"Wildly Constant": Anne Carson's Poetics of Encounter

Sastri 1 “Wildly Constant”: Anne Carson’s Poetics of Encounter The title of Anne Carson’s 2009 poem “Wildly Constant” poses a question: how to reconcile constancy—fidelity; continuity—with wildness— freedom, openness to the unexpected, to chance and change. The question pertains to marriage: the poem tells the story of a honeymoon that is also a writer’s retreat, and its narrative recounts the speaker’s leaving and returning to her husband’s bed. Seen differently, the paradox of wild constancy inheres in such practices as ekphrasis, translation, and literary criticism, where fidelity to a work of art both invites and constrains creative response. Encounters with persons and texts arrest, enliven and inspire. Being true to these encounters entails openness to being changed by them, and willingness to be true to them by transforming them in turn. Creativity inheres in this wild constancy. “Anne Carson is not an uncreative writer,” Oran MacKenzie notes, “but” her work is “highly derivative, blending poetry, essay, criticism and translation in multi-layered and complex juxtapositions of quotes, allusions, echoes and ekphrastic descriptions” (227).i “Genre hybridity,” remarks John James, “has long been a hallmark of the Anne Carson brand” (n.p.). Joshua Marie Wilkinson observes that in her work, “criticism, reading, writing, visual art, philosophy, drama, poetry, and prose all seem[] of a piece” (2, emphasis in original). For Wilkinson, this puts her in a “freakish category” of writers who “obliterate” genre (1).ii On the contrary: far from standing at a “freakish” remove from other writing, her work, in its distinctive shapes, not only illuminate continuities between modes of response—such as ekphrasis, translation, criticism— but also reveals an intimacy between responsiveness and creativity that has profound implications for how we think about creativity, reading, and the lyric poem. Sastri 2 Carson’s work brings to light how reading and inventive response take place in the space between two people, putting her poetics into conversation with studies that explore the fundamentally collaborative nature of creativity in the arts, sciences, and everyday life.iii Her scholarly essays avowedly reject an objective stance; Carson as a reader refuses to separate learning and feeling, scholarship and attachment. Elizabeth Coles’ forthcoming monograph—a welcome intervention in a critical field that has thus far lacked ambitious, synthesizing accounts of Carson’s work—examines the stakes of Carson’s practice of exposing her subjective reading experience.iv No less than her essays manifest their subjective investments, her poems, even when most inflected with personal experience, memory, and emotion, are saturated with others’ words and works. I wish to examine Carson’s conjoining of intertextual receptivity and passionate expression in her lyric poems; I suggest that doing so can help to illuminate lyric itself as the charged, recurrent evidence of, and potential for, intersubjective, heuristic encounter.v Thanks to her notorious genre-bending, Carson is rarely discussed as a lyric poet.vi Yet she translates lyrics from Greek, German, and French, crafts sonnets, writes ekphrastic poems and sequences, and engages at times in musings on nature, memory, and love that recall the romantics. Paradoxically, the absence in Carson’s oeuvre of a clear dividing line between lyric and writing about an art object or text enables us to draw from it a version of lyric in which intertextuality and expressivity, long opposed by lyric’s theorists, are two sides of a coin. I take up the notion of wild constancy to name the process, central to Carson’s poetics, by which something outside—text or artwork—alters the inside, becoming part of “something … wild” that underlies poesis (“Cassandra Float Can,” Float n.p.).vii The emotional and psychic charge of the aesthetic encounter, the way that artworks can seem themselves more person-like than thing-like, and the way the encounter can initiate a Sastri 3 process of discovery and creation, have been framed suggestively in recent writing on ekphrasis by Brian Glavey, Rachel Eisendrath, and others.viii Carson writes about paintings, drawings, and etchings by Giotto, Betty Goodwin, and Edward Hopper, films by Antonioni, site-specific art by Roni Horn and Gordon Matta-Clark; Monique Tschofen, and Elizabeth Harvey and Mark Cheetham, illuminate how her responses to particular artworks approach them in a spirit of reciprocity, cooperation, collaboration. But it is not only in her responses to visual art that Carson’s poetics partakes of “the fundamental relatedness” that Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux attributes to ekphrasis (5). Loizeaux’s ekphrastic poet “always responds to someone else’s work” (5); the same is true of Carson, whether the work in question is visual or textual. Carson calls the textual, and specifically the poetic, encounter, in the first instance, “mimesis.” To read is to undertake “the action of the mind” the poet first performed: I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. His mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you're different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference. (“Art of Poetry” 203) Carson’s description of mimesis as “repeat[ing]” an “action of the mind” chimes with accounts of lyric as iterable event such as Jonathan Culler’s.ix Like Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips, who supplement current scholarship’s emphasis on lyric’s situatedness in its originating contexts with attention to its transhistorical “‘literary’ qualities”—a poem can “stop you in your tracks, … show you things you had not seen, … make you think, … make you joyful, uncomfortable, or angry”—Carson implicitly conceives of, and practices, lyric as “textual event” (2-3).x Sastri 4 This event carries much of the affective charge and transformational potential of encounters with persons.xi That we “imitate” not just an action, but the person whose action it originally was—“you … feel when you’re in it that you’re moving with somebody else’s mind through an action” (“Art of Poetry” 203)—matters; “[t]he passionate moment echoes from soul to soul” (as she writes of quotations in Longinus’ On the Sublime [Decreation 46]). Carson shares what she calls Paul Celan’s sense of the poem’s “effort toward” the “mystery of encounter,” the way it fundamentally “intends another” (Economy 71, Celan 49). William Waters describes “poetry as a form of contact” (1); for Mark Payne, lyric’s ability to communicate in different places and times inheres in its seeking “responsive contact” (12). For Carson, “Contact is crisis”: “[P]erhaps the most difficult task we face daily is that of touching one another—whether the touch is physical, moral, emotional or imaginary” (Men 130). Her texts stage intertextual creativity as a “crisis of human contact” (Eros 21), evoking the delicate, precarious play of merging and separation, intimate knowledge and recurrent unknowing, that enliven inter-artistic relations, and intersubjective, relations. Eros the Bittersweet, Carson’s first book, reveals Western lyric, at its inception in written form, to be intensely preoccupied with the self’s permeable boundedness in relation to others, memorably detailing archaic Greek poets’ vision of eros as a force that assaults the individual, “piercing, crushing, bridling, toasting, stinging, biting, grating, … singeing and grinding to a powder” (40). “In experiencing and articulating the melting threat of eros,” Carson writes, “the Greek poets are presumably also learning something about their own bounded selves through the effort to resist dissolution of those bounds in erotic emotion” (40). This discovery, she speculates, reflects their era’s shift to literacy: reading and writing require the individual to “close or inhibit the input of his senses… so as to train energy and thought upon the written Sastri 5 words”; “becom[ing] aware of the interior self as an entity separable from the environment and its input,” the “individual personality gathers itself to resist disintegration” (44). This acute awareness of the “crisis of contact” (41), of boundaries and their dissolution, inflects lyric poetry as Carson perceives and practices it. Imbued with risk and urgency, the way encounters with texts and artworks affect us is belied by a paradigm of knowing; we