The secret formula, soon no longer to be secret, of my intellectual formation, is that it has for the most part consisted in a succession of remote tutelages under women a generation or so older than I, who work in no easily categorizable genre of scientific or literary or creative production, and whom I aspire, in certain ways, to be like. It is something like a unidirectional erotic distance-learning, a mixture of Plato's Symposium and the University of Phoenix. Here, the erotic, I should probably have to underline for you modern readers, is not some sexual pay-off, but an impulse, an aspiration-towards.
Anne Carson is perhaps foremost among these ideals. Here is what I like about her: she goes down into the language that goes down into the real predicament to which poetry is a response. Consider these lines from her 'Glass Essay' of the early 1990s:
I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air.
It could have been just a pole with some old cloth attached,
but as I came closer
I saw it was a human body
trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off
the bones.
And there was no pain.
The wind
was cleansing the bones.
They stood forth silver and necessary.
It was not my body, not a woman's body, it was the body of us all.
It walked out of the light.
'Silver and necessary' made me think of walking through snow-covered meadows between my office and home, on moon-lit nights, and of how my bones are always there on these walks, and part of the very same composition. With this phrase alone she left me convinced me that I am myself a mediocre poet precisely to the extent that I had hitherto failed to notice that it is bones, and not ideas or sentiments, that reveal what a human life is like, or rather what is necessary to a human life, as well as the luminescent qualities of that necessary thing.
Carson goes down into language that goes down into being, but it never stops being, at the same time, a joke. This is most clear in her 'Book of Isaiah', which tells, more vividly than scripture itself, of the peculiar triangulation of God and man and woman, all with Carson's characteristically funny and enviable understanding of the insides of ancient languages:
Notice whenever God addresses Isaiah in a feminine singular verb
something dazzling is
about to happen.
Isaiah what do you know about women? asked God.
Down Isaiah's nostrils bounced woman words:
Blush. Stink. Wife. Fig. Sorceress--
God nodded.
This is no 'women's poet', Anne Carson. This is a poet who not only faces up to, but draws her very force from the accrued stereotypes and prototypes of millennia of violence, of men against men and of men against women (quite a bit less of the third possible form).
Carson understands that in order to descend into the language that descends into the predicament that necessitates poetry, one needs to descend into the body and its excretions. The culmination of God's peculiar and dysfunctional relationship with Isaiah comes when the latter is transformed (reduced) to the feminine state through the onset of lactation, a power that in the end will serve as a life-force that courses through all of nature. The comical travesty (in the proper sense of that word, that lies hidden in the way we speak of RuPaul and Divine) of a man condemned by God to sprout jugs, turns into a celebration of nature's own self-generativity:
Isaiah sank to a kneeling position.
New pain! said Isaiah.
New contract! said God.
Isaiah lifted his arms, milk poured out his breasts.
Isaiah watched the milk pour like strings.
It poured up the Branch and across history and down into people's lives and time.
The milk made Isaiah forget about righteousness.
As he fed the milk to small birds and animals Isaiah thought only about their little lips.
God meanwhile continued to think about male and female.
(Incidentally, I myself have written about a case described by the 16th-century physician Santorio Sanctorius, in the annals of early modern medicine, of a widower with an infant child who, by force of imagination, caused himself to lactate.)
Carson calls the collection I've been discussing Glass, Irony & God. I take it that the glass is the words like 'silver' and 'necessary' and 'bone', the words by which Carson descends by language into the predicament to which poetry is a response. The irony is the grasp of language, and the way she never lets you forget that as she descends into the silvery and necessary, she is always just playing with language, playing, that is, as a virtuoso performer, on the foundation of a rigorous mastery of the classical languages. (God seems to move between these two poles: something that has mostly to do with language, something ripe for a good linguistic joke or playful mixing of speech registers, even if tradition portrays Him as something of silvery necessity.)
The dependency of the classical themes of poetry upon the contingent features of language --a dependency that cannot but be generative of humor-- comes through most vividly in what I believe is my favorite piece by Carson, her so-called 'Drop't Sonnet'. The poem concerns the extinction of a special form for the second-person singular pronoun in English, and how this prevents her from refering to 'the streaming downspout of voodoo pine' that she had experienced in a love affair as --in relation to the lover-- thine. Languages are always changing, but a poet can't help but experience the present state of her language as impoverished, as in need of revitalization by an excavation of the past. No one of late has undertaken this excavatory task more rigorously than Carson.
