Decreation Poetry Essays Opera Anne Carson

But how can we undo self without moving through self, to the very inside of its definition? Anne Carson's Decreation starts with form–the undoing of form.

But how can we undo self without moving through self, to the very inside of its definition? Anne Carson's Decreation starts with form–the undoing of form.

And that’s true of the persona in the poem, but it’s also true of me as me.

INTERVIEWER When you look back on “The Glass Essay,” for example, do you consider it a personal poem? CARSON I see it as a messing around on an upper level with things that I wanted to make sense of at a deeper level.

I also don’t know what it would be to do that, but if you read Virginia Woolf or George Eliot, there’s a fragrance of understanding you come away with—this smell in your head of having gone through something that you understood with the people in the story. INTERVIEWER Is that because it’s still part of your ongoing personal experience? CARSON I think so, because this capturing of the surface of emotional fact is useful for other people in that it jolts them into thinking, into doing their own act of understanding. INTERVIEWER There’s another line in “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions”—“I want to be unbearable”—that strikes me as exact and expressive of you as a writer.

CARSON I remember that sentence driving at me in the dark like a glacier.

Her work is insistent and groundbreaking, a blend of genres and styles that for years failed to attract notice.

In the late eighties, a few literary magazines in the United States began to publish her work.

I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts—to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.

But when I wrote “The Glass Essay,” I also wanted to do something that I would call understanding what life feels like, and I don’t believe I did. INTERVIEWER Or that it might be a failure to you, but a success for everybody else who picks it up?

In 2002 Carson became the first woman to receive England’s T. Eliot Prize for Poetry for For the past several years, Carson has been working on a spoken-word opera about three women mystics—Aphrodite, the fourteenth-century French heretic Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil.

Next year, Random House will publish —the eponymously titled opera—alongside new poems and essays.