Anne Carson

(An update for The New Quarterly's Who's Reading What page)

I'm reading Anne Carson. A lot of Anne Carson.

About a year ago, I saw her on television, reading �Short Talk on Walking Backward,� from the book Short Talks. She stunned me. We poets have been too caught up in William Carlos Williams's pronouncement: �No Ideas But in Things.� Oh, but why not ideas, why not? They are so amazing:

Short Talk on Walking Backward**

My mother taught me never to walk backward. That is how the dead walk, she said. I don't know where she got this idea; perhaps from a bad translation. The dead do not walk backward, but they do walk behind us. They long for us to turn around and look at them with love. They are victims of love, many of them.

There's not a Thing in that. And yet, it has a force of oracle, of revelation.

So I picked up Short Talks, which was reprinted by Brick Books a last year. I found God, Glass, and Irony in a used bookstore. James gave me the book of translation If Not: Winter (Fragments of Sappho) for Valentine's day, and I just found Men in the Off Hours on a remainder table.

I could take Carson a desert cure for obsession with the crafts -- sometimes I think consumptions -- of contemporary poetry, including mine: soundscapes, line breaks, lyricism (in the sense of music). She has a poem in Off Hours that opens: �Freud spent the summer of 1876 in Trieste / researching hermaphroditism in eels.� Not promising, by today's standards. If I came across it in the New Quaterly submissions pile I'd be skeptical, though I'd keep reading -- I mean, who needs alliteration or slant rhyme or the perfect line break if you've got Freud and eels? And I'd be glad I had kept reading:

�All the eels I've cut open are of the tenderer sex,� he reported after the first 400. Meanwhile

the �young goddesses� of Trieste were proving
unapproachable.
�Since

it is not permitted
to dissect human beings
I have in fact nothing to do with them,� he confided in a letter.

On the back of Men in the Off Hours, the New York Times Review of Books proclaims �Carson writes in a language any poet would kill for.� Kill what, exactly? I might manage small-animal sacrifice. Maybe we could work something out.

Anyone reading my poetry over the last year may notice how much more ready I am explore ideas -- even highly abstract ones, like the origins of language. That's Carson. I think I owe her this -- by way of a public thank you.

**For the moment, "Short Talk on Walking Backward" is quoted from memory -- when I find my copy of Short Talks, I'll check it. I think it's close but I'm not sure about the second-to-last sentence. Anyone else out there have a copy? Check it for me?