On Anne Carson, generosity and performance

Anne Carson came to Cove Park as the Creative Scotland Muriel Spark Fellow (how I wanted her to! how I agitated for her to!) and stayed for two weeks. This was hugely significant for me: Anne Carson is one of very few massive, lasting talents in contemporary world poetry. From the day I first read The Beauty of the Husband, shortly after it had rather grudgingly been awarded the TS Eliot prize (in a flurry of grumpy journalism saying  This Is Not Poetry) and found myself devouring a poetry book, twice, three times, getting something new each time I was in the lucky position finally of having a figure in poetry  to whom I could look for inspiration, who was reinventing the form with each book and taking delight in showing what is possible.

With her new book Nox, she explodes the form again. In amongst the hail of chatter about the death of the book, Kindles, digitisation, Anne Carson has produced an object (not exactly a book as it’s in a box) that is beautiful visually, quite expensive, designed for display not sticking on a shelf and simply ignores the direction we’re all supposed to be going in. It’s personal and powerful and most inspiring of all, Anne Carson has simply done what she pleased. This is what makes it a true gift to the reader.

I asked Facebook friends when was a good time to tell Anne that she was my Ultimate Poetry Idol. Straightaway, or a bit later? Many kind answers… in the event I didn’t say it at all, but she knew anyway. You can’t hide these things, even if you’ve mastered not-drooling. On the train home from a reception – a very long train journey – I asked if she would find it weird if I read The Beauty of the Husband again while I was sitting next to her, since I had it in my bag and wanted to read. So we sat in companionable silence while she read her Patricia Highsmith and I read my Anne Carson, and reader it was bloody obvious to her or indeed anyone with even one eye that I am her No. 1 fan… but hopefully not in a Kathy Bates sort of way.

From right to left: String, Anne Carson, Robert Currie, Polly Clark. Photo by Claire Quigley.

One of Anne Carson’s talents is her unending capacity to surprise. Each book is different from the others, taking leaps in imagination, in form, in subject. I was in for another surprise. Anne Carson also does what can only be described as Performance. She came to Cove Park with her husband, Robert Currie, who in her words, changes her two dimensions into three. He brings dancers, actors and props into her readings. Now, I’m British: prone to artistic constipation, prone instinctively to think ‘oh my god!’ rather than ‘what a great idea!’ and easily embarrassed. But when Carson asked me if I would like to take part in her performance, which would also include string, I leapt at it, because while I may be British and all those other things I’m a poet and know when to leap.

For those of you who couldn’t make it to the CCA to see Anne Carson’s reading, I’m really sorry! But here’s a photo. She began with a piece, where I read sections, and Robert Currie, gently and with perfect timing, unrolled a ball of string around the stage and audience, ending by rolling it back up again at the very last last word of the poem. An enduring memory for me will be Jo Shapcott holding up some of the string while listening intently. It was funny, diverting, but oddly undistracting. Carson went on to read in the expected way for much of the rest of the reading, although she did invite audience participation in quite a lot of it. And it was, frankly, the best reading I have ever gone to. Not because Carson ‘performs’: she actually reads very quietly and in a deadpan way. No, it is because at every turn she is open to the possibilities of the poem and the moment in which it is being read, and you feel there is nothing she won’t entertain in her mission to give the reader the poem to the best of her ability. Her collaborations with Robert Currie are a combination of seriousness, playfulness and generosity, and it got me thinking about ‘performance’ which is such a loaded idea in British poetry.

Since we had Kristin Linklater, the world renowned voice coach who has worked with actors like Donald Sutherland and Sigourney Weaver come to Cove Park to work with poets (more on this soon), I have been thinking about the notion of ‘voice’, the poem’s and the poet’s. Carson approaches performance in yet another way, bringing the very structure itself out of the page and into the space. This is exciting territory, for this British poet at least.

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