Friday, October 1, 2010

Anne Carson: The Physicality of Poetry

@ the 92nd Street Y, NY, 2008




 

 

 

 

Anne Carson Makes It New: Postcard From New York City

by Alex Dimitrov


"When we attend poetry readings we do so hoping that we will be moved by the poems in a way unlike the experience of reading them on the page. We expect that hearing them in the poet’s voice will give them another life, other dimensions. Most readings go something like this: The poet reads from her new book, answers questions after, maybe signs some books, then leaves. Now imagine being transported in a different way—not only by the movement of language itself, but by that of bodies and objects as they pull you toward experiencing your own physicality, being alert enough to hear your own breath. That is what an Anne Carson reading is like. 

Last Thursday Carson collaborated with sculptor Peter Cole, choreographers Jonah Bokaer and Rashaun Mitchell, and dancers from the Merce Cunnigham company to present "Stacks and Bracko," a reading and performance at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. Over seven hundred people turned out on a Thursday night, giving it the buzz of an art event that could be transformative in the mode of performance artist Allan Kaprow’s happenings in the 1960s. Not only was that certain kind of energy present (as Carson has developed a cult following which is part New York literati, part academic, part hipster), but the performance itself, in its inventive marriage of dance, sculpture, poetry, and theatricality, felt like something new, happening right now." Poets & Writers




Paul Celan

[MATIÈRE DE BRETAGNE] 

Gorselight, yellow, the slopes
suppurate to heaven, the thorn
pays court to the wound, there is ringing
inside, it is evening, the nothing
rolls its seas toward devotion,
the bloodsail is heading for you.
Dry, run aground
is the bed behind you, caught in rushes
is its hour, above,
with the star, the milky
tideways jabber in mud, stonedate,
below, bunched up, gapes into blueness, a bush-worth
of transience, beautiful,
greets your memory.
(Did you know me,
hands? I went
the forked way you showed, my mouth
spat its gravel, I went, my time,
wandering watches, threw its shadow--did you know me?)
Hands, the thorn-
courted wound, there is ringing,
hands, the nothing, its seas,
hands, in the gorselight, the
bloodsail
is heading for you.
You
you teach
you teach your hands
you teach your hands you teach
you teach your hands

"All these fluent traditions run aground in the second stanza, which is dry, stuck on land, lodged in rushes, bushed up, jabbering mud and which engenders the third stanza: five verses stalled in a bracket. The poet's thought stops on itself. His path is forked and his utterance gravel. Celan has crafted these middle verses out of immobility to emphasize the movement of the rest. Seas and phenomena flow again in the fourth stanza and go rolling out the end of the page without a stop. The poem as a whole, recapitulating the first stanza, has the rhythm of a bloodsail, sailing forward in waves from gorselight to gorselight to you."
Anne Carson, from 'The Economy of the Unlost"



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