Emily Wilson on Anne Carson: WTF?

 I WAS TAKEN aback by Emily Wilson's dismissive, mean-spirited, and inappropriately personal review of Anne Carson's Wrong Norma in the June 2024 issue of The Nation. 

Wilson opens by comparing Carson to Rupi Kaur and Margaret Atwood because Carson is Canadian, often writes in short declarative sentences about her own feelings, and has a large audience. This is neither perceptive nor helpful--and then seven paragraphs in Wilson acknowledges "And yet Carson is a very different kind of writer from either Kaur or Atwood, or indeed anybody." True...so why make the comparisons in the first place? They seem to have no point but to gratuitously diminish Carson's career.

Among the ways Carson differs from Kaur and Atwood is that she is a classicist and in her work draws extensively on her familiarity with ancient literature. This seems to be a point that particularly annoys Wilson; one can almost hear her snort, "pfft! Her, a classicist? Give me a break!" Wilson is a genuine classicist (she is famous for her Homer translations) and in a position to ding Carson for the incorrect lunate sigmas in the Greek text of If Not, Winter and to let us know that "Carson, for all her literary fireworks, did not get tenure at Princeton." So there! Again, why mention this? Most poets don't even get hired at Princeton, so here too Wilson seems to be aiming to humiliate.

Wilson also seems ticked off at Carson's popularity, as reflected in sales, Goodreads comments, and the existence of such merchandise as an Anne Carson hoodie. Given the popularity of Wilson's translations of Homer, I don't see why she has to begrudge anyone's commercial success, or be snide about authors who are popular enough to get their image on a t-shirt.

Or, for that matter, be snide about how people prepare themselves for going onstage. Apparently Carson likes to say "I am Anne Carson" repeatedly to herself before she does lectures or readings. "It's the kind of line that many public speakers, even those of us who are socially anxious or shy, would not feel the need to practice," Wilson tells us. True enough, but why bother mentioning it? Ridiculing anyone's private preparations for public speaking sounds like middle-school badgering.

The whole review--quite long, by the way, seven pages in the print edition--seems motivated by spite. Left a nasty taste in my mouth. I am sorry The Nation gave Wilson so much space in which to vent.

Louis Zukofsky, _"A"_; Mark Scroggins, _The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky_(2)

AMONG ZUKOFSKY'S BETTER-KNOWN statements is his description of his poetics as "An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music" ("A"-12). I  never took calculus, but I am guessing he means pure sound lies at one verge, pure discourse at the other, and poetry navigates in between. I further take this to mean Zukofsky is willing to come asymptotically close to sheer sound, if he feels like it. He is willing to approach the condition of music (as Walter Pater put it) as nearly as he can without actually reaching it. Zukofsky takes sound seriously.

Zukofsky's approach to translation, probably best known through his version of Catullus but also abundantly on display in the later sections of "A", reflects this seriousness about sound.

The old Saussurean distinction of signified and signifier was useful for me in thinking about this; for Ferdinand de Saussure, a word combined a sound or a written sign (the signifier) with a concept (the signified), so when I hear the sound <hors> or see the word "horse," I think of the tall, handsome animal that runs so well.

Translation typically renders the signified and lets the signifier fall away. If I were translating from French and came across the word cheval, I would translate it "horse," not "shove all," because the French word's signified is "horse," and the fact that the English phrase "shove all" sounds a lot more like the French signifier cheval than does "horse" doesn't matter. "Takyth the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille," as Chaucer's Nun's Priest says. The signified is the nourishing grain, the signifier the useless husk. Keep the grain, toss the husk.

But! As Zukofsky's poetics emphasize, sound matters in poetry, perhaps matters as much as semantic meaning. 

So--thanks to Mark Scroggins for this example--when Catullus writes:

Argivae robora pubis

a signified-based translation would give us:

the flower of Argive strength

but Zukofsky gives us:

Argive eye robe awry pubes

which is "wrong," of course. Zukofsky is giving us much of the sound of Catullus, but little of the meaning. But he is also giving us poetry, I would argue, not the mustily Victorian English equivalent of Catullus's phrase, but something arresting, puzzling, maybe a little ribald...in short, something that makes the Argonauts pop into view a little bit, sound a little more like the lusty young troublemakers they perhaps were...and doesn't that seem closer to Catullus than "the flower of Argive strength" does?

Similar transmutations often in the closing sections of "A", apparently, not just from Latin but also from Hebrew, Welsh, Arapaho, and who knows what else. So one gets lines like "agog o league a-god ran-on" ("A"-23). Puzzling? Yes. Arresting? Yes. Poetry? I certainly would say so. And closer to poetry, I bet, than whatever the literal translation of the source phrase would be.

Louis Zukofsky, _"A"_; Mark Scroggins, _The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky_(1)

 I READ "A" as a graduate student; more precisely, I read it in that rather long four-year stretch when I was not taking classes or prepping for exams but writing my dissertation. Whatever reading I did in that long stretch was always part scavenger hunt, as I was always reading with half a mind on what the writer was trying to do and half a mind on what I could glean, if anything, for my dissertation. This left me with the feeling, circa 1980, that I had not really done "A" justice (I barely looked at the parts written after WW II) and that I really ought to read it again when I had the time.

