I like the way Anne Carson begins “Men in the Off Hours” (2000): “I like the way Thucydides begins his account of the hostilities between Athenians and Peloponnesians that we call the Peloponnesian War.”
This was the seventh book by Carson — the Canadian poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday — but the first I encountered, assigned to read it in a poetry workshop in college. My professor might as well have assigned us to be baffled and amazed.
And I was. What was this, this sentence, in what looked like an essay from every angle, from the (mock?) scholarly title (“Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War”) to the block quotes to the unfolding thesis: War warps time, but differently for everyone, for children and old people (“Time embraces youth, youth embraces war”), women and men (“Even in the off hours, men know marks”). Yet it is short, for an essay — six pages that cover two millenniums — and is followed by an epitaph, a four-line poem.
The fourth piece in the book, “New Rule,” is a page of tercets about a squirrel (“I saw a squirrel jump and skid./Is this scary? he seemed to say”) and being jilted (“Not enough spin on it, said my true love/when he left in our fifth year”).
“Do you fear the same things as/I fear?” the speaker asks the squirrel. “A snail is a snail,” Carson writes in that first “essay” — is fear fear?
The fifth, called “Sumptuous Destitution,” is in couplets, kind of; every other line is a quote from one of Emily Dickinson’s letters to Thomas Higginson, followed by a loud citation, their full names spelled out each time: “(Emily Dickinson letter 319 to Thomas Higginson)” etc. These citations are longer, as lines, if they’re lines, than Carson’s own lines. One sentence is broken into five small parts (“‘Sumptuous destitution’/is a phrase/scholars use/of female/silence”), further broken up by ED’s interruptions. And is that even true?
Here, in these few pages from the middle of her career, we get a microcosmic sense of almost everything Carson is capable of and interested in. She has mind-boggling range and formal audacity, the power to bring out the poemhood in any prose genre (a story, a lecture, a play) and to complicate the poemhood of poems (what are lines?).
She mixes everything together in a casual defiance suggesting literature is always and never true, an art of fact. She translates meaning not just across language but across gapes of time, making ancient texts sound just-spoken. (Here is Elektra, in her “Orestes”: “Yes well, so it goes.”) She has an ever-present humor that can modulate from bitterest, dry-rag-dragging-on-dry-wood wit to full comedy. She likes to write about animals, gender, grief and suffering, human folly, love and war. She may be the easiest difficult poet, toying with obscurity but too hilarious to be truly intimidating.
Carson’s first book, “Eros the Bittersweet,” published in 1986, was a version of her doctoral thesis, a work of criticism. Her second was the first that could reasonably be read as poetry: “Short Talks,” released in 1992. Each piece in it is a prose block that takes on a single supposed subject: “Short Talk on Ovid.” “Short Talk on Rain.” If these are talks, they’re the shortest conceivable talks, several sentences each that could be voiced during the period most speakers spend opening their water bottle and taking a sip. These ironic little fictions or nonfictions could almost be labeled jokes, à la the one about walking backward: “My mother forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation.”
In aggregate they constitute an argument about how to talk: say as little as possible, as densely as possible, to justify speaking on a topic at all, whether it’s hopes or trout or Van Gogh: “When he looked at the world he saw the nails that attach colors to things and he saw that the nails were in pain.” Be the most fascinating person in the room for a couple of minutes.
A classicist by training, Carson achieved a new level of fame with her verse novel “Autobiography of Red” (1998), which imagines the winged monster Geryon from Greek myth as a gay teenager. The poem is composed in alternating short and long lines:
Geryon’s mother turned to knock her cigarette ash on the sink then faced Geryon again. He was seated at the kitchen table with his camera in front of his face adjusting the focus. He did not answer. He had recently relinquished speech.
This see-sawing has the effect of a constant reminder, an alarm always waking you up: Novel or not, this is a poem. Don’t be lulled into a prose state of mind.
Carson’s recent work is as playful as ever, as funny and sad and perplexing. “Wrong Norma” (2024) has the everything’s-possible quality of “Men in the Off Hours.” There’s a sestina with a scholarly appendix, a translation of a speech from Symposium, a new short talk, a tiny speculative crime novella (“Thret,” Parts I-III) in which the narrator befriends a helpful carrion crow named Short Pants: “Short Pants had a good sense of coda.”
These 15 pages make a strong introduction to Carson’s whole thing, the sketch that holographically projects all of tragicomic life. “I have always felt stunted by my own loneliness,” Carson writes, toward the end of Part II, “but now this strikes me as inaccurate, or the answer to a question that has not been asked. What do answers answer anyway.”
Looking back on 25 years of readership, I find I can’t overstate the influence Carson has had on me. Those first 10 or so pages were sufficiently rich in beauty and shock to change a young poet wanting change. She seemed, then and now, to offer an entirely new model of what a poet could be, what a poetry book could contain. And her body of work demonstrates the dazzling scales a writer can achieve while staying basically the same, an isotropic infinite universe from a big bang.
The post Why Anne Carson, the New Nobel Laureate, Is the Easiest Difficult Poet appeared first on New York Times.
