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Men in the Off Hours
Following her widely acclaimed Autobiography of Red ("A spellbinding achievement" --Susan Sontag), a new collection of poetry and prose that displays Anne Carson's signature mixture of opposites--the classic and the modern, cinema and print, narrative and verse.
In Men in the Off Hours , Carson reinvents figures as diverse as Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, and Audubon. She views the writings of Sappho, St. Augustine, and Catullus through a modern lens. She sets up startling juxtapositions (Lazarus among video paraphernalia; Virginia Woolf and Thucydides discussing war). And in a final prose poem, she meditates on the recent death of her mother.
With its quiet, acute spirituality, its fearless wit and sensuality, and its joyful understanding that "the fact of the matter for humans is imperfection," Men in the Off Hours shows us "the most exciting poet writing in English today" (Michael Ondaatje) at her best.
In Men in the Off Hours , Carson reinvents figures as diverse as Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, and Audubon. She views the writings of Sappho, St. Augustine, and Catullus through a modern lens. She sets up startling juxtapositions (Lazarus among video paraphernalia; Virginia Woolf and Thucydides discussing war). And in a final prose poem, she meditates on the recent death of her mother.
With its quiet, acute spirituality, its fearless wit and sensuality, and its joyful understanding that "the fact of the matter for humans is imperfection," Men in the Off Hours shows us "the most exciting poet writing in English today" (Michael Ondaatje) at her best.
166 pages, Hardcover
First published February 29, 2000
100 people are currently reading
3822 people want to read
About the author
Anne Carson
97 books5,044 followersAnne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won a Lannan Literary Award.
Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published eighteen books as of 2013, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction. She is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her books include Antigonick, Nox, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Economy of the Unlost; Autobiography of Red, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, and Glass, Irony and God, shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her latest book, Red Doc>, was shortlisted for the 2013 T.S. Elliot Prize.
Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published eighteen books as of 2013, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction. She is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her books include Antigonick, Nox, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Economy of the Unlost; Autobiography of Red, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, and Glass, Irony and God, shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her latest book, Red Doc>, was shortlisted for the 2013 T.S. Elliot Prize.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 219 reviews
June 1, 2020
me reading anne carson be like: go girl! ur rly giving us something! idk what but it’s something!
October 29, 2018
Lo hermoso que es leer a Anne Carson, y me encantó leerla en esta edición bilingüe, leí en las dos, me encanta la traducción, y los personajes que aparecen en sus poemas, desde Anna Ajmátova, hasta Catherine Deneuve, su manera de entrar en la realidad hacia la ficción, de jugar con el lenguaje y las ideas. Y ese ensayo final sobre la humedad-femenino, seco-masculino de la literatura antigua es precioso. Además de las entrevistas. Todo es alucinante. Amé este libro de principio a fin y amo a Anne Carson.
April 17, 2012
It is best not to read Anne Carson's poems in isolation, but rather to read a collection (well, at least not this one) in one sitting -- if possible -- and later return to poke through the shards to examine various bits and pieces. Carson is a poet who relies on fragments: personal, classical (her specialty), and popular. She starts with a canvas of grief — in this case her mother's passing away -- and proceeds to build a collage, using spray paint, glue, wit, the occasional essay, quotes, and whatever else happens to be nearby. The effect is meant to be cumulative. Her language is usually flat, but this is by design as she tells us (as if anticipating her critics) in the poem "Flatman (1st draft)":
I was born in the circus. I play the flat man.
My voice is flat, my walk is flat, my ironies
move flatly out to sock you in the eye.
