Issue 171, Fall 2004
Anne Carson and I first met in 1988 at a writers’ workshop in Canada, and have been reading each other’s work ever since. The interview that follows is a mix of our usual conversation and discussion about topics that preoccupy Carson’s work—mysticism, antiquity, obsession, desire.
Carson was born on June 21, 1950, in Toronto, the second and final child of Margaret and Robert Carson. Her mother was a housewife; her father worked for the Toronto Dominion Bank. During her childhood, the family moved about from bank to bank in small Ontario towns like Stoney Creek, Port Hope, Timmins.
In the 1970s Carson studied classics at the University of Toronto and then ancient Greek with the renowned classical scholar Kenneth Dover at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In 1981, she returned to the University of Toronto to write a Ph.D. dissertation on Sappho, which later became Eros the Bittersweet— a brief, dense treatise on lack’s centrality to desire. Today, Carson lives in Ann Arbor, where she teaches classics and comparative literature at the University of Michigan.
Although she has always been reluctant to call herself a poet, Carson has been writing some heretic form of poetry almost all her life. Her work is insistent and groundbreaking, a blend of genres and styles that for years failed to attract notice. In the late eighties, a few literary magazines in the United States began to publish her work. Canadian venues were considerably less welcoming, and it was not until Carson was forty-two that a small Canadian pub- lisher, Brick Books, published her first book of poems, Short Talks.
By the mid-nineties, Carson was no longer trying to find publishers; rather, publishers were clamoring to find her. In short order, three collections of poems and essays appeared—Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (1995); Glass, Irony and God (1995); Men in the Off Hours (2000)—as well as a verse novel, Autobiography of Red (1998), which seamlessly blends Greek myth, homosexuality, and small-town Ontario life. Two ostensibly academic books followed: Economy of the Unlost and her translation of Sappho’s poetry, If Not, Winter, both in 2002.
Awards and accolades came tumbling in: a Guggenheim Fellowship (1995); a Lannan Award (1996); the Pushcart Prize (1997); a MacArthur Fellowship (2000); and the Griffin Prize for Poetry (2001). In 2002 Carson became the first woman to receive England’s T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos.
For the past several years, Carson has been working on a spoken-word opera about three women mystics—Aphrodite, the fourteenth-century French heretic Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil. Next year, Random House will publish Decreation—the eponymously titled opera—alongside new poems and essays.
We started the following interview just after Christmas in 2002. Exhausted by the joyous demands of the season, Carson stretched out on an orange velveteen sofa and we talked—fortified by cups of oolong tea—for several hours.
INTERVIEWER
I want to start with your poem “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions.” There’s a line in there that stopped me right in the middle: “My personal poetry is a failure.” It made me wonder two things: What do you call your personal poetry? And do you really feel it’s a failure or is that just the poem’s persona talking?
CARSON
Well, I think there are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don’t say what I want them to say. And that’s true of the persona in the poem, but it’s also true of me as me.
INTERVIEWER
When you look back on “The Glass Essay,” for example, do you consider it a personal poem? Do you see it as a failure?
CARSON
I see it as a messing around on an upper level with things that I wanted to make sense of at a deeper level. I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts—to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life. But when I wrote “The Glass Essay,” I also wanted to do something that I would call understanding what life feels like, and I don’t believe I did.
I also don’t know what it would be to do that, but if you read Virginia Woolf or George Eliot, there’s a fragrance of understanding you come away with—this smell in your head of having gone through something that you understood with the people in the story. When I think about my writing, I don’t feel that.
INTERVIEWER
Is that because it’s still part of your ongoing personal experience?
CARSON
Well, that’s possible. But how can one ever judge those things?
INTERVIEWER
Or that it might be a failure to you, but a success for everybody else who picks it up?
CARSON
I think so, because this capturing of the surface of emotional fact is useful for other people in that it jolts them into thinking, into doing their own act of understanding. But I still don’t think I finished the thinking.
INTERVIEWER
There’s another line in “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions”—“I want to be unbearable”—that strikes me as exact and expressive of you as a writer.
CARSON
I remember that sentence driving at me in the dark like a glacier. I felt like a ship going toward the South Pole and then all of a sudden a glacier comes zooming out of the dark, and I just took it down. I appreciate that it’s accurate of what I both have and choose to have as my effect on people. I don’t know exactly why that’s the case.
INTERVIEWER
You once said you meant unbearable in a metaphysical sense.
CARSON
Well, yes, it couldn’t be physical, could it? Unless I went around hammering people.
INTERVIEWER
There are those days.
CARSON
With sharp objects. It’s true, that’s why I go to boxing class, to learn those skills. But that’s just, of course, shadowboxing, as they say.
INTERVIEWER
You don’t actually get to hit anyone?
CARSON
You don’t hit anyone, no.
INTERVIEWER
But you often think about hitting someone?