I retired a little over a year ago and thought, okay...now's the time to get back to "A". I've been re-reading it for about a year now--not continuously, obviously (even "A" doesn't take that long if you stick to it)--and I'm ready to record some impressions.

My dissertation was on Yeats's late-career politics, which have certain regions of congruence with his friend Ezra Pound's interwar politics (e.g., fascism), so "A", a book-length poem by a friend and disciple of Pound (as Zukofsky was) seemed worth examining. The poetry was interesting, but struck me at the time as junior varsity Cantos, and the politics were well to the left of Pound's and Yeats's, as just about every reasonable person's politics were in the 1930s, so as far as my dissertation went, "A" was a dry hole.

The drilling was not entirely in vain, though, as Zukofsky remained in my consciousness as a strong example of how one could be firmly committed to poetic modernism (as represented by Pound) and at the same time be firmly a person of the left. 

Mark Scroggins's lucid and graceful 2007 biography was helpful on this point. Zukofsky never actually joined the Communist Party, but in the 1920s was taken to a few cell meetings by none other than Whittaker Chambers--that right, Mr. Pumpkin Papers, a friend of Zukofsky at Columbia--and did in the 1930s join the League of American Writers, a group affiliated with a counterpart association in the USSR. Rather than pull a Coleridgean revolutionary-to-reactionary switcheroo, Zukofsky remained a leftist right through the turbulence on the 1960s. He read deeply in Marx; Marx has a role in "A" like that Major C. H. Douglas has in the Cantos--much to the advantage of "A", I'd say, as Douglas was a crank at best. 

"A" may have the advantage of the Cantos in a few other ways, too. "A" is more generous in its glimpses of the poet's life. I am one of the readers grateful that Pound came down from the austere heights and wrote of his own circumstances in the Pisan cantos. Zukofsky does so occasionally throughout his poem, but especially in the latter half. His love for his family, wife Celia and son Paul, is affirmed several places, sincerely but not fulsomely.

It also has more stylistic variety, which helps. The collage-like effect of the Cantos, the juxtaposition of apparently heterogeneous elements whose implied underlying unity is left to be intuited by the reader--there's a lot of that. But the poem also has several intriguing forays into closed forms, such as the sonnets of section 7 and the canzone of section 9--complete with the internal rhymes, and dealing with the ideas of Marx and Spinoza, no less. 

The most remarkable formal device in the poem may be its Zukofskian translations--a topic that will need a post of its own.

Tess Gunty, _The Rabbit Hutch_

 I HAVE NOT BEEN this captivated by a debut novel since White Teeth...well, that's not true, actually, as I have been roughly equally captivated by Bennett Sims's A Questionable Shape and Kate Briggs's The Long Form, but The Rabbit Hutch, which is Tess Gunty's first novel, captivated me in ways that reminded me very much of Zadie Smith's first novel. 

At the center of Gunty's novel is Blandine (formerly Tiffany) Watkins, an intelligent, perceptive young woman from a part of the world that, like Irie Jones's Willesden, often gets written off: rust belt Indiana. Like Irie, despite her intelligence, she is capable of big mistakes; like Irie, she holds deep core values that she can sometimes articulate piercingly but other times has a hard time so much as naming.  And like Irie, she is trying to find a footing for her selfhood in the wake of a massive betrayal by a mentor, which leads to a spectacular confrontation. I found myself rooting for Blandine as fervently as I did for Irie Jones back in 2001.

Like Smith, Gunty invents a profusion of plausible, sharply individualized secondary characters. The other residents of the apartment all pop into three-dimensionality, especially Joan, the reclusive obituary website worker, and Hope, who is slipping into post-partum depression. Not only is the high school drama teacher (genus Assholeus Charismaticus) who betrays Tiffany/Blandine deftly drawn, but so also is his wife, who would have been just a stereotype in most novels. And then we have the sublimely cranky Moses Robert Blitz, a brilliant comic creation...but even the priest to whom Moses Blitz idiosyncratically confesses is interesting in his own right. Gunty has a Dickensian/Smithian fecundity in conjuring character.

And again like Smith, Gunty has extraordinary control over her prose. It is versatile, for one thing, managing not only Blandine's explications of the spiritual thought of medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen, not only Moses's diatribes, not only the final message-to-the-world of dying child star Elsie Blitz, but also the bizarre confession of an online poster who signs himself "Mr. Boddy" and fears he is about to kill his wife with one of the weapons represented by the game pieces of the board game Clue.

Gunty's gifts, as that last detail may suggest, are so exuberant that they at times run away with her, and the ending of the novel is as open ended as that of White Teeth, but to tell the truth, I don't even see those as faults. For me, this was a Goldilocks novel--everything just right.

Ange Mlinko, _Marvelous Things Overheard_

 I AM WAY, way behind with Ange Mlinko. The last book of hers I read was Shoulder Season, and there are at least three since then.

