Reading Anne Carson's Reissued Short Talks

Iris Dunkle reviews the recently reissued Short Talks by Anne Carson, a "call back to the reader." "The book is made up of a series of lyric prose poems written in a voice that is both self-less and indirect at the same time; A voice that it is deeply personal, yet remains hard to recognize. In these poems, Carson’s voice reaches in like a light in a velvety dark room," writes Dunkle. More at The Rumpus:

In her poem “Introduction” Carson begins the book by immediately shifting the Teutonic plates beneath the reader’s feet by taking away the meaning of what we rely on for sense in a book: words. As she writes, “Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not, Facts were, faces were.” She reminds us that “Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else”. Indeed, the poems that follow each look at something (Homo Sapiens, Geisha, Gertrude Stein, Ovid in exile and Sylvia Plath) in order to understand how that person, place of thing has pushed by something else. She writes about things from all sides but straight on in order to understand this inheritance. It is in this space, the gap between what is known and what is not yet known, that the words are found. The place where the blind storyteller has to continue on past what is known using only his or her senses.

In “Short Talk on Chromo-Luminarism” Carson uses this technique to look behind what is known of George Seurat’s famous painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte in order to understand the painting’s epic, canonical pull. As she writes, “Where does a European go when he is ‘lost in thought?” Seurat – the old dazzler – has painted that place…He caught us hurrying through the chill green shadows like adulterers. The river was opening and closing its stone lips. The river was pressing Seurat to is lips.” In a sense she sees in Seurat the longing we feel for the cool, dappled place of uninterrupted thought, as created by the space between points. It is between the tiny points of colored paint, that we find respite because in those spaces we are able to find our own experiences and connect them to what is painted on the canvas.

Like most Carson books, the poems in this collection also speak back to recorded history, asking to see between the cracks of recorded facts in order to find a new kind of truth. In “Short Talk on Ovid” she imagines what it might have really been like for Ovid once he was exiled to Tomis and he is stranded in the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire, far away from all of his friends and family. “Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing” a poem no one will read (Ovid never finished his books of poems written while in exile: Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto). [...]

But at the center of this book, like all of her others that I have read and written copiously in the margins of, is a call back to the reader...

Read on here.