CARSON
In boxing class, yes. That’s why I go. It’s always a surprise who turns up, in the mind, to be hit. It’s not usually the people you expect.
INTERVIEWER
Does your teacher encourage you to shout out names of people who are the target?
CARSON
No, but that would be a good idea.
INTERVIEWER
My teacher did that. Except I was in a class of mainly women, and they were shouting out “George” and “Fred” and “Tom,” and so I got into the spirit and yelled out, “Pierre!” There was this pause, and then all the rest of the class yelled, “Pierre!” and we all slugged Pierre for a while.
CARSON
That’s good. Being unbearable hardly ever leads to that kind of group merriment. It’s a more solitary activity. I don’t actually know what it is to be unbearable, but I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they’re both charmed by the person or the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that’s almost happening, never quite totally happening.
INTERVIEWER
A kind of glare.
CARSON
Yes, a glare from behind the set where I’m standing. So if I’m a little actor on stage, there’s this terrible glare coming from behind me. And people feel that. I don’t feel it, but I’m aware of it going past me, and I see dismay on their faces mixed with this other thing. I think that’s why sometimes I am spooky to people. Because this glare is mixed with an infantile charm that disarms. And they have to deal with both.
INTERVIEWER
But what is that glare?
CARSON
I don’t know. It’s just absolute dread. It’s bumping up against the fact that you die alone. You think about that from time to time all through life, and it continues to make no sense against all the little efforts you make to be happy and have friends and pass the time.
INTERVIEWER
Does everybody carry that glare around with them? Is it just more evident behind you?
CARSON
I think everybody can have access to it, only they mask it in different ways. I have fewer ways to mask it for some reason.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think you’ve had it all along? What was your childhood like? I know you moved around a lot.
CARSON
My father was a banker, and all bankers are itinerant in the Canadian system because it’s their policy to move managers every three years. To give them experience with different communities and kinds of banking. It’s hard on the family, good for the bank.
INTERVIEWER
So you were in a new school every three years?
CARSON
Pretty much, yes. Which I do believe added to my survival skills. I remember thinking one day as we were pulling out of the driveway, as I was waving good-bye to my best friends, whom I would never see again, I remember thinking, Well the next time I go somewhere I’m just not going to make friends; there’s really no future in it. So there was a sense of closing in, closing gates.
INTERVIEWER
You didn’t make any new friends in the next town?
CARSON
I did, but a little more gingerly as time went on. At least half of your mind is always thinking, I’ll be leaving; this won’t last. It’s a good Buddhist attitude. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I’m just sad.
INTERVIEWER
You would be well on the road to enlightenment if you were a Buddhist.
CARSON
Instead, I’ve avoided enlightenment resolutely.
INTERVIEWER
I want to talk a little bit about ancient Greece. You first started studying Greek in high school?
CARSON
Yes. Grade thirteen.
INTERVIEWER
Was it immediately apparent that it would change your life?
CARSON
Yes, immediately. Mrs. Cowan started to teach me Greek—she was our Latin teacher in high school, in Port Hope—but she also knew Greek, so she offered to teach me because she found out I was interested in it. We did it on our lunch hour.
INTERVIEWER
There wasn’t a Greek class?
CARSON
No. No one was interested except me. We read Sappho together, and it was simply revolutionary. I don’t know every language in the world—maybe if I knew Sanskrit and Chinese I would think differently—but there’s something about Greek that seems to go deeper into words than any modern language. So that when you’re reading it, you’re down in the roots of where words work, whereas in English we’re at the top of the tree, in the branches, bouncing around. It was stunning to me, a revelation. And it continues to be stunning, continues to be like a harbor always welcoming. Strange, but welcoming.
INTERVIEWER
A lot of people say the ancient Greeks are really our contemporaries. Do you agree?
CARSON
I don’t feel much direct relevance of ancient things to modern things. It was the temper of the times, in the seventies and eighties when I was getting my degree and teaching, to claim that the project of being a classicist was to find relevance in antiquity and invent courses that convinced students you could learn everything you needed to know about modern life from studying the ancient Greeks. Well, this is bizarre, to say the least. What’s entrancing about the Greeks is that you get little glimpses of similarity, embedded in unbelievable otherness, in this huge landscape of strange convictions about the world and reactions to life that make no sense at all.
INTERVIEWER
So there’s this dense otherness that you just want to find out about. Whether it’s relevant is beside the point.
CARSON
One thing I do understand about the Greeks is that they, too, understood otherness and valued it. That is what the god Dionysus is as a principle—the principle of being up against something so other that it bounces you out of yourself to a place where, nonetheless, you are still in yourself; there’s a connection to yourself as another. It’s what they call ecstasy. The Greeks invented this concept, but they also embody it for us, which may just be our utilitarian approach to them. But who can say. We are always going to be looking at the Greeks and figuring out who they are in relation to what we are. We can’t get out and be in a third place and judge both of us.
INTERVIEWER
From a nice objective place?