Marvelous Things Overheard  is a bit more linear, a bit less oblique, than Starred Wire, more in New Yorker territory. I thought of the New Yorker particularly as I was reading "Bliss Street," a poem that juxtaposes the relative privilege and security of Mlinko's current circumstances with the hazards and precariousness of her grandmother's circumstances growing up in eastern Europe--a graceful, lucid, subtle poem, but, you know, well-behaved--and sure enough, it was published in the New Yorker.

Rather like Paul Muldoon, though, Mlinko is not so domesticated as to never flash a streak of anarchy. "Wingandecoia" reminded me often of Muldoon with its audacious (near-)rhyming ("camera/emerald," "emerges/emeritus"), its gleeful rewiring of the villanelle, and its tragicomic handling of the founding and disappearance of the Roanoke Colony.

The volume's other long poem, "Cantata for Lynette Roberts," about a Welsh poet who is only beginning to be rediscovered, was the book's highlight, I thought. Both that poem and "Wingandecoia" demonstrated that Mlinko has a deft and confident touch with the architecture of a long poem.

Shane Book, _Congotronic_

THIS ONE TOO has been on the shelf waiting for a while--among the benefits of retirement is getting around to the books I couldn't find time to read when I bought them, which in the case of Congotronic must have been quite a while ago. It was published in 2014; I think I bought it in 2019 or so, just before the pandemic.

The book's title sounds like a nod to Afrofuturism, which I wasn't sure was a term in much circulation in 2014, but it turns out the earliest citation in the OED is to a 1993 article by Mark Dery in South Atlantic Quarterly. The term seems to be most often used in discussing technology and science fiction  in relation to Black culture and experience; Congotronic deals with neither topic, but the term might nonetheless fit this collection of poetry. Book works with many of the most familiar topoi of Black-centered writing--enslavement, colonization, national liberation, ancient African civilization--and rewires, remixes, and reboots them in a way that both defamiliarizes them and revivifies them, that makes them new.

In "Mack Daddy Manifesto," for instance, the main voice is that of an Iceberg Slim kind of character, but the voice also channels Freud's The Ego and the Id and Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto. The effect made me laugh out loud on first reading, but since sex work has affinities with both (a) sex and (b) work, stirring in the voices of Freud and Marx with that of a procurer had a weird aptness.

In "Flagelliforms," a series of poems that blends events from the west African epic Sundiata with contemporary ones, with rapid changes of register and cinematic jump-cut montage.

For me, though, the book's highlight was "The Collected Novellas of Gilbert Ryle." I read Ryle's Concept of Mind way, way back while taking a course called "20th Century Philosophy"; he's a British philosopher for whom the mind is not a thing, but a cluster of events that we interpret to be a thing. Interesting stuff, but the poems Book calls Ryle's "novellas," each with its own title clipped from The Concept of Mind, are quite a bit trippier and maybe more fascinating. What are they about? I don't know! But they use a kind of post-syntactic syntax that reminded me of some of the effects Zukofsky gets in his translations of Catullus. To wit:

He had been busy culling spores
from the frothy air as the para-mechanical
cloud test came in low over the valley.

Or try this:

From where may I not pour me over, a wispy helmsman
nearly undone in fevered looking?

I see Book has a new collection, out last November. I need to find it and not wait five years to read it.

Jenny Xie, _Eye Level_

 I CAME ACROSS a couple of poems by Jenny Xie recently...in the New Yorker, I think, and somewhere else...which inspired me to read this, which has been sitting on the shelf since it won the Walt Whitman Award (now known as the "First Book Award") back in 2017. 

It reads like a debut collection in the early going, with poems based on travel impressions ("Phnom Penh Diptych,""Corfu") and childhood memories of China ("Lunar New Year, 1988"), very visual and elliptical. The poems towards the latter half of the book seem written later--at least, they don't seem written with the intention of dazzling the rest of the workshop. They are more introspective, more candid, based on longer experience...more mature, in a way, but in the way suggested by Dylan's line, "I was so much older then / I'm younger than that now." 

The first half of the book makes some canny transferred epithets, as when the description of a  garment becomes a description of being an immigrant ("The new country is ill fitting, lined / with cheap polyester, soiled at the sleeves") or words that might describe a mother's hair are applied to her emotions ("Her sorrow has thickness and a certain sheen"). They are consistently skillful, but sometimes feel a bit designed or calculated.

The poems of the latter half seem not be trying so hard but to be getting more work done. Take a line like, "The simplicity of it is difficult" (from "A Slow Way"). Boom! as the mic hits the floor.  Or Xie's pointing out that in the multiplicity of our selves, one of the selves will decide that it is boss: 

One self prunes violently
at all the others
thinking she's the gardener.

I know I have a self that thinks it's the gardener, and I bet you do too. 

Or the lines in which the book's title occurs: 

She had trained herself to look for answers at eye level,
but they were lower, they were changing all the time.

Xie has published another collection of poems since this one, as well as a novel. If I am right that the poems in the latter part of Eye Level were written late than those in the first part, the second collection will be worth getting a hold of.