can never know a work finally or completely. Coles describes Carson’s “project of intimacy in interpretation”: Carson “believes in what evades her in the work, what resists” interpretive certainty (137, 152). Coles’ term “intimacy” and her emphasis on “what evades” beautifully suggest the tension between desire to know and admission of what cannot be known that relationships to texts and to persons share. For Melissa Feuerstein, poetry “enable[s] readers to learn from the experience of unknowing,” in a manner akin to the difficulty of recognizing another person as an equal, separate self (210); for Toril Moi, to imagine that “the text only offered us one truth” would be “like saying that there is only one truth to be had about a human being” (209). Wild constancy, in reading as in human relationships, entails being true to the opacity and mutability of the other. In the pages below, I focus on three of Carson’s poetic works: “Wildly Constant,” a personal, meditative lyric that aligns fidelity in marriage with fidelity to the aesthetic encounter; “Hopper: Confessions,” a sequence both ekphrastic and intertextual in which the poet attends to the invisible (time, another’s subjectivity) beyond the visual surface, and anticipates the reader’s encounter with the poems that result; and “A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways,” in which a Greek lyric fragment collides with, and lyricizes, literary and nonliterary texts, setting off unexpected textual fireworks. Responsive, dialogic, in touch with the past and inventing the Sastri 6 future, wildly constant to their sources, Carson’s poems, I hope to show, offer a test case for understanding how poets create out of, and in contact with, the words, and works, of others.xii “Wildly Constant”: living with in art and marriage “Wildly Constant,” the poem from which I take my central paradigm, implicitly aligns the aesthetic encounter with what Carson calls “the moment Eros enters you” (Eros 153), and explores fidelity and freedom in both lyric—at once personal meditation and creative response— and marriage. In an extended metaphor that Carson would surely appreciate, Scots poet Alastair Mackie compares writing poetry to Penelope’s expectant watching at home—the poet spends his day “waiting for the kent face I dinna ken / until I scrieve it doun”—and also to Odysseus’s voyaging—“The unkent is the next poem. My sky-lines / are the blue lines o a page whaur my watches / are listenin for silence tae say something.” The reciprocity between Penelope and Odysseus in Mackie’s images, echoing Homer’s resonant comparison, in the Odyssey Book 23, of Penelope’s recognizing Odysseus with Odysseus’s sighting the shore, implicitly links writing with marriage. Both require “bold trust” and entail “happy discovery,” as Siobhan Phillips observes of Robert Frost (63), who called marriage “a making thing, an unfolding thing” (275). In “Wildly Constant,” Carson encounters an artwork in an unusual way: she lives in it. An installation by American artist Roni Horn in Stykkishólmur, Iceland, the Library of Water hosts an annual writers’ residency program, with participants housed in a “modest but comfortable apartment and writing studio” in the basement of the library building (artangel). As writer in residence in 2008, Carson was accompanied by her husband Robert Currie; as the poem recounts, the “extreme monogamy” of living “for three months in one small room / … / proved almost too much” for the couple. This occasion affords a resonant analogy. To live in, and with, Sastri 7 an artwork requires and enables a different relation to it than does encountering it in a museum; to live with a person in marriage presents different demands than does falling in love. What relation does the exigency of living with bear to the moment of encounter? One answer can be found in Socrates’ belief in the “unique … value” of “the moment Eros enters you,” which Carson elaborates: As Socrates tells it, … [t]hat incursion is the biggest risk of your life. … As you handle it you come into contact with the things inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be…. To address yourself to the moment when Eros glances into your life and to grasp what is happening to your soul at that moment is to begin to understand how to live. Eros’ mode of takeover is an education: it can teach you the real nature of what is inside you. Once you glimpse that, you can begin to become it. Socrates says it is the glimpse of a god. (Eros 153) To be true to these glimpsed possibilities requires a willingness to be changed by them, and an ongoing effort to live up to them. Philosopher Alain Badiou names such a process “fidelity.” In the case of love, “It’s necessary to be faithful to [love’s] decentring … not abandoning this decentring … for reasons strictly related to my fundamental narcissism or my irreducible singularity” (49). This “discipline” imposed on ourselves “intersects with the [more common] trivial” or “negative … meaning of the word ‘fidelity,’” that is, “not sleeping with someone else” (47-49). Badiou understands fidelity as positive, active, and temporal. To be faithful is not to remain unchanging, nor to value the originating moment over what follows: that moment only opens up possibilities that may be unfolded, with effort, over time. For Carson, this living out, unfolding, requires “submitting … to wholesale erotic takeover [and] the change of self entailed Sastri 8 in it” (Eros 165). Carson’s poetics entails a similar process of being changed by the work of art, and remaining true to it while enacting a wild creativity to which the encounter has given rise. As Carson explains, “Formerly the town library, [the Library of Water] contains waters from all the glaciers of Iceland. … Each water is contained in a glass pillar that reaches from floor to ceiling and reverberates with its own cold memories” (Gerstler 178). These “memories” manifest as the columns’ different shades, depending on the sediments in the glacial water; each column has a light source in the bottom which brings out the colors. Embedded in the floor surrounding the columns are words, in Icelandic and English, for the weather. Visually striking within and without, with large windows overlooking the harbor of this small Icelandic town, the Library invites shifting spatial and temporal perspectives as visitors move through the space. At the climax of the poem, the poet stands alone at night among the glacial columns, the building buffeted by the wind, “ponder[ing]” “why we are here.” “Wildly Constant” (Float, n.p.) does not announce itself as a poem about marriage, or an ekphrastic poem; it proceeds in a casual, meditative mode, and begins en route, on an early morning walk in Iceland’s strong wind. On her first such walk, the speaker recalls, she saw a raven. Famed for being “omnivorous. / Pernicious. // Monogamous,” ravens lead to marriage: I’m interested in monogamous. I got married last May and had my honeymoon in Stykkishólmur. This year I returned to Stykkishólmur to live with my husband Sastri 9 for three months in one small room. This extreme monogamy proved almost too much for us. Rather than murder each other we rented a second place (Greta’s house) near the pool. Now we are happily duogamous. The poem proceeds to introduce the Library of Water, comparing its “upright. // Silent” glaciers to books. As if remembering anticipating coming to the Library, Carson asks, “What would it be like / to live in a library / of melted books?,” and answers, “an adventure.” The adventure, when it comes to pass, feels in part like this: Sometimes at night when I can’t sleep because of the wind I go and stand in the library of glaciers. Sastri 10 I stand in another world. Not the past not the future. Not paradise not reality not a dream. An other competence, Wild and constant. Who knows why it exists. I stand amid glaciers. Listen to the wind outside falling towards me from the outer edges of night and space. In “a room full of melted glaciers / reverberating with the nightwind of Stykisholmur,” Carson says, she can “ponder,” for a time, “why we are here” and what (if anything) we are “signs” of.xiii “Wildly Constant”’s many deflections away from interpreting “signs”—“I should learn more about signs” is one of its refrains—suggest a preference for experience over knowledge that the Library honors. Rather than provide an answer—“Who knows why”—it offers a “place” to be. The phrase “Wild and constant,” describing the “other competence” to which the library gives access, recalls the earlier phrase “wildly constant,” which follows the introduction of Greta’s house as a happy alternative to the murderous “one small room”: There are ravens on the roof Sastri 11 of both places. Perhaps they are the same ravens. I can’t tell. If Roni Horn were here she’d say ravens are like water, they are wildly constant. To be like water might mean to be always moving, ungraspable: in “The Anthropology of Water,” Carson writes, “I cannot read maps—why press a seal on running water?” (Plainwater 123). Art may be seen as trying to fix or still the natural world. Roni Horn’s Library plays with this idea in its paradoxical preservation of (static) ice as (fluid, although contained) water.xiv “The Anthropology of Water” begins by comparing water and persons: “Water is something you cannot hold. Like men. I have tried. Father, brother, lover, true friends, hungry ghosts and God, one by one all took themselves out of my hands” (117). Eros the Bittersweet likens the “painful” pleasure of desire to “that of holding ice in your hands” (112). “Wildly Constant” asks whether marriage might become, not one more attempt to grasp water, but a paradoxical process—akin to Horn’s glacial columns—of simultaneous holding and freeing. Monogamous and “wildly constant … like water,” the ravens point toward such a process. “To raven” can mean “To have a ravenous appetite, craving, or desire”; “To rage with hunger,” a usage that appears in “The Anthropology of Water” (170). The assaultive wind that Sastri 12 “hits me. / A punch in the face” and, in one version of the poem, “rock[s]” the Library, recalls the depiction of Eros in Ibykos’s fragment 286 as the North wind which “shakes” the poet’s “whole breathing being” (Float, n.p.). What becomes of such energies in marriage? In a seemingly digressive moment of “Wildly Constant,” Carson observes, “In your dreams / said … Anna Freud…/ you can have your eggs cooked as perfectly as you want // but you cannot eat them.” It is a reminder that, in the words of Harvey and Cheetham, “The relative stability of duogamy is … always haunted by a (wild, intrasubjective) other” (23). Yet “Wildly Constant” ends by anticipating eggs which are edible and shared: Before leaving the library I turn off the lights. The glaciers go dark. Then I return to Greta’s house. Wake up my husband. Ask him to make us some eggs. “Wildly Constant”’s ending by looking to the future—a modest, everyday future—hints at an appetite for renewal that chimes with Stanley Cavell’s conception of marriage as a “willing repetition of days, willingness for the everyday” (178).xv Marriage’s everyday, as Jane Hedley suggests, coexists with a temporality of “literary and/ or mythic archetypes” such as Penelope and Odysseus (5-6). In “Wildly Constant”s ending we might hear an echo of the end of the penultimate and the beginning of the final chapter of Sastri 13 Joyce’s Ulysses, when Bloom, the wandering Odysseus, falls asleep beside Molly muttering something about a “roc’s auk egg” and Molly thinks he is asking for “breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs” (607-8). This comic collision of spouses suggests a reciprocity between the poetspeaker and the sleeping husband. In “Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep),” Carson writes of Penelope that “sleep is the deepest contract she shares with her husband. Miles apart, years apart, consciously and unconsciously, they turn the key of each other” (Decreation 29). In Economy of the Unlost she invokes Heraklitos’ saying “Men asleep are laborers and coworkers of what is going on in this world” (58). From this perspective, it is as if the sleeping husband in “Wildly Constant” is the poet’s collaborator, her co-worker in constructing the poem. At the same time, the turn toward waking reminds us of the world outside the poem, and creative possibilities not yet dreamed of; the husband may not only cook eggs for breakfast, but hatch something entirely outside the poem, unpredictable and awaited with pleasure. “Wildly Constant” was published under Carson’s name in the London Review of Books, Best American Poetry 2010, and Float. However, introducing two pieces written in Iceland in a performance at the Whitney Museum in November, 2009, Carson states that while “living in Roni Horn’s installation Library of Water, underneath, in a room, … we … wrote a poem collaboratively, Currie and I” and “we do like this poem. Currie and I wrote it together” (“Cage”). The performance version contains several stanzas not included in any of the published versions, stanzas which are as sonically dense, lush, and lyrical as the published poem is tonally matter-of-fact and everyday. These stanzas interrupt the personal narrative with description rich in color, sound, and metaphor. For example, after the first two stanzas about walking in the wind, read by Carson, we hear these lines, read by Penelope Thomas (my transcription in italics): Sky before dawn is blackish green. Sastri 14 Perhaps a sign. I should learn more about signs. Turning a corner to the harbour the wind hits me a punch in the face. Between igneous and atmosphere crows tend like braille the silver dark stumble like overlong songs. In correspondence, Carson explains that she wrote and poem and Currie added the stanzas in question, which he “chose to not include” when the poem was published “as these were intended for the performance” (“2ness”). The sonic and figurative emphasis of the interpolated stanzas bring to mind Carson’s notion that “Poetic language has [the] capacity to uncover a world of metaphor that lies inside all our ordinary speech like a mind asleep” (Economy 58). The sleeping husband and his poetic language seem to safeguard an alternate vision, “reciprocally invisible” and yet “interdependent” with the poet’s own (58). Seen in this way, collaboration might represent an opportunity for married partners to remain, or become again, unknown to one another. Frequent collaborators with each other, and with visual artists, musicians, and dancers, Carson and Currie have taught seminars on collaboration, and given joint interviews that emphasize the “trust” that enables Sastri 15 collaborators to work freely and, as it were, independently: collaboration “depends on liking the people and trusting the people. You have to assume that whatever they do will be as good as you want the thing to be and just go ahead with that” (“An Interview” [Berkobein]). When asked, “What’s the most important part of any artistic collaboration…?” Carson responds with one word: “Trust,” and Currie adds, “Trust as defined in a lot of different ways; trust of critical response, aesthetic integrity” (“Unwriting”). Asked for favorite examples of collaboration, Currie replies, “Well, John Cage and Merce Cunningham,” and Carson continues, “Yes, they represent the ideal form of it. They interacted so little with each other in the process, which made it so magical” (“An Interview” [Berkobein]). Partners in life as well as work, Cage and Cunningham, for Carson and Currie, “represent the ideal form” of mutual trust and collaborative freedom.xvi “Hopper: Confessions”: “Here, you hold this” In “Wildly Constant,” the poet lives inside a three-dimensional, situational artwork; in the earlier “Hopper: Confessions” (Men 50-59), she contemplates a series of flat canvases, paintings and etchings by Edward Hopper, available primarily to the eye. Carson complicates the visual surface by bringing to it not just a third but a fourth dimension, time; and equally, by refusing to dissociate the viewer’s “eye” from her “I,” an “I” who thinks and feels by means of an idiosyncratic, deeply personal collection of texts that join her in the ekphrastic encounter. Where “Wildly Constant” ends by turning toward the world outside, and the time beyond, the poem, where the daily adventure of marriage begins again, “Hopper: Confessions” anticipates the reader’s encounter with the poems, which it offers to us with an extended hand. Throughout the sequence, particularly its final poem, “The Glove of Time by Edward Hopper,” Carson collaborates with Hopper, exploring a relationship between words and pictures Sastri 16 that is “mutual, dynamic,” and “deeper than the visible surface” (Economy 52). I take those words from Carson’s discussion of the poet Simonides of Keos: at a time of new illusionism in the visual arts in