CARSON
There is no objective place.
INTERVIEWER
Most people are not aware that you’re a visual artist as well as a verbal artist. You make books—a single book per person. I remember once we were going through the Ontario countryside, and everything was white, and at one point you pointed off in the distance and said, “I used to live there.” I think it was Port Hope? I looked out and thought, Nobody used to live there. There was just nothing there. Then you handed me this white book that you’d made for your brother Michael after he died.
CARSON
When I go on the train from here to Toronto I always dread passing Port Hope because it was a place my family lived for six, seven years, and my parents for about fifteen years and my brother intermittently, so the book, because it’s about him, is connected to that place. But it’s a place where everyone’s life fell apart. That’s too strong. It was a place where we all, my brother and I, met the end of our adolescence. So that’s a serious order.
INTERVIEWER
So you wrote the book as a way of mourning your brother?
CARSON
Yes, I wrote the book because when my brother died I hadn’t seen him for twenty-two years. He was a mystery to me. He died suddenly in another country, and I had a need to gather up the shards of his story and make it into something containable. So it’s a lament in the sense of an attempt to contain a person after he is no longer reachable.
INTERVIEWER
And it was based on a classical lament, wasn’t it?
CARSON
It’s based on a poem of Catullus, the Roman poet, first century b.c., whose brother died in Troy when Catullus was living in Italy. Catullus traveled to Troy, in Asia Minor, and buried him and wrote a poem about him, which has the refrain in it, ave atque vale (good- bye and farewell). In my book I printed out the text of the poem, and then took it apart. I just read an article in which T. S. Eliot is quoted as saying, “Poetry is punctuation.” It was followed by a quote from Jacques Lacan: “The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom,” which I thought was totally cool. So in this book, I dismantled the Catullus poem, one word per page, and I put the Latin word and its lexical definition on the left-hand side, and then on the right-hand side a fragment of a memory of my brother’s life that related to the left-hand side of the page. Where the lexical entry didn’t relate, I changed it. So I smuggled in stuff that is somewhat inauthentic. But it makes the left and the right cohere, so that the whole thing tells the story of the translation of the poem, and also dismantles my memory of my brother’s life.
INTERVIEWER
You also used family photos—but mostly just the backgrounds. Why?
CARSON
I found that the fronts of most of our family photos look completely banal, but the backgrounds were dreadful, terrifying, and full of content. So I cut out the backgrounds, especially the parts where shadows from the people in the front fell into the back in mysterious ways. The backgrounds are full of truth.
I also used bits of text from Michael’s letters, actual pieces of the letters, some of my mother’s answers to his letters, paint, plastic, staples and other decorative items on the right-hand side. I also tried to give the book, on the left-hand side, a patina of age— because it’s supposed to be an old Roman poem—by soaking the pages in tea, which added a mysterious sepia overtone.
INTERVIEWER
I was wondering about your preference for things that are old and battered.
CARSON
In surfaces, perfection is less interesting. For instance, a page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains. Because the tea stains add a bit of history. It’s an historical attitude. After all, texts of ancient Greeks come to us in wreckage, and I admire that—the layers of time you have when looking at sheets of papyrus that were produced in the third century b.c. and then copied and then wrapped around a mummy for a couple hundred years and then discovered and put in a museum and pieced together by nine different gentlemen and put back in the museum and brought out again and photographed and put in a book. All those layers add up to more and more life. You can approximate that in your own life. Stains on clothing.
INTERVIEWER
Did making the book help you to understand your brother?
CARSON
No. I don’t think it had any effect whatsoever on my understanding. Another failure of the personal, I guess. I finally decided that understanding isn’t what grief is about. Or laments. They’re just about making something beautiful out of the ugly chaos you’re left with when someone dies. You want to make that good. And for me, making it good means making it into an object that’s exciting and beautiful to look at.
INTERVIEWER
It’s interesting that you said “object.” Because your poems feel more like objects than poems. They feel constructed, like a painting.
CARSON
Yes, that you travel inside of. I think that’s what poems are supposed to do, and I think it’s what the ancients mean by imitation. When they talk about poetry, they talk about mimesis as the action that the poem has, in reality, on the reader. Some people think that means the poet takes a snapshot of an event, and on the page you have a perfect record. But I don’t think that’s right; I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. His mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.
INTERVIEWER
So it’s an action for both the writer and the reader.
CARSON
Yes, exactly, and they share it artificially. The writer did it a long time ago, but you still feel when you’re in it that you’re moving with somebody else’s mind through an action.
INTERVIEWER
Can you remember when you first felt compelled to commit that action—when you first started writing?
CARSON
I remember one day in grade two when we had to draw pictures of a barnyard, and the teacher saying we could put a story on it if we wanted to, to explain our barnyard. That was quite a breakthrough moment. Putting the story as well as the picture together. My first book of poems, Short Talks, was initially a set of drawings with just titles. Then I expanded the titles a bit and then gradually realized nobody was interested in the drawings, so I just took the titles off and then they were pellets of a lecture.
