Rendering visible through language: writing drawings and the literary portrait in Anne Carson’s Men in the Off Hours

Abstract

In 1992, Anne Carson published Short Talks, her first book of poetry. According to her, the book was initially conceived as a collection of drawings. In the process of its being creafted, however, the titles for these drawings gradually expanded until they became forty-five prose poems that ended up displacing the drawings from the final publication. Such displacement not only marked the beginning of a fruitful career, but also foreshadowed an enigmatic relationship which would be constantly addressed in her later work: that between drawing and writing. Even when Carson’s meditations on verbal and visual media are not constrained to the relationship between drawing and poetry, this connection is crucial to understanding her poetics, since, as she has stated many times, she considers her poems more as drawings than as texts. In this article, I embrace this interartistic provocation and, by analyzing poems from her work Men in the Off Hours (2000), I examine in which sense she considers her poems as drawings. The poems are read in the light of her theoretical proposals, especially the ones set out in her academic study, Economy of the Unlost (1999), in which she explores the relationship between visual arts and poetry.