Despite the discomfort of the interview portion of the reading, Carson’s live reading aptly captured the subtlety of her craft. Words and images leave the room of Carson’s poems through one door, only to enter through a window or side door, and they fit in once again; they are relevant. Words from one poem peek into another poem, a conical amalgam of words on top of words on top of words. Biblical characters are woven in with mundane objects, Eastern Religions, pop culture, corporate machines, lunar bodies of water, Greek myths, and French philosophers. Her work is orderly, yet myriad in it starts and stops, at once whole and wholly undone. Carson admits, “I often start a book in the middle…. Reading in the wrong order is very helpful. Writing in the wrong order actually works well too.” 

 

Carson’s work is postmodern, fragmented, but, like an algebraic equation, the sum of its parts is what matters. And, if one listens with a discerning ear, they will pick up on the mastery, the skill with which the language marries itself over and over again, dizzying but not redundant, out of order but with a sense of rightness to it. The experience is like reading Proust backwards, which Anne Carson does, apparently, in the morning, while eating her cereal.