Irony is important to Carson (as earlier evidenced in her collection "God, Irony, and Glass" -- Carson's Trinity). In the prose piece "Irony is not Enough: Essay on Life as Catherine Deneuve (2d draft)", she tells us (citing Sapho) that "irony is a verb." As Deneuve (see the actress in "Indochine"), Carson wears the mask of a detached and beautiful woman pursuing one of her students:
How very interesting (Deneuve thinks) to watch myself construct this silk and bitter relation. Latin rhetoricians translate the Greek work eironia as dissimulatio, which means "mask." After all why study the past? Because you may wish to repeat it. And in time (Sapho notes) one's mask becomes one's face. Just before going to jail Sokrates had a conversation with his prosecutors about irony, for this was the real source of their unease, and as they spoke they saw a miniature smoke of grief climb into the room, turning dark now and sulfurous in the confused ash. You're a real man Sokrates, says Deneuve. Closes her notebook. Pulls on her coat and buttons it. But then so am I.
Carson, the classicist, is really a romantic. As the seemingly remote Deneuve, she nevertheless finds herself thinking that "to breathe is to love," as she watches the student ("in a new earring") doing a translation in class:
Thank you, she says after the girl translates a Greek phrase with extreme vulgarity, making the others laugh. Bell rings. Girl leaves abruptly. Deneuve sits quiet as the room empties. Then puts her head down on the table and laughs. How lungs work. As Sapho says:
To stop breathing is bad.
So the gods judge.
For they do not stop breathing
Later Deneuve goes back down the hall. Inside her office the light is bluing, old ice of April unlacing its fast. She turns to the sound of the five o'clock bell. Comes a knock at the door.
Throughout the collection, Carson adopts various historical masks (though the Deneuve mask seems closest to the author). Akhmatova, Artaud, Freud, Lazarus, Lev and Sonya Tolstoy, as well as many others. The connective is grief, mortality. The presentation is often cinematic, as Carson enjoys pulling in the modern medium with a series of poems about "TV men." The "TV men" poems to some extent are the least enjoyable. These poems come across as clipped bullets lacking depth. But this is exactly what Carson wants, because time and how it is perceived is an important part of Men in the Off Hours.
In the collection's opening piece — the short essay, "Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War," Carson (playfully) explores differences of time perception. Men (Thucydides) see time as linear, with seasons coming and going (along with the ebb and flow of war). But Woolf — portrayed by Carson -- has an epiphany on the subject of time, finding it an interior experience, as described in her essay "Mark on the Wall":
Virginia Woolf concludes her essay "The Mark on the Wall" abruptly. Amidst speculation she notices someone standing over her who says: "I'm going out to buy a newspaper."
The odd thing is, and although incidental it may be the reason why she ends this way, you grasp at once without any mention of the fact that someone is a man. He could no more be a woman than Thucydides. Not only because of his need for newspapers and view of the war ("Though it's no good buying newspapers. . . .Nothing ever happens. Curse this war. . . !") but because he at once identifies the mark on the wall as what it is. A snail is a snail. Even in the off hours, men know marks.
Carson revisits this dialogue later, in a "TV men" poem, but without the depth and nuance of the earlier piece. Carson is simply saying that, as (post)moderns, things are flattening out. It may not make for great poetry but, as a statement placed within the context of the collection, it resonates.
This apparent conflict in the perception of time is ultimately artificial and not some sort of enduring divide between sexes. Ideally, Carson finds a bit of both in all of us (though connection between the two remains a problem) and throughout life we often — gender aside -- shift back and forth as need requires. In an appendix to this essay, Carson closes the ring by writing touchingly of her mother, time, death, Woolf, and Carson's own writing:
Crossouts are something you rarely see in published texts. They are like death: by a simple stroke -- all is lost, yet still there. For death although utterly unlike life shares a skin with it. Death lines every moment of ordinary time. Death hides right inside every shining sentence we grasped and had no grasp of. Death is a fact. No more or less strange than that celebrated fact given by the very last sentence of her [Woolf's:] diaries (March 24, 1941):
L. is doing the rhododendrons.
Crossouts sustain me now. I search out and cherish them like old photographs of my mother in happier times. It may be a stage of grieving that will pass. It may be that I'll never again think of sentences unshadowed in this way. It has changed me. Now I too am someone who knows marks.
