The Real Lives of Julie Carr

In the first line of the last poem, “The Humble View,” from Real Life: An Installation (Omnidawn, 2018), Julie Carr writes that this project has been her attempt to “make [her] writing inseparable from life.” One might interpret this line to mean that it encapsulates Carr’s refusal to let other parts of her life dominate her “writing life.” It might also mean that this book should be understood as a new kind of diary or partial memoir, an aestheticized recording of her thoughts, observations, beliefs, joys, frustrations, and desires over the course of several months or years. As in her previous books, a great deal of Real Life revolves around the lives of children, her own and others, as they navigate the precarious terrain of childhood and adolescence in the most violent democracy in the West. Insofar as this journal-memoir-treatise also covers the period of her pregnancy (for the fifth time we are told), the question of the professional woman and motherhood is both the focus and subtext of these restless, incessantly interrogating lyrics, narratives, and meditations.

On February 26, 2020, I attended a talk on my university campus, a formal conversation between two women professors, one a mother, the other, a colleague of mine, not a mother. The occasion was the publication of their most recent books, one on the struggles of being a mother and a professional woman, the other, by my colleague, a defense of her decision to remain childless, to not give birth or adopt children.[1] At the end of the discussion, my colleague, thinking about what might be her legacy as a prominent, well-published scholar of French history, reminded the audience that the concept of legacy presupposes future human beings, which is to say, the birth and survival of other people’s children. As a person who is not a parent—by neither nature nor nurture—I was taken by my colleague’s linkage between personal legacy (it’s something people my age tend to ponder) and a world of strangers’ children. It’s a cliché but children are, collectively, the future of the human species, and some of those children may turn out to be, my colleague implied, scholars of French history.

To think of children in this way, however, is to erase the individuality of each human child, to render them into an abstract, and so, universal form called the human future. And yet this erasure of the specific child is also the condition for the possibility of empathy or sympathy for children by parents and non-parents. In short, I am able to feel empathy for parents and sympathy for their children because I “know” at least one parent, at least one child. Sympathy for children is possible because I subconsciously turn that child I know into the “type” for another child. Moreover, insofar as the future of the human species is always threatened by cosmological and terrestrial forces—meteor strikes, environmental disasters, pandemics—that invariably connect children to precarity, their physical births and deaths serve as the material template for the metaphysical concepts of creation and destruction, dialectically connected at the hip, so to speak, yet another cliché that evokes not only birth and death but also maternity and offspring.

The childless female historian’s legacy, the life she will, or will not, have after her life is over, is a general possibility absolutely dependent on other people’s children, themselves at risk of premature deaths from war, disease and, in the United States especially, gun violence. A number of American poets have taken up this issue, have written books of fiction and poetry about our penchant for gun violence. For example, Erica Hunt recently published a book of poetry that concerns racialized, misogynistic, and state violence against children and women.[2] Hearing Hunt’s powerful reading from that book in November 2019 reminded me that poet Julie Carr has been writing poetry and essays about lethal violence against women and children the entirety of her publishing career.

Full disclosure: Because I have published two books with Omnidawn and, more important, sit on the organization’s Board of Trustees, I have a policy to never review books published by its authors. Moreover, I am an acquaintance of Julie Carr (in the same way that I have “conference friends”), and I try to avoid—not always successfully—reviewing their books too. Here I am violating both constraints, and I am also aware I may not be speaking to anyone but myself since I believe in, and usually endorse, the editorial policies of journals and magazines forbidding or discouraging poets from reviewing the books of poets they know. I have also written elsewhere that book reviewing is, for me, more often an excuse to think through problems (aesthetics, social, cultural, etc.). For these reasons (and more, no doubt) I am not a “good” book reviewer and certainly not a “professional” one. So below I will try to explain why I am thinking about a book that’s taken me over a year to finish.[3] But first, as they say, a few summary comments. Carr’s 2018 book, Real Life: An Installation, feels like a Collected or comprehensive Selected; all the themes, ideas, and obsessions that permeate her previous books of poetry are on display here. Carr has written some big books of poetry before (for example, Rag (Omnidawn, 2014) and 100 Notes On Violence (Ahsahta Press, 2010)) but at 192 pages, Real Life is easily her longest. No doubt the sense that this is a kind of summing up, a coming to terms with, gives the book the feel of a Collected or Selected. Thematically and formally, Real Life most resembles 100 Notes On Violence where Carr writes, in “59,” “The book about violence must be a book of quotations. / For everyone speaks about violence.” Probably, but no one I know has written more poems about violence against children and women than Carr,[4] and so it can be said of her what is often said about poets in general: she’s been writing variations on the same poems for well over a decade.