INTERVIEWER
So the trout poem originally had drawings of trout in it?
CARSON
The trout poem has a picture of a fisherman. I have the manuscript at home, with all the drawings. No one ever liked my drawings. I don’t think I was that good. Maybe I could have been good if I drew as much as I wrote, but it’s scarier to draw. It’s more revealing. You can’t disguise yourself in drawing.
INTERVIEWER
I always assumed that because writing was your main thing, you did drawing as a kind of relaxation.
CARSON
No, I don’t.
INTERVIEWER
The writing’s a relaxation?
CARSON
It is. It’s play by comparison. Drawing is quite, quite naked. Horrifyingly naked. But I’ve always felt that if I could have forced myself to draw every day I’d be a better person. That it would pull me into an honesty and diligence about honesty that I otherwise slack off from. I also get very happy when I’m drawing—even when I was working on Michael’s book, which was a completely melancholy subject. I felt so happy, just fulfilled.
INTERVIEWER
And you never feel that when you’re writing?
CARSON
No, rarely. Maybe for a second, or a moment here or there, but not in any sustained way. It doesn’t gather up my being the way making an object does.
INTERVIEWER
So why write at all?
CARSON
I write to find out what I think about something.
INTERVIEWER
Could you talk about how you go about it?
CARSON
I work at three different desks, with a different project open on each, let’s say, so one is academic, one writerly, and one art. I go at these erratically, sometimes to all three desks within an hour. They cross-pollinate one another.
INTERVIEWER
So it’s not so much a routine as a system.
CARSON
That’s an interesting distinction. I would say that there’s a routine in that each morning I get up and go for a walk, come back, make my tea and breakfast. Then I read for an hour—I’m reading Proust right now, Un Amour de Swann, with my dictionary. Then I move to the desks. So it’s a routine at first but after that, it’s just a fluid system.
INTERVIEWER
What about the process of inspiration—what sorts of things propel you toward writing?
CARSON
Particular images begin the thinking or the work. For example, “The Glass Essay” began with staring at a frozen ditch near my mother’s house, which I think actually occurs in the poem somewhere. So some phenomenological thing gives rise to the idea.
INTERVIEWER
Do sound, smell, something you overheard on the bus also come into play?
CARSON
Yes, phrases on the bus, or phrases in dreams. Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
INTERVIEWER
You seem to work by linking things that nobody else in the world would really link or even think of linking.
CARSON
The things you think of to link are not in your control. It’s just who you are, bumping into the world. But how you link them is what shows the nature of your mind. Individuality resides in the way links are made.
INTERVIEWER
For Economy of the Unlost, what first prompted you to link Simonides—an epitaph writer who was also the first poet to get paid—to Paul Celan, who’s however many centuries later?
CARSON
You know, I could list things I saw but that’s not why I put them together, that would be an afterthought. I put them together by accident. And that’s fine, I’m happy to do things by accident. But what’s interesting to me is once the accident has happened, once I happen to have Simonides and Paul Celan on my desk together, what do I do with the link? What I do with it depends on all the thoughts I’ve had in my life up to that point and who I am at that point. It could be Simonides and celery, it doesn’t matter; it only matters insofar as I’m going to make a work of art out of it. It seems totally arbitrary on the one hand and on the other, totally particular about who I am as a thinker.
INTERVIEWER
So you familiarize yourself with one work and then the other until these initially inchoate connections start to appear?
CARSON
Yes, exactly. I have a sense of following, like a hound dog with my nose to the ground, but looking not just for a track of scent, but for a track of shapes. I think of ideas as having shapes and when I sense that two different texts or writers have the same shapes in them, I know I can bring them together.
INTERVIEWER
Once you’ve made those connections, how do you decide whether something will be poetry or prose?
CARSON
That’s impossible to say. I wouldn’t call that a decision—it’s more like smelling one’s way.
INTERVIEWER
Autobiography of Red initially smelled like prose?
CARSON
I typed out some early portion of it as prose, but it just sounded stupid—all tangled in on itself. I think I sent it to Ben Sonnenberg—he ran Grand Street then—and he said I should throw it out.
INTERVIEWER
In your books, the persona is sometimes a gay man or a gay boy. Like Autobiography of Red, where Geryon falls in love with Heracles. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your life as a gay man.
CARSON
It’s been a somewhat checkered career. I was never totally successful. I think it started in high school, when I developed a fascination with Oscar Wilde. Some of my friends shared this fascination so we used to dress like Oscar Wilde and memorize his aphorisms and construct conversations in the lunchroom, as if we were Oscar Wilde and his friends.
I can’t exactly remember why I fixated on Oscar Wilde, but I did feel that it gave me an education in aesthetic sensibility, and also a kind of irony toward myself that was useful in later life—an ongoing carapace of irony that I think lots of gay men develop in order to get through their social and personal lives, and which I found useful for myself, too.