the 5th century B. C., Simonides resisted the “total investment in the visible surface of the world as reality” that illusionism implied: “His medium is words positioned so as to lead you to the edge where words stop, pointing beyond themselves toward something no eye can see and no painter can paint”; “there is one thing a poem can do that a painting cannot, … namely, render the invisible” (51). In Hopper, Carson encounters an artist who would himself render the invisible: as she says in an interview, he “seems to be trying to paint time. There’s really nothing else in [his paintings], no other questions in them than ‘what does time feel like?’” (“Gifts and Questions” 23). In “Hopper: Confessions” Carson juxtaposes Hopper’s works with quotations from Augustine’s Confessions, Book XI, meditating on time as a mystery human beings cannot fully grasp. Rather than take the visible as “evidence” (Men 52), Carson acknowledges what cannot be seen and what cannot be known; she discovers instead what can be made, and explores poetic language’s mimetic capacity to “reenact[]”—rather than represent— “the reality of which it speaks” (Economy 52). An epigraph cautions against one “obvious” mode of translating the visual to the verbal: “I hope it does not tell an obvious anecdote for none is intended (Edward Hopper)” (Men 50). Taking heed, Carson’s poems eschew storytelling. Irregular lineation and rhyme abound, establishing the work’s lyric, not narrative, character. “Room in Brooklyn” casts Hopper’s painting of that name as an exploration of Augustine’s words: “let us say / Time present was long, / Because when it was present it was long.” In short lines which slow syntactic progress, it traces “A gradual dazzle” shimmering “As hours / blow / the / wide / way / Down my afternoon.” “Nighthawks” comes closest to anecdote as it responds to this iconic painting’s Sastri 17 suggestion of a film still, but ultimately elevates questions of temporality—explored with Augustine’s help—over plot. Its opening lines seem to imagine the thoughts of the man seated at the diner’s counter, addressed to the woman beside him: I wanted to run away with you tonight but you are a difficult woman the rules of you— The same three lines, in reverse order, end the poem. Anecdotally, the planned romantic adventure has failed; temporally, the speaker looks back to looking forward. Carson evokes the peculiar stasis surrounding this retrospective anticipation via the semantic mirroring of the first and last stanzas and the visual mirroring (increasing, then decreasing, indentations) of the two central stanzas; as the speaker says, “Past and future circle round us.” The repeated negatives in the lines from Augustine—“I know that if nothing passed away, time past were not. / And if nothing were coming, time future were not. / And if nothing were, time present were not”— reinforce the sense of stasis, of something “not” happening. At least since W. J. T. Mitchell’s influential essay “Ekphrasis and the other,” it is “commonplace” to frame ekphrasis in gendered terms (Loizeaux 80). Responding to nine paintings that include female figures, “Hopper: Confessions” has been read as a critique of the male gaze: for Barbara Fischer, in it “Carson addresses a male perspective on feminine objecthood” (82). Fischer’s reading captures how in “Western Motel,” “Carson’s ekphrasis exposes … the palpable discomfort of being watched”: addressing the woman in the painting, Carson repeats the potentially menacing sentence “Two suitcases watch you like dogs.” But Fischer’s emphasis on the paintings’ women as objectified and “silenced ‘others’” does not fit Sastri 18 Carson’s more reciprocal, collaborative poetic mode (79). This becomes clear if we compare Carson’s poems to Liesl Mueller’s “A Nude by Edward Hopper,” whose speaker directly refuses to be “what I might be, / a man’s dream / of heat and softness, / or a painter’s” and asserts, “this body / is home,” “I live here.” Very different from the closing of Carson’s “Evening Wind,” which addresses the nude woman in that etching: You on the other hand creature whitely Septembered Can you pause in the thought that links origin and tendency? Speaking on behalf of the painted figure, as Mueller does, can have ambiguous implications: “prosopopoeia can … be understood as the collapse of subject and object, … equally an objectification and an exercise of empathy” (Loizeaux 24). Carson’s address may feel more respectful than Mueller’s speaking for. And while Mueller focuses on appearance and bodily experience, Carson implies the woman’s metaphysical contemplations: she will “wish to be remembered / after passing from this world,” and perhaps prays with Augustine, “Shut it not up I beseech thee, do not shut up these / usual yet hidden things / from my desire.” Johanna Malt observes that “in the ekphrastic encounter, language comes up against both a close family member and an impenetrably inaccessible other” (221). In the sequence’s last poem, “The Glove of Time by Edward Hopper,” the inaccessibility of a painted woman’s experience does not prompt the poet to psychological speculation or narrative, but rather gives rise to reflection on the baffling, enriching, heuristic encounter between the poet-viewer and the work of art. Returning to the painting Automat, the subject of the sequence’s second poem, “The Sastri 19 Glove of Time” revises “Automat”’s suggestion that its female figure is rendered as sexually appealing or available, focusing instead on the viewer’s distance from and inability to know the painted woman’s experience. “The Glove of Time by Edward Hopper” enacts a self-consciously subjective response to a work of art and the female figure portrayed within it. Carson does not so much correct painting with poetry, or a male perspective with a female one, as make available to the reader a subjective involvement with Hopper’s work that honors its independent existence, eventually turning away from it to pursue her own creation. Densely layered with quotations from and references to Shakespeare, Keats, Rimbaud, Ashbery, and Godard, “The Glove of Time by Edward Hopper” enacts the poet’s emerging from the encounter with Hopper’s works changed, and creating out of the collision something new: “The Glove of Time” anticipates the reader’s encounter with the poem as much as it reflects on the viewer’s encounter with painting. Although Fischer has it that Carson “tell[s] her reader outright that it is an actual ekphrasis” (82), “The Glove of Time by Edward Hopper” bears the only title to include the painter’s name, alerting us, as does the absence of text from Augustine, to a difference from the preceding poems. It begins with a disorienting use of the first-person: “True I am but a shadow of a passenger on this planet / but my soul likes to dress in formal attire / despite the stains.” Who speaks? The poem asks this question, but only after two lines of conventional narrative ekphrasis describing the woman in Automat (seated alone at night at a cafeteria table, wearing a hat, a coat, and one glove)—“She walks through the door. / She takes off her glove.”—yield to questions: Does she turn her head. Does she cross her leg. That is a question. Who is speaking. Sastri 20 Also a question. All I can say is I see no evidence of another glove. Earlier in the sequence, “Automat” frames the woman, via short repetitive rhymed phrases, as a “Girl de luxe” who does “Night work”; incorporating the opening of Psalm 130, “clamo / ad te / Domine,” recited to prepare for confession, the poem suggests an inflection toward confession, prayer, or both. These suggestions are absent from “The Glove of Time,” which, far from making conjectures, hesitates to decide even the most seemingly superficial details, like “Does she cross her leg” (her knees are hidden by the table and her feet cropped out of the frame, making the question undecidable). The poem avoids extrapolation and judgment, choosing instead uncertainty and reflexivity: “Who is speaking. / Also a question.” This takes us back to the ambiguous “I” of the opening lines. From “Does she turn her head,” “She” seems to refer to the woman in Automat as we imagine her just prior to the moment of the painting. The first “I” seems less the woman, imagined as a living person, than the painted woman, coextensive with the painting itself. Mentioning “evidence,” by contrast, the second “I” seems to be the viewer. This “I” draws attention to her