In general, Carr is an innovative, not experimental, poet, one largely accessible to general readers of poetry.[5] And though she moves easily between lyric expression and narrative description, she often juxtaposes these two modes of writing, creating parataxic effects, usually from stanza to paragraph (and vice versa), as opposed to line by line parataxis. However, nonlinear narrative, and even nods to surrealism, show up in some of her more recent books (e.g., Objects From A Borrowed Confession), and she weds those devices to more traditional lyric and narrative techniques. These techniques and strategies can be found in Real Life as well as in her more recent poetry books. However, because it provides a kind of introduction to some of Carr’s concerns, I want to briefly summarize some of the concerns in her collection of essays, Someone Shot My Book (University of Michigan Press, 2018).

In several of the essays, Carr approaches the problem of violence against women and children with a passion that borders on religious enthusiasm. At the same time Carr comes up against the temptation of idealism: to imagine life without violence can sometimes lead one to imagine life without loss, even when life presupposes loss. For Carr, however, killing leads to a different kind of loss since it is the expression of “the fundamental lack of borders.” Yet, as Carr scours NRA websites and rereads the Romanticist values of poetry, as well as modernist texts like Williams’s Paterson, a strange, troubling relationship between poetry and guns comes into view. Both, she realizes, awaken us from the torpor of quotidian existence, the sometimes numbing routines of daily life. Thus, in the tenor of tentativeness, hesitation, these essays argue for the value of affect and emotion over the cognitive and ratiocination—“I want the physiological process, distilled, to get to an affective state I can’t really name—perhaps presence.” At the same time, Carr argues, by examining the poetry of her exemplary predecessors (Lorine Niedecker) and contemporaries (Lisa Robertson), that the distinctions between affect and cognition are false. The blurring or erasure of the distinctions is crucial to Carr’s ethos which drives her attack on US gun culture, an attack equally fueled by fervor and facts.[6]

Thus the symphonic structure of Real Life (it has five movements, which also allude to Carr’s interest in modern dance) calls into question the affective/cognitive distinction since classical music is emblematic of their mutual necessity and interdependence: the emotional power of a symphony is due to its complex structure executed with a precision so mathematical that affect and cognition meld into aesthetic pleasure. At the level of smaller discrete units, individual poem titles run the gamut from the quotidian (“Late Night Bus Ride”) to the philosophical (“A Thing Is A Hole In A Thing It Is Not”). Repeated titles (variations on “Installation” and “Fourteen-Line Poem”) echo the book’s motifs: the commodification of everyday life, violence, childhood trust vs adult distrust, determinism and free will, and, most insistently, the body as a possible site of relative freedom from ideology.[7] In thus subtitling her book An Installation, Carr ponders here, as she does in Someone Shot My Book, the extent to which the desire to make art, to write poetry, to create, is coextensive with the love of guns, the pleasures of play (e.g., gunplay), of destroying, in general. In short, are the pleasures of installing and uninstalling, for example, a life, joined at the hip? What does it mean to wake up one day and realize that the life one thought one had “chosen” turned out to be a life that “history,” “genetics,” or “chance” installed? While these are questions that any human being may wonder about, they seem particularly pertinent for women who “choose” to have, or not have, children. For in “carrying” a future child or children the way one is said to be carrying when armed, a pregnant woman may well be carrying a future murderer.[8] Perhaps more important, both the woman carrying and the woman not carrying are betting on the future against the present, are sacrificing the present for a future they wager they will not see: a future after the future, embodied, say, in the legacy of grandchildren or the legacy of articles and books about the articles and books they wrote. And so on.