INTERVIEWER
There’s also the persona in “The Anthropology of Water” in Plainwater.
CARSON
Oh, you think that’s a man?
INTERVIEWER
You identify yourself as a man at one point.
CARSON
That’s the other thing about being a gay man. Model yourself on Oscar Wilde and you just lie all the time.
INTERVIEWER
“Anthropology of Water” presents a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. You actually made that pilgrimage, didn’t you?
CARSON
I did walk across Spain. It’s 380 miles and it takes six weeks. I wore Saucony running shoes that were ten years old—the world’s best running shoes. I went with my friend who in the book I called El Cid.
INTERVIEWER
Did you know you wanted to turn this experience into a book?
CARSON
I was writing in little books all the way along of an evening. About the same subjects from the beginning—the walking itself, the concept of penance, and my relation to the man I was with. He’s emblematic of the kind of men who show up in my life.
INTERVIEWER
Like the self-possessed, opinionated men in a lot of your work?
CARSON
Yes, the man with the secret self. The unreachable self.
INTERVIEWER
When I was reading “Anthropology of Water,” I thought it was about you—your trip with El Cid to Compostela—at least until you suddenly say something that indicates you’re a young man.
CARSON
I see. Yes, that may be true. I haven’t read that for a while. I’m sure it is true. I guess I’ve never felt entirely female, but then probably lots of people don’t. But I think that at different times in my life I located myself in different places on the gender spectrum, and for many years, throughout my thirties, which is when I made that pilgrimage, I didn’t have any connection to the female gender. I wouldn’t say I exactly felt like a man, but when you’re talking about yourself you only have these two options. There’s no word for the “floating” gender in which we would all like to rest. The neuter gender comes up in the unbearable poem, but that doesn’t really capture it because you don’t feel neuter, you feel just wrong. Wrong vis-à-vis the gender you’re supposed to be, wrong vis-à-vis the other one, and so what are you?
Historically we use man for people of any gender because men win. So it’s useful to do that when cornered.
INTERVIEWER
You didn’t have much interest in feminism when you first came to Montreal. But then you joined a group of women who got together and read. What shifted?
CARSON
Did I do that? That was brave of me.
INTERVIEWER
At first you were skeptical, even hostile, because the other women were quite feminist. But then something happened and next I knew, you were writing about women and dirt.
CARSON
Oh, yes. Yes, true, there was some kind of a sequence there. Well, let’s see, how does that seem to me now? I think that for a long time, I was just a solipsist. It’s not really that I wasn’t a feminist, or didn’t understand feminism—I didn’t understand masculinism either — but that I just didn’t understand being human. It’s a problem of extended adolescence: You don’t know how to be yourself as a part of a category, so you just have to be yourself as a completely strange individual and fight off any attempt others make to define you. I think most people go through that by the time they’re seventeen, but for me it extended to about forty. Until recently, I didn’t have friends I could relax around and be just as weird as I wanted to be. Now I do—people who don’t leave the relationship as a result of me being weird. And my experience with men is that if they don’t like you, they leave.
INTERVIEWER
Is that what you meant when you told me you think of yourself as evil?
CARSON
That may be another, more melodramatic way to describe this. Evil and good are terms I use from time to time, when I’m trying to shock myself into some better thinking.
INTERVIEWER
In Autobiography of Red, there’s the sense that Geryon is evil, a monster. This is his own sense of self, it doesn’t come from anybody else. The same seems true of your conception of yourself. I wonder where that comes from. Part of the answer is obviously explored in “Dirt and Desire.” There’s this idea of women as being—
CARSON
Polluted.
INTERVIEWER
Polluted, uncontainable, they flow all over everything, they have holes, you always have to keep them in or they’ll just flood.
CARSON
Leak all over.
INTERVIEWER
That’s the historical answer, but is there a personal answer, as well?
CARSON
I don’t know. I was drawn to the Geryon story because of his monstrosity, although it’s something of a cliché́ to say that we all think we’re monsters. But it does have to do with gender, though I don’t know what it is about growing up female that makes one think: monster.
INTERVIEWER
Can we discuss Sappho’s Fragment 31? In Eros the Bittersweet you use it as an illustration of Eros’s lack. And then when you come back to it in Decreation it’s an almost completely new reading of the poem in spiritual terms.
CARSON
Oh, that’s perplexing. Let’s see. The difference between the two readings derives from ignoring or taking into account the final verse of the poem in the manuscript that we have. It’s a completely puzzling half-verse having to do with daring and poverty, and when I decided to try to make sense of it in Decreation the only way I could do so was in spiritual terms. The poem up until that point is concerned with an erotic triangle, but then in this half-verse it goes to a new place, which I chose to understand as a place facing God. I don’t know where spiritual reality goes for Sappho—the poem doesn’t go on after that half of a verse—but I was trying, in Decreation, to interpret it as a space of poverty in the mystical sense of the annihilation of the self.
