DECREATION: Poetry, Essays, Opera
Issue #25
By Susannah J. Felts
Published: September 1st, 2005 | 1:31pm
Anne Carson’s ninth book, which includes poetry, essays, opera, and even a short screenplay, begins with an epigraph from 14th-century scholar Montaigne — “I love a poetical kinde of a march, by friskes, skips, and jumps”— that perfectly forecasts the deeply associative trip to come.
A classics professor at the University of Michigan, Carson, best known for Autobiography of Red, her novel in verse, has said she keeps her academic notes and creative jottings in the same journal; she sees no point in boundaries of any sort, and centuries of distance are but puddle-jumps for her mind. She discusses Longinus, who pierced the side of Jesus during the Crucifixion, alongside the Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, and muses on the distinct pleasure of quoting, of moving between roles of audience and author, which is a dance she, of course, choreographs with particular grace. “The passionate moment echoes from soul to soul. Each controls it temporarily. Each enjoys it quote by quote,” she writes. “To feel the joy of the Sublime is to be inside creative power for a moment, to share a bit of electric life with the artist’s invention, to spill with him.”
Another essay explores the significance of sleep in works by Virginia Woolf, Homer, and — here’s the real wild card — Tom Stoppard. Carson summons Woolf again later when she traces connections between total solar eclipses (“totality,” she comes to call them) and conjugal bliss, and in Woolf’s company this time are ancient poets and the nature writings of Annie Dillard. This is Carson doing what she does best — masterminding a brainy cocktail party of the most unlikely guests, and gliding between genres as freely as she does epochs — from essay to ode, screenplay to opera. At times, the book feels like a grab-bag, but throughout it, Carson’s drawn to charged moments of sublime spillage, the very nature of decreation.
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ABOUT THE BOOK
DECREATION: Poetry, Essays, Opera (Knopf)
By Anne Carson
240 pages, $24.95
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