"Deepest at Its Surface"

Abstract

"Deepest at Its Surface" Catherine Daly DeCREATION: Poetry, Essays, Opera Anne Carson Knopf http://www.aaknopf.com 272 pages; cloth, $24.95 In Decreation, Anne Carson explores her identification of eros, spiritual journey, and writing with the tangible result of the life of the mind by extending the investigation of form beyond genre that she began in Eros the Bittersweet (1986) and continued in her next four books. Included in this most recent collection are a "screenplay" featuring Abelard and Heloise; the title libretto based on the writings of Marguerite de Porete, Simone Weil, and Sappho; an "oratorio" written for a celebration of Gertrude Stein; a "documentary"; essays; and poems. Carson explores the idea of truth (mostly about love) across nonfictions, including poetry, to demonstrate how the varying rhythms of essay and poem can unfold meanings. In this collection, the poems and essays cumulatively meet criteria for an ode, rather than an elegy, to Carson's recently deceased mother. The poems in the collection survey the ways free verse lines can be end-stopped and justified on the page, and the ways two voices can combine in one work. The essays are about the poems, the poems' references, and the poems' content. In the first section, "Stops," where stops are end stops, sleep and, finally, death, the lines are either right-, left- and center-justified (a rarity in poems outside of greeting cards) and shaped. The essay following this section, "Every Exit is an Entrance," concludes in a center-justified "Ode to Sleep." Thus, it is an epode. The sublime is another characteristic of the ode which features in Decreation. The sublime is a theme in the "Gnosticisms" poems, distinguished from the "Sublimes" section poems by their less arbitrary formal concerns. Another series of assorted projects — among these, the Beckett-inspired "Quad," —brings us to the final essay, consisting of sections addressing each of the authors (Sappho, Porete, and Weil) to whom the libretto gives voice, followed by the three-part libretto. A "documentary" concludes the book. Essays either conclude or introduce the poem sections. Carson, through this arrangement, draws parallels between the idea of decreation and conclusion —for example, the conclusion of an essay and the ode. The entire book may be understood as a postmodern ode. Starting with her early poetry, such as "The Life of Towns," a series of poems about fanciful, Calvino-esque locales, Carson's poems have begun in strong concepts or "projects." She executes these self-assignments with a cool tone and end-stopped lines. The concepts are brilliant in their obviousness —why hot a tango as a form rather than rondeaux ?— and one is continually surprised that no one has thought these thoughts before, never mind so well. This type of poem appears in Decreation. For example, Carson was asked to write a work of art criticism, and, after determining that being "before " a painting was somewhat like being "before" an opinion and thus demanded a conditional standpoint , wrote "Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988) by Betty Goodwin." Each line in the poem is an "if statement without its required "then" statement: "If body is always deep but deepest at its surface. . .." "If afterwards she would sit in the way a very old person sits, with no pants on, confused. ..." "If conditionals are of two kinds graven and where is a place I can write this..." Since the painting is itself reproduced (albeit in black and white) in Decreation, the relationship between the image and the "if statements is clear, as the painting shows a twisted human figure confined by an abstract line or "angle" receding from the flat light field of the remainder of the painting. Descriptive elements of the conditional lines are revealed to be descriptive, when, alone, they would simply be gnomic. The sense of wild supposition has been blanched from "if," and what remains are the emotional concerns of the author, conjured by the art. In other words, the poem is a successful personal response to the painting, ensconced in a fine bit of analysis and application of grammar. The emotion is what renders this poem part of Carson's MANDORLA NUEVA ESCRITURA DE LAS AMERICAS · NEW WRITING FROM...