I heart the Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson. I was introduced to her work during grad school by my friend Suzanne Hancock (also from Canada and also an amazing poet; check out her Another Name for Bridge). I had heard much about Anne’s Autobiography of Red and Suzanne lent me her copy. I read it in one sitting (couldn’t put it down) on a Friday morning while lounging in bed and was so inspired and in awe of her project that I went out and bought every book of hers I could get my hands on. And Autobiography of Redremains one of the five books I’d probably take with me to a desert island.
Anne started teaching at UM during the winter terms while we were there and I remember seeing her around the English Dept. in Angell Hall, usually in black and gray save for her shoes which always seemed to be red. Suzanne struck up a friendship with her (and in an amazing moment defended her work eloquently to a befuddled Phil Levine who, during a Hopwood Tea, made an off-handed remark to Suzanne and me that Anne Carson was “not a poet”. Ahem.), but I was too in awe and didn’t even know what to say if I were to encounter her. I heard her read much of the work in Decreation, to an overflowing lecture hall, shortly before we graduated, and fell even more in love with her understated persona. And she signed my copy of Autobiography of Red.
It was with great delight to see her perform again at the 92nd St Y last night. Her first piece was, in her work’s true fashion, a hybrid poem-essay called “Cassandra Floatcan”. While she read, a cast of performers carried large photographs around the hall, across the stage, up and down the aisles, the photographs also displayed on the large screen behind Anne. At one point her collaborator Robert Currie held up a red dress and let it drop at a poignant moment. And he constructed a house-like structure out of sticks that she then knocked down at the end. The essay was amazing and I’d have to sit with it before I attempted any sort of explication. But a shout-out to my friend, the poet Dante Micheaux who was one of the photograph-carrying performers for this piece.
The second piece was “Possessive Used As Drink (Me): A Lecture on Pronouns in the Form of 15 Sonnets” and clearly piqued my interest as it was a corona sonnet cycle (oh how I love those!). This piece involved a video of three dancers, two live dancers on stage, Robert Currie sort of subtly cuing and directing, and a panel that consisted of Anne and two other female readers. Some of the poems Anne read by herself out loud. Some were pre-recorded and the three voices would all read, sometimes in unison with each other and Anne’s pre-recorded voice, sometimes staggered beginning and ending at different points, and often at different registers and tones, even singing sometimes, that created this layered, at times ethereal, and definitely a Greek chorus-sounding performance. Another piece that I would need to see in print before I could discuss in more detail, but the performance grabbed my interest, especially the sonic layering.
A few years ago I heard the poet Christine Hume read at UM and she performed two poems that also experimented with sound, reading the poem live but timed to a pre-recorded and digitally enhanced version of her voice. It conjured a voice that lives in my imagination and was the inspiration for the voice of Nix in my comic book poem. But just last week my friend Liz Stephens commissioned me to write a poem for her short experimental film, and when we deliberated over the audio for it I suggested that we both do multiple takes of reading the short poem, and then she could superimpose our voices at the different speeds over each other as the piece is very concerned with the superimposition of imagery. More on this film in a future post, but the timing of these sound experiments all aligning right now grabbed that part of my mind always looking for a bigger design and connections in the seeming randomness of events.
Oh, and Anne was wearing black and gray. And had on red cowboy boots. Heart. Her.