own activity with a deictic command that might be addressed to herself, but might equally address the reader: “The words are not a sentence, don’t work on that. / Work on this.” The viewer-poet shifts attention from the woman to “the moment,” perhaps as captured in another Hopper painting: It is not empty time, it is the moment when the curtains come blowing into the room. When the lamp is prepared. Sastri 21 When light hits the wall just there. But immediately the unseen, subjective and temporal, returns to haunt the seen: “Now it rose up—the life she could have lived (par les soirs bleus d’été).” (Soir bleu is an early Hopper painting; the quotation is from Rimbaud’s “Sensation,” a poem entirely in the future tense.) In order to convey the invisible, perhaps we need to do more, or other, than look: It so happens paint is motionless. But if you put your ear to the canvas you will hear the sounds of a terribly good wheel on its way. Somewhere someone is travelling toward you, travelling day and night. Putting an ear to the canvas feels like listening for a whisper or a secret. (Here, we hear Ashbery’s rewriting of Marvell.) Carson invites a similar startling intimacy a few lines later: “Here, you hold this: / evidence.” Even more so than “Work on this,” this second instance of address plus deixis suggests contact. Carson does not say “Here, look at this: evidence.” Instead she draws attention to our holding of the poem—as in Whitman’s “Whoever you are holding me now in hand”—or holds out her hand, as does Keats in “This living hand,” to make (physical, imagined) contact. What we hold is the poem: evidence of Carson’s encounter with Hopper. Earlier, the speaker saw “no evidence of another glove”: but of course, it is on the basis of the one visible glove that we seek the invisible one. The final lines take the glove in unexpected directions: Sastri 22 It so happens a good evening glove is 22 centimeters from hem to fingertip. This was a glove “shot in the back” (as Godard said of his King Lear). Listening to his daughters Lear hoped to see their entire bodies stretched out across their voices like white kid. For in what does time differ from eternity except we measure it? In Economy of the Unlost, Carson sets Simonides’ commitment to “a reality beyond” the visible against Protagoras’s formulation that “’Man is the measure of all things, both of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not’” (51). Such a perspective denies anything that cannot be seen. With a related arrogance, Lear treats the invisible as if it were visible; specifically, he so treats love. Wishing to divide his kingdom, Lear demands, “Tell me, my daughters, / Which of you shall say doth love us most” (I.1.53-4); Cordelia refuses the demand, choosing to “Love, and be silent” (I.1.68). Carson brings out the violence implicit in Lear’s demand through the image of the body stretched across the voice like white kid. The poem’s final line recalls the quotation from “Automat,” in which Augustine addresses the “human soul,” saying “to thee is it given to see and to measure the length of time.” Does measuring time imply a denial of the invisible; is there a parallel between Lear’s division of his kingdom into three, and time’s division into past, present, and future? From a certain Sastri 23 perspective, as Augustine makes clear, such division is meaningless, although pragmatically it is useful. Harmless compared to the demand to see and measure love, it nonetheless shares the character of stamping measurement onto elusive physical, metaphysical, or experiential ground.xvii To speak of past, present, and future leaves out “what time feel[s] like” (“Gifts” 23). In “Room in Brooklyn,” “Nighthawks,” and “Evening Wind,” Carson’s language evokes this experience. “To render,” which can mean (among other things) “To represent or reproduce, esp. artistically; to depict, portray” and “To reproduce or express in another language; to translate,” is an apt verb for the complex relationship between the poem and “the invisible.”xviii In light of Carson’s renderings, the final question of “The Glove of Time” might have read, “For in what does time differ from eternity except we feel it?”xix The poem’s reflexive gestures (“Work on this”; “Here, you hold this”) and its quotations encourage us to hear another possibility in “measure”: to “measure” time might mean to make verse of it. Does verse impose a false grid on time, on experience; or does “measure” take on a different quality here? In Carson’s notion of mimesis, reading is temporal: “a movement of yourself … through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you're different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference” (“Art of Poetry” 203). The poet’s measuring—verse-making— then measures time for the reader, the time it takes to read and experience the poem. Faithful to Hopper’s works in their attempt to render time, Carson’s poems introduce unexpected perspectives and elements—Augustine, Lear, Keats—with a wildness that exceeds dutiful fidelity. Sympathizing and collaborating with Hopper and the figures he paints, she also acknowledges what she cannot know, not presuming to speak for the figures, but addressing them in own interiority, their own experience. Bringing her own presence to the foreground, Sastri 24 forging a Hopper painting that she makes obvious is hers and not Hopper’s, acknowledging her subjectivity, she is true to her ekphrastic occasion in leaving it behind to anticipate our encounter with the poem. Recording an aesthetic encounter, she looks ahead to what Payne calls “the begetting encounter between poet and reader” (17); in holding out her hand, she evokes that encounter as something tactile, horizontal, and intimate. “A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways”: translation as collaboration, translation as setting free When an interviewer suggests that translation is “perhaps a form of collaboration,” Carson replies, “Sure…. A collaboration with the original piece. It's a useful metaphor” (“An Interview” [Berkobein]). Recent writers on translation frame it as “collaborative creativity” (Reynolds 67) and suggest that “All translations are collaborative” (Gold 128).xx For Carson, as we saw above, trust and mutual freedom underpin creative collaboration. How can such a model coexist with the aim of fidelity translation traditionally demands? Carson offers a provocative answer in “A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways,” published first in the London Review of Books in 2012 and subsequently, with minor changes, as part of “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent” in the chapbook Nay, Rather (2013) (reprinted in Float, 2016). Introducing “A Fragment” in “Variations,” Carson announces, “I shall take a small fragment of ancient Greek lyric poetry and translate it over and over again using the wrong words” (Float, n.p.). The first translation of fragment 286 by sixth century BCE Greek poet Ibykos is uncontroversial; in subsequent versions, Carson borrows her “wrong words” from texts ranging from Donne’s “Woman’s Constancy” to Beckett’s Endgame to the manual for a microwave oven. Remaining constant to its source in the syntactic structure it maintains in all versions, “A Fragment of Sastri 25 Ibykos Translated Six Ways” practices reading as mimesis; in its zany departures, via the intertexts, it enacts the mutual setting free of reader-translator and original. At times Carson evokes the ideal of fidelity in translation. When introducing If Not, Winter, she writes of using “the plainest language I could find, using where possible the same order of words and thoughts as Sappho did. I like to think that, the more I stand out of the way, the more Sappho shows through. This is an amiable fantasy (transparency of self) within which most translators labor” (If Not x). At other moments, however, what interests Carson is precisely what resists this “amiable fantasy,” what brings the “self”’s encounter with the work into focus. For example, brackets: used to signify the portions of Sappho’s poems physically missing due to historical accident, brackets allow the reader a taste of the “drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp”; “Brackets … gesture toward the papyrological event” and “imply a free space of imaginal adventure” (xi). As Yopie Prins argues, the fragmentation of Sappho’s works enabled Victorian readers to “project [the] fantasy of a female