Fragment 31
He seems to me equal to gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing—oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me.
But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty
INTERVIEWER
In the poem, does the ecstasy arise from self-annihilation?
CARSON
Yes. In the poem Sappho doesn’t use the word ecstasy, but she talks about herself standing outside herself and observing her own condition—which constitutes ecstasy, but which also constitutes what many mystics strive to achieve in canceling their selfhood so that they can be empty vessels for God. I don’t think Sappho has that idea as such—it’s an anachronism to ascribe it to her—but I do think there is a deep spiritual (not just ornamental) substance to Sappho’s descriptions of gods and our relation to gods that ought to be taken into account when reading her poetry. It’s an aspect of that otherness of the Greeks we discussed earlier. They were intensely religious people, had hundreds of gods, religious ideas filled their lives.
INTERVIEWER
In Decreation, there’s also an idea of babbling into the void, because it’s the only way you can talk to God, or hope to reach him. Standing there and just spewing it out.
CARSON
No, I wouldn’t say spewing or babbling. In Sappho’s poem, her addresses to gods are orderly, perfect poetic products, but the way—and this is the magic of fragments—the way that poem breaks off leads into a thought that can’t ever be apprehended. There is the space where a thought would be, but which you can’t get hold of. I love that space. It’s the reason I like to deal with fragments. Because no matter what the thought would be if it were fully worked out, it wouldn’t be as good as the suggestion of a thought that the space gives you. Nothing fully worked out could be so arresting, so spooky.
INTERVIEWER
In Decreation, you describe the characters Sappho, Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil as writers whose work is an act of expression of the self, self-advertising, but you also note that they’re all trying to flee the self. This is a conundrum that comes up in Economy of the Unlost. At one point you say, “There’s too much self in my writing.” Is the range of the work that you do—poetry, essays, opera, academic work, teaching—a way of trying to punch windows in the walls of the self?
CARSON
No. I would say it’s more like a way to avoid having a self by moving from one definition of it to another. To avoid being captured in one persona by doing a lot of different things.
INTERVIEWER
You often collaborate with other artists…
CARSON
Decreation has been done in a lot of different versions— installation, performance, and as a pedagogical tool—in New York, Michigan, San Francisco, Potsdam, Montreal, England, and Michigan again.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve also made books with other people.
CARSON
One with California artist Kim Anno, which is a book of part of the libretto for Decreation. And also, more recently, New York artist Roni Horn asked me to collaborate on a book with three other people—Louise Bourgeois, Hélène Cixous, and John Waters.
INTERVIEWER
How do these collaborations work for you?
CARSON
It works for me insofar as I can stand out of the center of whatever the work is. So I’m not organizing or directing or the fulcrum of it.
INTERVIEWER
Does that let you see the work in a different way?
CARSON
It allows me not to be anxious, which allows for invention. It’s a looser place than the center.
INTERVIEWER
As if you have to come upon your own work by surprise?
CARSON
Right. I have to smuggle myself into it.
INTERVIEWER
A couple of years ago you put on a theatrical production of Decreation using college students. Why did you choose to work with complete amateurs?
CARSON
It’s intoxicating to introduce people to utterly strange things. I suppose I wouldn’t have gone into teaching if I didn’t like that in general.
INTERVIEWER
What effect does teaching have on your creative work?
CARSON
It gives me a structure of life and people to talk to, thus contributing to sanity.
INTERVIEWER
In Economy of the Unlost you suggest that academic work is, at its best, selfless. But then you retreat from that position and admit that your best academic work tends to come from the closed aesthetic room of the self.
CARSON
I was taught that objective reportage of academic questions is the ideal form for scholarship to take, but in pursuing scholarship myself I never found that possible. I could never think without thinking about myself thinking. And I’m not sure if that’s a casualty of being me or of being human, so I decided to assume the latter. So my scholarship, such as it is, is intensely subjective. But because I am aware of this as a problem, I make an attempt to continually bridge the gap between that subjective self and the reader. Although it’s a private vision, it also brings the reader into its vision from time to time.
INTERVIEWER
Is Catholicism a way out of self for you?
CARSON
No, quite the reverse. I don’t think I’m ever so resigned to myself as when I’m in church trying to understand why I’m in church. Sitting there thinking about my mother and all the times we sat together in church. The only good memory I have of it is leaning up against her fake-fur coat during Mass. I remember the smell of that coat, how comforting that was on a cold winter day. But, no, it’s not a way out of self at all.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think of yourself as being particularly devout?
CARSON
No. I think of myself as being particularly baffled—on the one hand, by the whole question of God and the relation of humans to God, but on the other hand, possibly because of lots of empty spaces in my life, I am open to exploring what that might mean. I don’t go to church with any expectation of fulfillment or illumination. I just go because I have gone, and my mother went and her mother went. A kind of thinking takes place there that doesn’t take place anywhere else. No matter how unattractive the service—and nowadays the Mass is rather unattractive in its modern translation—no matter how brainless the sermon, there is a space in which nothing else is happening so that thinking about God or about the question of God can happen. But nothing changes, I don’t become wise about this, I don’t become ethically better or more interesting. I’m just the same person.
