reading in the margins: Anne Carson

, another fragment of a longer work-in-progress,

At first I wrote only for myself, nothing else existed. In the uncounted millennia before the big bang, when I was a riot of atmospheres and inexplicable nongravitational intensities, before the creation of galaxies or cherry trees or rational thought, before the creation of creation, I kept a few notes. I can’t call it a diary because “day” as such did not yet exist but it had the same solipsistic purpose – to prevent the moments of my own life from being “allowed to waste like a tap left running,” as Virginia Woolf put on p. 239 of volume I of her somewhat later contribution to the same genre. Of course “taps” as such did not yet exist either but I’m trying to give an impression of a tendency to self-reproach that I shared with Mrs. Woolf from the beginning. We writers feel the burden of being a subject-in-process no matter who we are. (“LECTURE ON THE HISTORY OF SKYWRITING”)

Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma (2024) is an accumulation of essays, poems, handwritten notes and other scraps that provides this explanation on the back cover by the author: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them wrong.” While it is important to acknowledge coherence, or even incoherence, there is a sense of shared tone throughout this assemblage, and I would even suggest that Wrong Norma holds as singular unit of shared purpose and thought far stronger than, say, the pieces within her Decreation (2005). Wrong Norma might not be structured as a book-length piece, a “verse novel,” in the same way as Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998), The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001) or Men in the Off Hours (2001), but as a whole, Wrong Norma sustains a myriad of threads that interweave across an exploratory prose lyric, a structure she’s been honing now for decades. Where, through this, could anyone argue for wrongness? In a recent interview conducted by Kate Dwyer for Paris Review, Anne Carson opens:

When people ask me, “How are Canadians different from Americans?” I say, “Canadians have one characteristic: they’re polite, but wrong.” All the time, polite but wrong.

Don’t let her provocations distract you, dear Canadian reader, even if she is saying exactly what she means. An idea of wrongness, that connects to the collection, that connects to her own impossibility. While Carson is being deliberately provocative, she is also telling you something that is most likely about herself, in her simultaneous straightforward and roundabout way. Does she truly consider herself (she is Canadian, after all) wrong, or does she merely wish you to think that? This kind of distraction or deflection is comparable to the work of Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall: able to speak directly to or through one subject or thought through the very means of another. These pieces are not linked, Carson says, almost daring the reader.

The pieces of Wrong Norma carry a shared tone, as she turns to a thought or a subject or an idea and considers it, focusing on all the different sides until it becomes almost unrecognizable; until she manages to find that new element into and through that might be otherwise deeply familiar, or so one may have thought. She offers declarative sentences and straight lines that accumulate into a narrative bend, turning expectation and turning, returning, offering echoes and linkages, moving rings outward as each pebble drops into the water. As her “EDDY” begins:

Funny thing to worry about. Little hairs. Hairs on back of sweater as she goes out of the room. Little hairs, how you look from the back, girls worry about this. Or they used to. Now girls are free. Okay to be unpretty, ungirls.

Carson writes with a distance that allows for a kind of deeper intimacy; not the clear headed and disparate observer of a Joan Didion, but the writer completely inside themselves, pushing the distance outward. Comparable instead to Sheila Heti, perhaps: Carson composing moments of barely concealed variations, of herself and her partner, as a means through to a deeper commentary, whether on literature, history, translation or ethics. One could offer Anne Carson as a deeply ethical writer and thinker, a right way and a wrong way of approaching anything, even as she remains open to the conflicting, the contradictory. Perhaps, as did New York novelist Paul Auster, she writes “herself” to provide clarification as counterpoint to a separate narrator, providing the illusion of self across other venues and ventures. As a collection, the assemblages of Wrong Norma offer prose sections alternating in major and minor key, composing through-lines and asides, or even Greek chorus: Carson offering tethers between her pieces that echo the connective tissue of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus animations.