body and a feminine voice,” an “idealized … figure” Prins calls a “personification” (3,4, 7). For Carson, fragmentation instead reminds us that we do not and cannot know Sappho, and opens onto a wider perspective on the text, not as something to grasp completely, render transparently, translate exactly, but rather an “event” that begins an “adventure” (If Not xi). In “A Fragment,” the adventure begins with a vivid rendition of Ibykos 286: In spring, on the one hand, the Kydonian apple trees, being watered by streams of rivers where the uncut garden of the maidens [is] and vine blossoms Sastri 26 swelling beneath shady vine branches bloom. On the other hand, for me Eros lies quiet at no season. Nay rather, like a Thracian north wind ablaze with lightning, rushing from Aprhodite accompanied by parching madnesses, black, unastonishable, powerfully, right up from the bottom of my feet [it] shakes my whole breathing being. These lines memorably portray the onslaught of eros that Carson explores in Eros the Bittersweet, an eros “hostile in intention and detrimental in effect” (40), which blasts the “I,” “parching” and “shak[ing]” his “whole breathing being.” xxi Other translators make the poem’s contrast simply with “But” or “Now” in the place of “on the other hand.”xxii Carson, as Adrienne K. Ho Rose points out, “retains … crucial rhetorical markers ‘on the one hand’ (μεν), ‘on the other hand’ (δε), and ‘nay rather’ (τε υπο)” and intensifies the contrast they make by translating the “τε υπο” (“but just as,” which accompanies Sastri 27 “on the other hand”) with the logically unnecessary and lexically “antiquated” “Nay rather” (133). Also the title of the chapbook in which “A Fragment” appears, “Nay rather” serves to emphasize the poem’s rhetorical, logical structure, and thus to frame the fragment as a contrastive structure of thought. This structure governs the six versions that follow, each of which includes “On the other hand” and two lines later “Nay rather.” To translate, or imitate, such rhetorical markers might be understood as an unexceptional practice of imitatio, which “can entail grasping the principles which underpin a particular text,” such as “a rhythmic pattern, or a rhetorical structure” (Burrow Imitating 14). Carson’s practice makes emphatic the way that such principles constitute modes of thought; how, as David Lehman writes, “a formal decision may precede or even dictate content,” making “imitation … a creative strategy” (xiv). Maintaining the contrastive structure, each of Carson’s versions is constant to one aspect of the Ibykos. But in introducing different intertexts that severely restrict lexical choices, “A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways” seems to push to a point of deliberate absurdity what Peter Robinson describes and denounces: “an account of translating which states that because exact reproduction of an original is impossible, poets should take advantage of this fact to spin off ‘poems in their own right’” (32). In the first of Carson’s spin-offs, passing Donne’s “Woman’s Constancy” through the prism of Ibykos yields wonderful phrases like “true deaths / sleeping / beneath true marriages.” But this thematically cognate version is followed by versions using words from Bertold Brecht’s FBI file, Conversations with Kafka, Beckett’s Endgame, stops and signs from London Underground, an owner’s manual for a “new Emerson 1000W microwave oven”; these versions deflect the kind of interpretation or intertextual commentary that the Donne version invites, Sastri 28 yielding instead a sense of energies released when particles (poems) collide. xxiii The last lines in the piece suggest as much: On the other hand, a frozen pancake will not crust. Nay rather, like radio waves, bubbling, spattering, accompanied by you rubbing your hands together, without venting the plastic wrap, without rearranging the pieces halfway through, without using the special microwave popper, [it] will burn your nose right off. Playful and deliberately absurd, the versions explore a relationship to the source text very different from the aim of the “transparent… self” putting the plainest words in the same order of thought. On the contrary, they evoke Carson’s notion of the “individuality” that “resides” in the particular “way” an artist makes links between the unchosen things she encounters “just … bumping into the world,” and her sense of “mak[ing] the mind move” between “five books … or five words at random” in a process that becomes “suddenly exhilarating” (“Art of Poetry” 207, “Anne Carson”). Such exhilarating movement seems a far cry from fidelity. For Reynolds, a translator is “answerable” to an author (67); in the seventeenth century, he reminds us, “You could cause Sastri 29 ‘injury’ to Virgil just as you might to a living person” (121). Robinson takes translators to task for evading the necessary labor of “faithfully imitative approximation” (32): “The fact that there can be no literal translation … of a work of art … allows there to be fidelity and accuracy…. You can only be faithful to someone or some thing when you have acknowledged both its integrity and the need for that to be cherished and protected” (43). Robinson’s version of constancy in translation frames the text in terms that strikingly evoke a person. Carson’s translation practice—for example in If Not, Winter and the first Ibykos version—demonstrates her capacity for Robinson’s kind of fidelity. But her speculations about untranslatablity, and her practice across “A Fragment,” suggest a different sort of fidelity to the encounter with the text, an encounter that invigorates, exhilarates, and releases. In “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” Carson praises the “benevolence of the untranslatable” which opens up “the feeling that something has passed us and kept going, that some possibility has got free” (Float n.p.). Just before introducing the Ibykos versions, she writes, As a classicist I was trained to strive for exactness and to believe that rigorous knowledge of the world without any residue is possible for us. This residue, which does not exist — just to think of it refreshes me. To think of its position, how it shares its position with drenched layers of nothing, to think of its motion, how it can never stop moving because I am in motion with it, to think of its shadow, which is cast by nothing and so has no death in it (or very little)—to think of these things gives me a sensation of getting free. (n.p.) What resists the translator, what refuses totalizing knowledge, sets her “free,” and, equally, remains free of her; in “A Fragment,” we might say, the Ibykos “has got free.” Sastri 30 In Gold’s terms, translations “deny a writer’s complete authority over language” (128). Carson speculates that poetry itself “expos[es]” the “myth at the bottom of language”: “that you can know it ever definitively. Use it, yes. Make sense, yes. But know it, I’m not sure” (“An Interview” [Watchel]). She continues, “you leap off [a] building when you think poetically; you don’t amass your data and then move from point to point, you have to just know what you know in that moment. Something freeing about that” (“An Interview” [Watchel]). Carson frames the Ibykos versions as translations, or as “a catastrophizing of translation” (Float n.p.) But we might equally think of them as lyricizations: as much as she translates Ibykos, Carson lyricizes Beckett, Brecht’s FBI file, and so on. This is not the lyricization Virginia Jackson describes, an unconscious imposition of twentieth-century norms of first-person lyric speech onto the varied poetry of the past. Carson stages a self-conscious, playful collision of genres and historical moments as she shapes the later poetic, dramatic, and prosaic texts via the brevity, lineation, and contrastive rhetorical structure of the Ibykos fragment (itself the oldest of the texts). This lyricization also involves, I suggest, the leap from a building, the letting go of knowing, the unpredictability, that the surprising resulting poems enact. The lyric encounter sets in motion outcomes which cannot be known. Colin Burrow observes that “in early modern English, ‘events’ were generally things which had not yet occurred”—“the outcome of a battle before it had been fought, or the result of a hazardous financial venture before it had been completed” (“Shakespeare’s” 98). Lyric poems “are themselves ‘events’ in [this] sense—objects not fully