INTERVIEWER
So there’s not really a doctrinaire side to it.
CARSON
I wouldn’t say the doctrinaire side of Catholicism, for example, makes much sense to me in its details or its history. So, no, I don’t look to Catholic thinking as a guide to how to live my life. I do think it’s some aspect of being human to engage the question of gods. But it’s an historical accident that I was brought up Catholic by my mother and that she was by her mother. This tradition that carries us is just an accidental vessel. I could have been a Muslim and been equally confused, I’m sure.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think of yourself as having a relationship with God?
CARSON
No. But that’s not bad. I think in the last few years, since I’ve been working on Decreation and reading a lot of mystics, especially Simone Weil, I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t. So, sad fact, but get used to it, because nothing else is going to happen.
INTERVIEWER
He’s not available because he chooses to remove himself or he’s not available because he doesn’t exist?
CARSON
Neither. He’s not available because he’s not a being of a kind that would fit into our availability. “Not knowable,” as the mystics would say. And knowing is what a worshiper wants to get from God—the sense of being in an exchange of knowledge, knowing and being known. It’s what anybody wants from any relationship of love, and the relationship with God is supposed to be one of love. But I don’t think any kind of knowing is ever going to materialize between humans and gods.
INTERVIEWER
Is it stymied because of the nature of the beast?
CARSON
Because of the difference of the two orders. If God were knowable, why would we believe in him?
INTERVIEWER
So he’s like the ancient Greeks, the “unknowable other,” whose presence is fascinating and in some way illuminating, but not really understandable?
CARSON
Yes. Not an available instrument of anything we need or do. Which isn’t the same as saying “not existing.”
INTERVIEWER
I know you’ve been working on and off on the sublime. It combines Antonioni and the actress Monica Vitti?
CARSON
Some parts of it did. But I think I’ve given up on the sublime. Some time ago I decided to try to understand it. For some reason, I felt that Monica Vitti embodied the sublime, especially in Red Desert. So I studied Red Desert and wrote some stuff about it and worked my way into the theory of sublime. Various people’s versions of it—Edmund Burke, Kant, Antonioni himself. But it’s too big a topic for me so I wrote around in it for a while and then stepped out to see if there was any kind of thread there that I could develop and get ahold of, but it’s defeated me.
INTERVIEWER
I think particularly of that poem when Antonioni goes to the madhouse.
CARSON
Yes, a true story. He went to film in a madhouse. It was his first attempt to make a movie. He had the inmates perform for him.
INTERVIEWER
Did he tell the inmates what to do?
CARSON
He didn’t get that far. He went to the room where the inmates were brought. He set them up in some formation and turned on the lights that were necessary for filming, and the inmates went nuts. Because of the lights, or so the doctors at the scene conjectured.
INTERVIEWER
Your conjecture is that the inmates start rolling around on the floor as a ruse because they discover that they can kiss each other under the guise of being mad.
CARSON
It’s a complicated ruse. I think they have a general group ruse in any situation that suggests danger or novelty. So they hit the floor and start rolling, and then some of them who happen to have affections for one another also use it as an occasion for kissing. That’s kind of incidental. Not the main motive of the rolling. In the conventional descriptions of the sublime, like Kant’s, there’s usually a trigger from the phenomenal world, a thunderstorm or a cliff or a vast starry night—vertigo of the infinite—from which the self recoils in horror or dread. Dread followed by a recovery of the feeling of mastery, a soaring sensation of, Look at this incredible dread, and how I rise above it with my amazing human mind!
INTERVIEWER
I remember, and it wasn’t that long ago, when you couldn’t get people to take your writing seriously. You used to say, “I’m going to be famous fifteen minutes after I’m dead.” That’s all shifted in the last several years, and I wonder what kind of difference that’s made, both personally and professionally.
CARSON
Doesn’t make a lot of difference. It’s nice to be met at airports, I’ll say that. It hasn’t made much difference inside the writing, either, except that I feel somewhat freer to do anything I want, which is both bad and good. Good in the sense that it’s an exploratory space, bad in the sense that I’m not sure anybody really thinks about judging me the same way as before. There isn’t a blank space in which the judgment happens, there’s a ready-made space, a judgment already there that you either live up to or don’t. It’s already altered by the time you enter.
INTERVIEWER
Your work used to be met with complete bewilderment: “But this isn’t poetry, this is clearly prose. This is in paragraphs, I can tell the difference between prose and poetry.” The responses were completely dismissive.
