I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.
On Ovid
I see him there on a night like this but cool, the moon blowing through the black streets. He sups and walks back to his room. The radio is on the floor. Its luminous green dial blares softly. He sits down at the table; people in exile write so many letters. Now Ovid is weeping. Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing. In his spare time he is teaching himself the local language (Getic) in order to compose in it an epic poem no one will ever read.
On Parmenides
We pride ourselves on being civilized people. Yet what if the names for things were utterly different? Italy, for example. I have a friend named Andreas, an Italian. He has lived in Argentina as well as England, and also Costa Rica for some time. Everywhere he lives he invites people over for supper. It is a lot of work. Artichoke pasta, Peaches. His deep smile never fades. What if the proper name for Italy turns out to be Brzoy- will Andreas continue to travel the world like the wandering moon with her borrowed light? I fear we failed to understand what he was saying or his reasons. What if every time he said cities, he meant delusion, for example?
Sleep Stones
Camille Claudel lived the last thirty years of her life in an assylum, wondering why, writing letters to her brother the poet, who had signed the papers. Come visit me, she says. Remember, I am living here with madwomen, days are long. She did not smoke or stroll. She refused to sculpt. Although they gave her sleep stones- marble and granite and porphyry- she broke them, then collected the pieces and buried these outside the walls at night...
Canicula Di Anna
1.
What we have here
is the story of a painter.
It occurs in Perugia
(ancient Perusia)
where lived the painter Pietro Vannucci
(c. 1445-1523)
who was called Perugino,
a contemporary of Michelangelo
and teacher of Raphael...
some philosophers of the present day
meet in conclave
upon the ancient rock of Perugia.
They seem to have commissioned
for purposes of public relations,
a painter to record them
in pigments of the fifteenth century...
The painter, at any rate,
is not a happy man.
A woman, as usual, is the problem...
9.
It is perhaps not widely known
that a certain so-called Perugino
spent the years 1483-1486
covering with frescoes
that part of the Sistine Chapel
now immortalized by Michelangelo's Last Judgment,
which efforts were ruthlessly effaced
to make space for
his successor's more colossal genius...
13.
Group portrait: a special commission.
I paint the philosophers at table and
on the way to Being.
The bottle is difficult. I attempt
a color invented by Cimabue.
The phenomenologists engage in dialectic
about wine as vinegar.
To render the throat holes
(blackish red) I have acquired
sap of the tree draco dracaena (an expense
but the phenomenolgists requested it)
or dragon's blood, which, medieval legend
recounts, originally
soaked into the earth
during epic wars
of elephants and dragons...
14.
The phenomenologist from Paris hates mosquitoes
and carries a small electric devise
that lures the female mosquito to her death
by simulating the amorous cry of the male. Then
to block the whining sound, he has pink earplugs.
As he sits in conversation
with the phenomenologist from Sussex
a mosquito is observed to enter.
The Englishman leaps to his feet,
calling, "Let us use the mosquito machine!"
and smashes the insect to the wall
with the devise. It is the first sign
of wide ontological differences
that will open in the Anglo-French dialectic
here.
from Anne Carson- Plainwater
I have only read this single volume of Carson, but already I find myself entranced. Carson is Canadian (have you read any of her JBI?)... 58 years old... a professor of classics and comparative literature with a distinguished background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art. She writes poetry, prose, essay, criticism, and translation (her recent translations of Sappho are well regarded). Beyond this the writer is quite reluctant to reveal information of her personal life.
Carson's books of "poetry" are a fascinating merger of all of her experiences as a scholar and professional writer. Her works remind me in many ways of the writings of Borges, Italo Calvino, Augusto Monterroso, the shorter writings of Kafka, Donald Barthleme, and the "prose poems" of W.S. Merwin. Like these writers she blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction... often presenting marvelous fictive accounts of historic personages complete with scholarly details and notations. At times one is not certain if the work one is reading is prose, poetry, essay, history, critical analysis, meditation... or something completely different. There is also a marvelous crisp, crystalline prose not far removed from that of Borges, Calvino, or Merwin.
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