The ‘impossible truth’ of writing off the subject: Anne Carson’s decreation poetics and ‘The glass essay’

Abstract

Advocating a poetics of ‘decreation’ committed to ‘getting Me out of the way’, the experimental poet and classicist Anne Carson has typically invented strangely hybrid, trans-generic forms that resist and subvert conceptions of self, subject, or even an agential ‘center’. Yet auto / biographical questions are foundational to her work, even as it seeks to depart from conventional life writing forms. Taking up the troublesome problem of ‘Me’ in Carson’s work, this article attends specifically to the emergence of Carson’s decreation poetics in ‘The Glass Essay’ (1995). It examines the process of (self) decreation as a relational, anti-subjectivist proposition and as a textual phenomenon that ultimately poses intractable paradoxes for readers, including the paradox of a ‘dream of distance in which the self is displaced from the centre of the work, and the teller disappears into the telling’ (Carson 2005: 173).