knowable, stubbornly full of futurity” (112). In the essay “Cassandra Float Can” (Float n.p.), which brings questions of translation together with the site-specific “anarchitecture” of Gordon Matta-Cark, who cut away parts of empty buildings to leave “an art of pure shape,” Carson asks of Cassandra’s prophesy in Sastri 31 Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, “What is the future doing underneath the past?” The same question might be asked of art that takes inspiration from prior art: ekphrasis, translation, or indeed lyric, since encounters with past instances are implied in the very notion of genre. “Wildly Constant,” for example, like the glacial columns it describes (echoed by its long, narrow form), “reverberates with its own cold memories,” which are in part generic: Shakespeare’s “liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,” the wind as assaulting eros (as in Ibykos) and as inspiring prophecy (as in Shelley), love’s burning and freezing from Petrarch to Chaucer and on. Poetic texts from the past become sources for present and future invention that is true to, but cannot be predicted from, those sources; poets revive and revise past forms, making genre “a historically evolving set of possibilities with potential to surprise” (Culler 89-90). Poems “constantly reevaluat[e] [their] own assertions” and “continue to reveal themselves in the light of their readers’ further interpretation and intersubjective involvement” (Eisendrath 162). Or as T. S. Eliot wrote, seeking the “vitalizing effect” he believed ancient Greek literature could have on contemporary English, “We need an eye which can see the past in its place with its definite difference from the present, and yet so lively that it shall be as present to us as the present. This is the creative eye” (64). Intimate and transformative, the lyric encounter involves what Carson calls a “collaboration of distance and closeness,” a “thrilling … interchange” (“Just” 148) from which something new—in the first instance, the altered self experienced through reading; unforeseeably, the way the poem will alter others and be altered by them in future encounters— can emerge. Works Cited Sastri 32 www.artangel.org.uk/library-of-water/writers-residency-programme/#writers-residencyprogramme Ashbery, John. Selected Poems. Penguin, 1986. Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. Routledge, 2004. St. Augustine. Confessions. Trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin. Penguin, 1961. Badiou, Alain. Philosophy and the Event. With Fabien Tarby. Trans. Louise Burchill. Polity, 2013. Barnstone, William (translator). Ancient Greek Lyrics. (1962) Indiana University Press, 2010. Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. (1987) Reprint: Routledge, 2018. Budelmann, Felix and Tom Phillips, eds. Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric In Early Greece. Oxford University Press, 2018. Burrow, Colin. Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity. Oxford University Press, 2019. ---. “Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Event.” In The Sonnets: The State of Play, edited by Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Clare Whitehead. The Arden Shakespeare, 2018, pp. 97-116. “Cage a Swallow Can’t You But You Can’t Swallow A Cage Can You: A Sonnet Sequence for Roni Horn.” Whitney Museum of American Art, 6 November 2009, https://whitney.org/media/545. Carson, Anne. “2ness > 1ness.” Received by [the author], 20 Jan. 2020. ---. “An Interview with Anne Carson.” Conducted by Eleanor Watchel. Brick. 89, 2014, https://brickmag.com/an-interview-with-anne-carson/ Accessed 7 April 2020. Sastri 33 ---. “Anne Carson with Michael Silverblatt.” Conducted by Michael Silverblatt. Lannan Foundation, 26 Oct 2016 www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbridHY7o_M ---. “The Art of Poetry No. 88.” Conducted by Will Aitken. Paris Review, Issue 171, Fall 2004, pp. 191-226. ---. Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera. Vintage, 2006. ---. Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan). Princeton University Press, 1990. ---. Eros the Bittersweet. Princeton University Press, 1986. ---. Float. Jonathan Cape, 2016. ---. “Gifts and Questions: An Interview with Anne Carson.” Interview by Kevin McNeilly, Canadian Literature 176, 2003, pp. 12-25. ---. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Virago, 2003. ---. “‘Just for the Thrill’: Sycophantizing Aristotle’s Poetics.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter, 1990, pp. 143-154. ---. Men in the Off Hours. Jonathan Cape, 2000. ---. Plainwater. (1995) Vintage, 2000. --- and Robert Currie. “An Interview with Anne Carson and Robert Currie.” Conducted by Megan Berkobein. Asymptote. www.asymptotejournal.com/interview/an-interview-withanne-carson-and-robert-currie/ ---. and Robert Currie. “Unwriting the Books of the Dead: Anne Carson and Robert Currie on Translation, Collaboration, and History.” Conducted by Andrew David King. Kenyon Review (blog), October 6, 2012. kenyonreview.org/2012/10/anne-carson-robert-currieinterview/ Sastri 34 Cavell, Stanley. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. University of Chicago Press, 1994. Celan, Paul. Collected Prose. Translated by Rosemarie Waldrop. Routledge, 2003. Chadwick, Whitney and Isabelle de Courtivron. Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership. (1993) Thames and Hudson, 2018. Coles, Elizabeth. “The Sacred Object: Anne Carson and Simone Weil.” Acta Poetica 31.4, 2013, pp. 127-154. Culler, Jonathan. Theory of Lyric. Harvard University Press, 2015. Cyrino, Monica Silveira. In Pandora’s Jar: Lovesickness in Early Greek Poetry. University Press of America, 1995. Eagleton, Terry. The Event of Literature. Yale University Press, 2013. Ede, Lisa and Andrea Lunsford. Singular Texts/ Plural Authors. Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. Eisendrath, Rachel. Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis. University of Chicago Press, 2018. Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. (1928) Faber and Faber, 1997. Feuerstein, Melissa. “For Want of a Door: Poetry's Resistant Interiors.” Comparative Literature, Spring 2012, Vol. 64, No. 2, 2012, pp. 207-229, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23253933 Fischer, Barbara. “Noisy Brides, Suspicious Kisses: Revising Ravishment in Experimental Ekphrasis by Women.” In In the Frame: Women’s Ekphrastic Poetry from Marianne Moore to Susan Wheeler, ed. Jane Hedley, Nick Halpern, and Willard Spiegelman. University of Delaware Press, 2009, pp. 72-90. Sastri 35 Frost, Robert. Collected Prose of Robert Frost. Ed. Mark Richardson. Harvard University Press, 2008. Gerstler, Amy and David Lehman, eds. The Best American Poetry 2010. Scribner, 2010. Glavey, Brian. The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis. Oxford University Press, 2016. Gold, Alexandra J. “Frank O’Hara’s ‘Dictionary of Art’: a collaborative ekphrasis.” Word & Image, 34:2, 2018, pp. 126-136. DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2017.1387001 Greenfield, Richard. “‘Parts of Time Fall on Her’: Anne Carson’s Men in the Off Hours. In Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, ed. Joshua Marie Wilkinson. University of Michigan Press, 2015, pp. 94- 100. Hallam, Elizabeth and Tim Ingold, eds. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation. Berg, 2007. Harvey, Elizabeth D. and Mark A. Cheetham. “Tongues of glaciers: sedimenting language in Roni Horn’s Vatnasafn/Library of Water and Anne Carson’s ‘Wildly Constant.’” Word & Image, 31:1, 2015, pp. 19-27, DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2015.1013272 Hedley, Jane. Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence. Palgrave, 2018. Heffernan, James A. W. “Afterword.” In Ekphrastic Encounters, edited by David Kennedy and Richard Meek, pp. 257-266. Hutcheon, Linda and Michael Hutcheon. “‘All Concord’s Born of Contraries’: Martial Methodologies.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 14:1, 1995, pp. 59-64. Hume, Angela. “The ‘Dread Work’ of Lyric: Anne Carson’s An Oresteia. In Wilkinson, ed., Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre. Jackson, Virginia. Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton University Press, 2005. Sastri 36 James, John. “Astralize the Night.” Boston Review, May 18, 2017, bostonreview.net/poetry/johnjames-astralize-night John-Steiner, Vera. Creative Collaboration. Oxford University Press, 2000. Joyce, James. Ulysses, edited by Hans Walter Gabler, Vintage, 1986. Kennedy, David and Richard Meek, eds. Ekphrastic Encounters: New Interdisciplinary Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts. Manchester University Press, 2019. Lattimore, Richard (translator). Greek Lyrics. Chicago University Pres, 1960. Lehman, David. Poems in the Manner Of. Scribner Poetry, 2017. Loizeaux, Elizabeth Bergmann. Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts. Cambridge University Press, 2008. Lucas, F. L. (translator). Greek Poetry for Everyman. J.M. Dent, 1951. MacKenzie, Oran. “Spillage and Banditry: Anne Carson’s Derivatives.” Economies of English. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 33. Ed. Martin Leer and Genoveva Puskás. Tübingen: Narr, 2016. 225-242. Mackie, Alastair. Back-Green Odyssey and Other Poems. Aberdeen: Rainbow Press, 1980. Malt, Johanna. “Ekphrasis/ exscription: Jean-Luc Nancy on thinking and touching art.” In Ekphrastic Encounters, 219-236. McHugh, Heather. Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993. Wesleyan University Press, 1994. McHugh, Heather and Nikolai Popov. “Preface.” In Glottal Stop: 101 poems, by Paul Celan, trans. McHugh and Popov. Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Moi, Toril. Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell. University of Chicago Press, 2017. Mueller, Liesl. “A Nude by Edward Hopper,” Poetry (June 1967): 226. Sastri 37 www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=110&issue=4&page=20 Ogden, Thomas. Subjects of Analysis. Karnac, 1994. Payne, Mark. “Ideas in Lyric Communication: Pindar and Paul Celan.” Modern Philology 105, 2007, pp. 5–20. DOI:10.1086/587193 Phillips, Siobhan. The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse. Columbia University Press, 2010. Prins, Yopie. Victorian Sappho. Princeton University Press, 1999. Robinson, Peter. Poetry and Translation: the Art of the Impossible. Liverpool University Press, 2010. Reynolds, Matthew. The Poetry of Translation: from Chaucer and Petrarch to Homer and Logue. Oxford University Press, 2011. Rose, Adrienne K. Ho. “‘[it] shakes my whole breathing being’: Rethinking Gender with Translation in Anne Carson’s ‘A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways.’” Konturen X (2018), pp. 126-151. Sabeti, Shari. “Writing creatively in a museum: tracing lines through persons, art objects and texts.” Literacy 50.3, Sept. 2016, pp. 141-148. Sastri, Reena. “Louise Glück’s Twenty-First Century Lyric.” PMLA 129.2 (2014), pp. 188-203. ---. “A Marriage of True Minds: Collaborative Creativity in the Auden-Kallman Libretti.” In Auden at Work, ed. Bonnie Costello and Rachel Galvin. Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. Tschofen, Monique. “Drawing out a new image of thought: Anne Carson's radical ekphrasis.” Word & Image 29:2, 2013, pp. 233-243, doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2013.794916 Waters, William. Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address. Cornell University Press, 2003. Wilkinson, Claire Louise. The Lyric of Ibycus: Introduction, Text and Commentary. De Gruyter, Sastri 38 2012. Wilkinson, Joshua Marie. “Introduction.” In Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, ed. Joshua Marie Wilkinson. University of Michigan Press, 2015, pp. 1-9. _______________________ I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for Contemporary Literature for exemplary guidance that much improved this piece. Thanks also to members of the online poetry group in summer 2020, with whom I had the good fortune to discuss “Hopper: Confessions.” i MacKenzie’s sensitive reading emphasizes the “bidirectional relationship” that Carson’s texts establish with their sources, linking her poetics ingeniously with financial derivatives (232). ii Noting that “her apparent freedom to create, fuse, and otherwise repurpose extant genres seems to have everything to do with her fidelity to texts ancient and modern,” Wilkinson rejects the idea that this “contradiction” might be a “through line” in Carson’s oeuvre (3-4, emphasis in original). iii See Chadwick and de Courtivron, Ede and Lunsford, Hallam and Ingold, John-Steiner, Sabeti. iv Coles, personal communication. A monograph by scholar of classics and religion Louis A. Ruprecht is likewise forthcoming: Reach Without Grasping: Anne Carson’s Classical Desires situates Carson within a “nonconformist classical tradition” (“Eros” 142) and a tradition of embodied spirituality. v I situate a related model of lyric in the context of the lyric-Language binary and the “new lyric studies” more fully in “Louise Glück’s Twenty-First Century Lyric.” vi For an intriguing reading of lyric as “a figure for a radical negativity” in An Oresteia, see Hume (210). vii There exists “in our minds, one or two beats before a thought forms itself into anything like mental speech, into phrase or sentence, something earlier, rougher, more gripped, more frail, Sastri 39 more saturated, something that will dry away like the dew or crumble like prehistoric paint as soon as its exposed to air, something that—compared to a sentence—is still wild” (Float n.p.). viii Glavey describes ekphrasis as “relational formalism”: “a way of attaching to [aesthetic] objects,” and further suggests that a “mimetic slippage between persons and poems…is arguably a feature of ekphrastic writing” (3-4). Eisendrath reads Renaissance ekphrases as resisting emerging imperatives to view artworks as objects and aesthetic experience as objective, and illuminates artworks’ paradoxical status as, in Adorno’s words, “‘things that aren’t things’” (162). For David Kennedy and Richard Meek, ekphrasis is “a moment of fruitful encounter between word and image,” where “encounter” not only signifies “an accidental unexpected meeting,” but also suggests “that as a consequence of such a meeting there is a change of direction” (13). ix “The fundamental characteristic of lyric … is not the description and interpretation of a past event but the iterative and iterable performance of an even in the lyric present” (226). x For more on literature and the event, see Attridge (59), Eagleton (41). xi Psychoanalytic accounts resonate (i.e. Thomas Ogden on reading, Christopher Bollas on the aesthetic moment), as do accounts by poets and critics including Toril Moi— “immersed in your text, I can see what you see, but without losing myself, without becoming you” (217-28)—and Heather McHugh— as a reader “I identify myself as … the unfolding” of the text (Hinge xiii). xii In this way it addresses the resonant question underlying Colin Burrow’s Imitating Authors: “how do human beings learn sophisticated usage of language from others, and yet end up sounding like themselves (or believing that they do)?”, a question “close to the heart of what it is to be a language user and a human being … from infancy … until we die” (1-2). xiii The LRB version has “rocking in the nightwind”; Float has “reverberating with.” Sastri 40 xiv Harvey and Cheetham comment on the ecological dimension of this state-shifting: Horn’s and Carson’s works preserve “memories of glaciers,” some of which have since melted (20). xv Linda and Michael Hutcheon describe their collaborative work within marriage as “emerging from our daily dinner table dialogues,” a “domestication of the Bakhtinian … dialogic” (63-64). xvi I develop the notion of marriage as a metaphor for collaboration in “A Marriage of True Minds.” xvii Richard Greenfield names the “yearning to bring nonlinearity, experience, and phenomena into a contained and ordered whole” the “patriarchal construct of time,” and observes that across Men in the Off Hours Carson both critiques and “tonally sympathizes with” this yearning (98). xviii Oxford English Dictionary, “render v.t.” I.3.b, I.2.a. xix In a more recent translation, “see and measure” becomes “feel and measure” (265). xx Translation has further been called “a mysterious paradigm of the encounter between self and other” (Popov and McHugh xiii). xxi The final verb is in question: the manuscript’s ‘‘protects’” is most commonly translated as “‘shakes’”; other possibilities are “‘crushed, shattered’” or “‘consumes, tears’” (Cyrino 105). xxii See for example Barnstone, Lattimore, Lucas, Wilkinson. xxiii Rose argues that Carson critiques gendered models of eros by “gradually distancing and replacing the gendered words and images over the course of six retranslations” (144).