Poetry Reviews
Short Talks
by Anne Carson
London, ON: Brick Books, 2015
75 pp, $20
Riffs
by Dennis Lee
London, ON: Brick Books, 2015
105 pp, $20
It would be difficult to imagine two poets whose lives and work share similar origins but whose careers have experienced such divergent trajectories as Anne Carson and Dennis Lee. Both hail from Ontario, attended the University of Toronto, and published poetry collections with Brick Books in the early 1990s. But, for the most part, the similarities end there. They do share a penchant for humor, though their styles differ severely. Carson is witty, and dry; Lee is exuberant, bawdy, Whitmanian at points. Nevertheless, Brick Books’ recent re-release of Lee’s Riffs (1993) and Carson’s Short Talks (1992) begs readers to examine these books in tandem, through the curatorial perspective, yes, of Brick Books’ Classics series, but also through the lenses of time, oeuvre, and contemporaneity. While one might experience either of these texts in isolation, their placement within each poet’s developmental arc—coupled with their temporal position in North American literary history—frame them as analogs for two radically diverse strains of poetic ingenuity. Each equally captures its author’s idiosyncrasies, and in so doing, challenges the boundaries of poetic production as we know it, then and now.
Upon its release, readers generally considered Short Talks a collection of prose poems. Taken on its own, I suppose it is. The titles (“Short Talk on […]”) suggest their oratorical nature and the pieces do at points read essayistically: “A mythical animal,” writes Carson, “the vicuña fares well in the volcanic regions of northern Peru” (“Short Talk on Vicuñas”). Really, little about these writings characterizes them as conventionally ‘poetic.’ Humor, however, persists throughout the book, and the Talks are so pithy, it’s easy to see them as poems. “Short Talk on Gertrude Stein About 9:30 PM” reads in its entirety: “How curious. I had no idea! Today has ended.” Moreover, the period’s poetry circles were growing increasingly open to genre hybridity. This was the era, on the one hand, of Jorie Graham’s The End of Beauty (1987), which pushed the absolute limits of how a line could appear and act on the page. In 1992, James Thomas’ Flash Fiction anthology was released, giving rise to a subgenre of prose that quite closely resembled the prose poem. (M.F.A. students are still working out those distinctions.) It only made sense, then. These were prose poems, and Carson was a poet. In fact, today’s poetry community continues to most emphatically embrace her work, despite Carson’s resistance to generic classification.
In retrospect, Short Talks’ categorical defiance is part and parcel to Carson’s oeuvre. Since 1992, little of her writing has properly conformed to the conventions of poetry, essay, or fiction, per se. “The Glass Essay” (1992), for instance, is written in verse, and reads more or less like a poem, but the title delineates it as an essay and it does consider its subject matter in an investigative, essayistic manner. Her most celebrated work, The Autobiography of Red (1999), and its 2013 sequel, Red Doc>, have been marketed as novels in verse, but given their engagement with Stesicheros’ fragments—and with the process of translating them—even this categorization seems insufficient.[1] Then, of course, there’s Nox (2010), which combines translations, poetic fragments, letters, photographs and visual art. The book—if we can properly call it a “book”—conforms to many of the generic conventions of the pastoral elegy (searching, rehearsal, attempts to fashion a daedal substitute for the deceased), but does so very much in Carson’s signature a-generic manner. Thus, what Brick Books calls Carson’s “first collection of poems” seems less an inaugural compilation of her poetic endeavors as an inkling into the increasingly diverse opus of a funny, creative, and rigorously intellectual verbal artist.
Short Talks begins with an odd but formal “Introduction”: “Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story, Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else.” These first four sentences key readers in to some of Short Talks’ central themes: Carson’s subjects, though diverse, are inseparable—intrinsically, if tenuously, connected. Each “pushes,” or prompts, another of the Talks. They are, moreover, words that describe the “facts” and “faces,” that fix phenomena in language, preserving theirs accounts for posterity and offering, for the writer, a mode of investigation. This minor apologia is significant, since Carson’s subjects are so diverse. I imagine one of the major challenges in constructing this book was making its myriad pieces cohere, a feat Carson accomplishes with ostensible ease. More importantly, however, it allows her to highlight the emphasis on inquiry and intellectual pursuit evident in nearly all of her writing, from the searching effort crucial to the process of translation; the seeking and eventual rehabituation necessary to mourning; and, most essential, an elemental and unadulterated desire for knowledge. Indeed, Carson notes in the introduction, “I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough […] you can never work enough.”
Perhaps Short Talks’ most endearing quality—and what allows this collection specifically to endure, despite her myriad subsequent publications—is Carson’s sense of humor. In fact, humor is the very characteristic that allows readers to dismiss the non-poetic generic indicators—the titles and the essayistic language—as tongue-in-cheek gestures aimed at undermining the self-seriousness of her academic subject matter. (The Talks consider Kafka, Van Gogh, and Friedrich Hölderlin, for example.) Carson’s humor is tempered with sentiment, which is what renders it so affective. Take, for instance, “Short Talk on Reading”:
Some fathers hate to read but love to take the family on trips. Some children hate trips but love to read. Funny how often these find themselves passengers in the same automobile. I glimpsed the stupendous clear-cut shoulders of the Rockies from between paragraphs of Madame Bovary […] Since those days I do not look at hair on female flesh without thinking, Deciduous?
The association at the passage’s end is strange, but true. It’s oddity makes it funny, but there’s a relatability to the passage as well. Who hasn’t conceived some eccentric, apparently useless associative connection between two things? It’s how mnemonics work. But those factors are emotively underscored by the situation at hand, and by the subsequent truth readers glean from examining it closely. The speaker—the “child” of the poem—does not want to be in the car; she loves to read. The father hates what she loves (i.e., “reading”), but loves what she hates (long car rides). There’s an estrangement there that we can all relate to on some level, but that this speaker in particular conveys with powerful clarity, despite the ironic detachment produced by the passage’s comedic final turn. Moments like this one are the most powerful in Short Talks. It’s what I love about Carson still.