CARSON
Yes, and since then there’s been what people call a paradigm shift, which means now I can’t do anything wrong, but which really means people are offering equally blind judgments of the work. I don’t know why that happens. I guess people are just afraid to think. They like to have a category that’s ready so they can say: Okay, now we know this is good, we can enjoy it.
INTERVIEWER
Did winning the MacArthur have a similar kind of effect? I know it didn’t lead to a more lavish lifestyle.
CARSON
How do you mean? I think I bought some socks. Socks and a new pillowcase. Also, they let me in the bank at any hour now. Even after the door is barred they rush up and usher me to the back room. I find that charming. Otherwise not much difference.
INTERVIEWER
You have an interesting theory about money.
CARSON
It’s not that interesting. It’s just the inverse of the usual theory, which is that all money, indeed all numbers in life, should get bigger. But it doesn’t make sense that they should get bigger—why bigger? If you just switch it around and think all numbers should get smaller, it makes life better.
INTERVIEWER
What did your dad think about this attitude?
CARSON
Dad didn’t take this view, I have to say.
INTERVIEWER
What was his attitude to money?
CARSON
Complicated. I don’t think that I grasped it. I only know that whenever we had conversations about economic affairs, we would end up sitting at the table, surrounded by napkins covered with calculations. It was a situation of total dismay for us both.
INTERVIEWER
Has coming from Canada formed you in some way as a writer?
CARSON
No, I don’t think so. I don’t know if I’d be any different if I’d been born somewhere else. When I go to America I feel different but not in a paraphrasable way, and when I come back here I feel a sense of relief, perhaps just because it’s nice not to be conspicuous. And one can certainly be inconspicuous here. I do feel that I miss the rocks and the air, and the smell that the world has in Canada. But I don’t feel formed by it.
INTERVIEWER
Are there contemporary writers who feed you in a certain way? Does the anxiety of influence make you anxious?
CARSON
It makes me anxious to the extent that if I read somebody and I think, Wow, I’d really like to do that, I stop reading them because I don’t want to be an imitator. I have a monkey side; I could easily just imitate, which becomes parodic. Parodic because I really don’t want to become that person and the only relationship you can have to someone you want to imitate and not become is parody. But I do like, for example, Mavis Gallant, and I try not to read Mavis Gallant when I’m also writing because I’d just seep into her. So while I don’t have a sense of trying to craft a voice, I do have a sense of trying to avoid blending in with anyone else’s.
INTERVIEWER
I end up putting you and Alice Munro together. In each of you there’s an attachment to the physical world and the details of life— almost like you are reveling in them—whether they’re bad, good, painful, or whatever else. Does that seem right to you?
CARSON
I recognize that. Reveling is a good word for it. But she and I are very different. What we have in common is perhaps an attitude that however bad life is, what’s important is to make something interesting out of it. And that has a lot to do with the physical world, with looking at stuff, snow and light and the smell of your screen door and whatever constitutes your phenomenal existence from moment to moment. How consoling—that this stuff goes on and that you can keep thinking about it and making that into something on the page.
INTERVIEWER
And it goes on for everyone.
CARSON
It goes on for everyone, you can always communicate that. And for me, even when I read George Eliot, I read her for the descriptions of weather. Perhaps that’s the wrong way to read George Eliot, but how comforting, the way she describes light moving over trees and lying on a bench and somebody’s foot there.
INTERVIEWER
But you quote Eliot saying that attempts at description are stupid. Did she really say that?
CARSON
She did say that. But she keeps on trying to do it. She does limit it, though. I think she has a much greater capacity for description than she allows herself. The weather is usually just a dab at the beginning of each chapter. Then she goes onto metaphysical dialogues where people discuss the meaning of life. But the weather is always there at the beginning, and it is undeniable. She just gets it. She describes clouds moving over the sun at eleven o’clock in the morning on a path in an oak forest and it’s just exactly how that would be. I admire that more than any other aspect of writing.
INTERVIEWER
She’s good at evening, too. It’s like she describes the weather in the morning when the chapter starts and dusk when it ends.
CARSON
Yes, and that’s the reason why I find Chinese and Japanese poetry satisfying. Because it seems to have the same aim. In fact, it’s their whole mechanism of insight into reality, to capture something of the phenomenal moment and then let that exude a meaning larger than the moment. I think that’s some kind of final achievement in writing. Which in my practice gets all messed up with also trying to describe my mother or my socks or my love life, but I think if I were a better person, I could get all that out of there and just describe the weather, the snow or the moment of light and it would be a better work of art.
INTERVIEWER
I think you did it in an e-mail you sent me on the anniversary of your mother’s death. You said, “I miss her like an old sock.”
CARSON
One sock, you always need the other sock. Knowing when to stop, that’s the lesson of that e-mail. Knowing when to stop is what makes a good piece of writing.
INTERVIEWER
That seems a good place to end. Unless there’s anything else you’d like to add?
CARSON
I’d like to add a piece of wisdom from Gertrude Stein: “Act so there is no use in a center.” That’s what I try to teach my students.