The hymns of the Rig Veda contain the following suggestion: “Something only exists if consciousness perceives it as existing. And if a consciousness perceives it, within this consciousness there must be another consciousness perceiving the consciousness that perceives,” and so forth. You can pursue this regress in an inward direction, as Vedic scholars do, or you can go the other way and find sky upon sky upon sky perceiving all the degrees of consciousness in the cosmos. You need to take a breath to think this. And your breath is the thinking. We think each other back and forth, your mind and me. We write one another. (“LECTURE ON THE HISTORY OF SKYWRITING”)

There are ways that Wrong Norma includes elements and threads of everything that Carson has published prior, including echoes of her first published collection, Short Talks (1992), the collection that first introduced a wider Canadian audience, at least, to her work. “A demographic of dreams. My friend Stanley Lombardo,” Carson writes, as part of “SHORT TALK ON HOMER AND JOHN ASHBERY,” “translator, translates it ‘the dream deme.’ So how would this work? Big file catalogue with all the dreams waiting in alphabetical order to slip into some head at night? Or they’re standing around with drinks? Or so bored by signifying they lie on the ground in heaps? Have a gift shop? Sell books by Adorno? Form factions and animosities? Perch on chairs like an audition?” Short Talks is still very much a work that continues to influence contemporary writing, and Wrong Norma might encompass everything of Carson’s writing-to-date in a single offering, echoes upon echoes that resonate throughout this particular pastiche.

In Emily Watson’s recent piece on Carson for The Nation, “Fox and Hedgehog,” she curiously spends a great deal of time focusing on Carson’s biographical details, akin to a magazine long-form piece, oddly distracting in a piece framed as a conversation around Wrong Norma. Watson begins, also, with the odd caveat of Anne Carson being a rare poet able to transcend a readership well beyond those who read poetry, offering Carson as part of a trio of comparable Canadian women writers, alongside Margaret Atwood and Rupi Kaur. While this is true, why not Leonard Cohen as well? Watson and I can at least agree on the catch-all element of this new book being entirely the point, existing as a purposeful and thoughtful extension and structural reevaluation by the author of all of her previous published work. Watson writes:

For some late-period writers, the publication of a ragbag batch of self-avowedly unrelated bits might signal a waning of powers. But in Carson’s case, this kind of deliberate “wrongness” is not a symptom of age; it has always been essential to her literary agenda. Throughout her long, prolific career, she has specialized in unexpected juxtapositions—between ancient and modern, sense and nonsense, the lyrical and analytical modes. The new collection revisits many of her familiar obsessions, including Plato, Proust, art, swimming, film, scenery, violence, grief, desire, disappointment, dressing up, animals, aesthetics, and alienation. Once again, she shakes up her kaleidoscope of sparkling allusions into another set of visions and revisions. The effect is often at least partly funny, but Carson also gestures toward a more serious purpose: She uses writing and art to find a kind of rightness in putting things together wrong.

Carson does, as she herself suggests, write on a wide range of subjects, with threads including foxes, conversation with friends, short lectures, ex-lovers, offering fresh perspectives through juxtaposition. Wrong Norma exists as a suite of sharp pieces, with all of Carson’s usual (and unusual) myriad considerations of structure and classical examination alongside contemporary references and biographical detail. Carson presents Wrong Norma both as quilt and as accumulation, fully aware that the true delight of Carson’s work is through the connections she makes between thoughts and references, and everything, somehow, returning to and through the Greeks. Is that all there is?

Yet how effective it might have been – a boy’s atrocious bloody boredom, her own virtuoso stanzas of six and eight, all the steaming, stinking heap of it urged into rhyme, she stopped. Ashamed. Starving to do it. She read up on poetry of witness and telling the truth to power and thought, no. Sassoon, Celan, “you told me how you butchered prisoners…” all that, no. “Your golden hair…” no. Poems don’t purify anyone. There is a heap. It steams and stinks.