The Erotic Poetics of Anne Carson

university of toronto quarterly, volume 70, number 4, fall 2001 CHRIS JENNINGS The Erotic Poetics of Anne Carson To explain what I do is simple enough. A scholar is someone who takes a position. From which position, certain lines become visible. You will at first think I am painting the lines myself; it=s not so. I merely know where to stand to see the lines that are there. And the mysterious thing, it is a very mysterious thing, is how these lines do paint themselves. Anne Carson, >The Life of Towns,= Plainwater Discussing Sappho=s fragment 31 near the beginning of Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson provides a figure for eros that illuminates a recurring pattern in her own poetics. In the fragment, Sappho=s speaker observes the girl she desires speaking to an attentive man. The result >is not a poem about the three of them as individuals, but about the geometrical figure formed by their perception of one another, and the gaps in that perception ... The figure is a triangle= (13). This triangle makes >the radical constitution of desire= visible. For, where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components B lover, beloved and that which comes between them. They are three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching. Conjoined they are held apart. The third component plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates, marking that two are not one, irradiating the absence whose presence is demanded by eros. When the circuit-points connect, perception leaps. (Eros, 16) Carson calls connecting the circuit >triangulation= (Eros, 17), and taken as a paradigm, that suggests a poetics of lack that employs and enables duality as an essential component of its unity. Beginning with a >genius for juxtaposition= (Cook, 327), Carson gives her writing a triangular structure by binding the terms juxtaposed not only to each other but to a liminal position between them. This perspective conceives connection from contiguity and serves as the >third component= that >both connects and separates= the terms in order to reveal >the lines that are there.= Translation is 924 chris jennings her master trope. The familiar form of bringing the ancient in contact with the contemporary has its own three-part structure, situating the translator on the cusp between two languages. Carson=s engagement with ancient Greek allows her, as an English-language poet, to draw on the tension between the two languages, to make both their interactions and their differences a source of poetic power. The triangle figure is also a conspicuous feature of Carson=s play with genre. In her hands >all the rituals of form are first and foremost an expression of their own limitations, the sign of what leaks out of them= (Phillips, 117). Juxtaposing genres within a work not only enables her writing to slip between and beyond generic boundaries, it destabilizes those boundaries, defining genres by relation rather than internal coherence. Carson=s poems, essays, and even interviews mirror this relation on a larger scale, informing one another as though they were fragments of a single masterwork. This triangular paradigm describes the >radical constitution= of Carson=s poetic vision, and the underlying structure of her writing. I The influence of Carson=s engagement with ancient Greek, particularly her experience as a translator of fragmentary or unreliable texts, is complex. Carson suggests the role Greek plays in her poems when describing her poetics as >[p]ainting with thoughts and facts=: >I think probably my painting notion comes out of dealing with classical texts which are, like Sappho, in bits of papyrus with that enchanting white space around them, in which we can imagine all of the experience of antiquity floating but which we can=t quite reach= (>A Talk,= 19). For Carson, Greek words are >pure, they=re older, they=re original ... They just shine right out at you ... It=s qualitative, there=s more life there= (>A Talk,= 16), whereas >English is a bitch= (Autobiography, 137).1 Comparing languages, Carson figures meaning as a tree: >When you=re travelling around in Greek words, you have a sense that you=re among the...