As if to counter the possibility that self-recognition is inextricable from interpellation, that “self-knowledge” is simply another app “installed” into the life she lives, Carr uses a strategy she has used in every book of poetry she has published: intertextual citationality. However, not since Rag has Carr deployed this tactic so effectively. Whereas in Rag Carr quoted primarily from women poets, literary theorists, philosophers, and artists, the words and ideas of both women and men, especially those of Marshall Berman, serve as epigraphs, poem titles and motifs in Real Life.[9] For example, the various references to “red” in the fifth and fourth movements allude not only to the Marxist critique of commodification in Berman’s best known book but also to blood spilled, blood violated (especially that of female children whose country “loves little girls too much”) and the blood of menstruation which, via “Installation 24: A Public Fountain,”[10] hearken back to Rag. Colloquially, rag is a misogynistic slur for menstruation as well as a metonym for the throwaway, the disposable. In Rag, both meanings appear: “Rag on the shelf and a brush” and “Dear Daughter/Here is your gift: a piece of cloth/To wrap me in.” The rag, the throwaway, the broken, and the disposable are metonyms for all children, “even” those whose skin is the same as Carr’s: “To find a color in this boy you had to split him open.” Red and the rag in this earlier book were thus predictive of their recurrence, in girls, in children, and in women, in Real Life.

If this country indeed “loves little girls too much,” it’s because it hates women with even greater passion. And so, for Carr, misogyny is the other side of pedophilia. In Think Tank (Solid Objects, 2015), misogyny was generalized and tethered to the threat of violence: “a headlock is to a hat as a paring knife to tongue.“ When she wrote “At the doorway: endlessness,” Carr underscored the doorstep of every house as Janus-faced: domestic crimes and childhood dreams on one side, gun violence and opportunities to live out those dreams on the other. However, Think Tank suggested that the inside and outside were as mixed up and intertwined as cognition and affect, as culture and nature. For every exteriorized inside (“Like the low roar of the mower under storm clouds, with me it’s like/ this it’s perfect it’s like//sleeping in the body of a bird.”), there is an interiorized outside (“Darlings/crawl into the bed/attendant as birds to a/ berry tree/ eat their/ ice cream at my/ feet and want to know/ all about sperm/ banks.” In both directions, we—adults and children—are carriers, in every sense of that word, and that’s not even counting random disasters: “Windows blaze, all, all—the train jumps its tracks.” And as Real Life reminds us, especially in the first movement, the slow disasters of everyday life (“Worse jobs report”) do not ordinarily penetrate the bubble of childhood (“Tell me a witch story, she says.”). Ordinarily, the borders hold. But when the extraordinary strikes, when the borders collapse and “Ashley, age 6, who had been kept up late,” is “taken to the movies,/ for there was no babysitter// was…/shot dead,” the temptation of insularity, of comfort, is invoked. Carr resists that temptation since “the central confusion of real life” is that the body is both “victim” and “perpetrator,” which means not giving in to only affect. At the same time, ratiocination is no panacea either since, having built up its critical apparatuses over millennia, “The archive is a radio soaked in senility.” Facing inadequacies in both directions, as it were, Carr is inconsolable, flushed with anger, guilt, resentment, and shame. She’d tried to exorcise some of these demons in her 2017 book, Objects From A Borrowed Confession (Ahsahta Press). There, in a series of discrete poems, Carr interrogated the ethics of confession through multiple genres—journalism, memoir, poetry, nonfiction prose, screenwriting—in order to confess as a human being, the inescapable bonds between love and war, friendship and violence, etc., all of which are connected to sin (envy, pride, etc.). In other words, Objects From A Borrowed Confession demonstrated if nothing else, the inadequacy of confession as both genre and atonement.

Impaled on the horns of the body and mind, Carr cannot close “the gap…/between what [she] want[s] and what [she] know[s].” She is all too aware that, from the “outside,” she lives and enjoys the privileges of a “model” American life: a middleclass married professional white mother. Installed in that life, she embraces and rebels, accepts and defies it. Is Real Life: An Installation a powerful exoneration or a full-blooded confession? Yes.