob turns off her car at the stoplight in Kieslowski's "Red."

But I turn off the car whenever I am at a stoplight. For reasons, check here and here and here. And before you say, "But you should only turn it off if you are going to be idling for ten seconds or more," here's my response to that: I might have the engine off for less than 10 seconds once in a while, but considering how often I am at a stoplight for a minute or two, my turnoff time averages to well over 10 seconds per time I turn my engine off.

The Presumed Politics of Poets

Some people argue that a preference for particular aesthetic forms implies a preference for a particular politics. For a complete dismantling of one such argument, see this post by Robert Archambeu. He defends Geoffrey Hill, Anne Carson, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg against the accusation that their poetry is — not "elitist" but "fascist."

I am on record as a fan of Hill's work; a line from his "Improvisations for Hart Crane" (quoted in the post I just provided a link to) nicely captures how what I like works for me: "Thou canst grasp nothing except through appetite." Appetite (or pleasure), that is, is the first step in grasping (or understanding) poems—not just "difficult" poems, but any poems (Reginald Shepherd made some insightful remarks along these lines, and on pleasure and judgment, too).

As for Anne Carson, I am also on record as a fan of her Autobiography of Red, one of the best of the verse novels I have read (the most recent of my posts on this subject is on Rosellen Brown, but I will have more to say about it at some point, maybe when the semester is over). When Carson goes into storytelling mode, as in AoR or the extraordinary "Glass Essay" from Glass, Irony, and God, all her supposed "difficulty" disappears, because I find myself drawn into the work "before" the question of difficulty ever arises, as it were.

Verse novels

I was telling my Mom about what I have been reading lately, and I mentioned having re-read Glyn Maxwell's latest book, "The Sugar Mile," which is a verse novel. She asked me to suggest a few verse novels for "an avid reader". Here are my favorites among the contemporary verse novels I have read over the past seven or eight years:

Les Murray, Fredy Neptune
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Brad Leithauser, Darlington's Fall
Glyn Maxwell, Time's Fool
Glyn Maxwell, The Sugar Mile
John Barr, Grace

The one that I do not recommend at all is W.S. Merwin's "The Folding Cliffs," which is dramatically weakened by Merwin's standard practice of using no punctuation at all! That may be okay in shorter poems, but it is exhausting over hundreds of pages.

Of the six listed above, I had an interesting experience regarding two of them: Fredy Neptune and Time's Fool. Both of these are hugely entertaining books, but when I thought about re-reading them, I found myself unable (in the case of FN) or unwilling (in the case of TF) to do so. They are long, rich books, but once felt like enough -- the thought of reading them again was exhausting!

It's possible that I made the mistake of re-reading Fredy Neptune with the idea of writing about it. That slowed the reading down enough that it dragged and I staggered to a halt. Also, as I am now re-reading a lot of Maxwell, I am getting more interested in the idea of re-reading TF.

If you read this and know of some other good verse novels, please list them in the comments! I love them!