Joy of Reading Anne Carson

Visit Literary Hub to read Karen Solie's account of her time well spent with Anne Carson's work. "In the summer of 2001, home for a visit from university, I took Anne Carson’s Men in the Off Hours and The Beauty of the Husband on a family fishing trip to Lake Diefenbaker," Solie reflects. From there: 

The former went over the side of the 14-foot aluminum Starcraft. Likely I’d been asked to ready the net. Though I hung the book over the line back at camp, it remains annotated with the lake’s algal profile.

I didn’t know then that Mistaseni lay under the boat in pieces eight feet tall and thirty across. But now in my memory the water is infused with the cruelty of my culture’s crude exercise of power. Infused more potently, though, with the failure of the effort. The government did not anticipate that the story of Mistaseni’s origins and significance would be recharged by the effort to suppress it. Carson writes in Economy of the Unlost that “For the Greeks, memory is rooted in utterance,” in the cognates “I remember,” “I mention,” “I name.” Alongside memory’s quantitative reconstructions is its “light shed on darkening things . . . the difference between oblivion and fame, between dead body and living name.”

Similarly glossed with that trip’s mold and mosquitoes is my copy of Richard Hugo’s Selected Poems. In Hugo, I’d found my way into the poetry of how and where I’d grown up. How to signify the irreconcilables of that place as a way to live with them. I read in Triggering Town that “Your words used your way will generate your meanings. Your obsessions lead you to your vocabulary. Your way of writing locates, even creates, your inner life.” My obsessions, my vocabulary, my meanings. I’d been unused to this kind of talk.

Read on at Literary Hub.