Facing these lines is a picture of Carson's mother. For Carson, all divisions — which are ultimately artificial —end with the great leveler (and perhaps comforter) death. Also, for Carson, the Metaphysical (in any traditional and historical sense) is swept aside in a series of "Epitaph" poems that encompass not only the religious but also those cultural items most important to the poet ("Epitaph: Zion", "Epitaph: Europe", "Epitaph: Donne Clown", "Epitaph Evil", etc.). All are bundled up in the shadow of death. In "Shadowboxer," Carson is a fighter (or better, an intellect) fighting death (tongue-in-cheek):
Of the soldier who put a spear through Christ's side on the cross
(and by some accounts broke his legs),
whose name is Longinus,
it is said
that after that he had trouble sleeping
and fell into a hard mood,
drifted out of the army
and came west,
as far as Provencia.
Was a body's carbon not simply carbon.
Jab hook jab.
Slight shift and we catch him
in a moment of expansion and catastrophe,
white arms sporting strangely in a void.
Uppercut jab jab hook jab.
Don't want to bore you,
my troubles jab.
Jab.
Jab.
Punch hook.
Jab. Was a face not all stille
as dew in Aprille.
Hook.
Jab.
Jab.
Less satisfying as a response to the "Epitaph" poems is the poem "No Epitaph," a piece that is meant to evoke the survival of poetry, even in such a vacuum as the Chinese Cultural Revolution. As a poem unto itself, it is shallow, and has the reader remembering Winston Smith's ("1984") utterance of "Shakespeare" without really knowing what it meant. But Carson's equivalence between the memory destroying Communist East and the history haunted West seems forced and unconvincing, especially when the corpse (and the weak light shed upon it) happens to be Poetry:
Was there some trouble? An old worker died of appendicitis
on the night shift and the body could not be cremated
until certain disputes
between the hospital and the family were resolved.
Someone would have to watch the body, they stood in a small circle,
shadows straining away from them toward all high corners of the room.
He was surprised as anyone to hear himself say he would do it.
What was it like? Quiet he says. Each night for a week
he kept company beside the empty arms of the dead.
Looking out the door we can see Venus rising.
Okay there she is.
Cold rushes in.
No need for men to chatter so.
(No Epitaph)
Of course this is Carson's brand of irony, with the unnamed Chinese poet's pure response of "Quiet." The real ones doing the chattering are the Venus lovers. (One wonders how various western professors live with themselves, studying texts they loath for various ideological reasons.) As a suggestion of a new poetical advent, free of history's detritus, the poem seems hokey. Carson's hip disdain for her own erudition comes across glaringly as an act meant to bring the house down.
Some critics doubt that Carson even writes poetry. I think she does write poetry but of a kind unlike any I've read. "Men in the Off Hours" has its ups and downs, for not all the experiments work. But with Carson's writing there is always wit, and usually, underneath the assembled fragments, you detect her passionate heart, which makes it easy to forgive her various sins. But are they sins? Or is Carson writing the modern novel: part prose, part poetry, part essay. How the lines are blurring. Jab. Jab.
(A slightly different version of this review appeared in the Avatar Review.)
I was born in the circus. I play the flat man.
My voice is flat, my walk is flat, my ironies
move flatly out to sock you in the eye.
Irony is important to Carson (as earlier evidenced in her collection "God, Irony, and Glass" -- Carson's Trinity). In the prose piece "Irony is not Enough: Essay on Life as Catherine Deneuve (2d draft)", she tells us (citing Sapho) that "irony is a verb." As Deneuve (see the actress in "Indochine"), Carson wears the mask of a detached and beautiful woman pursuing one of her students:
How very interesting (Deneuve thinks) to watch myself construct this silk and bitter relation. Latin rhetoricians translate the Greek work eironia as dissimulatio, which means "mask." After all why study the past? Because you may wish to repeat it. And in time (Sapho notes) one's mask becomes one's face. Just before going to jail Sokrates had a conversation with his prosecutors about irony, for this was the real source of their unease, and as they spoke they saw a miniature smoke of grief climb into the room, turning dark now and sulfurous in the confused ash. You're a real man Sokrates, says Deneuve. Closes her notebook. Pulls on her coat and buttons it. But then so am I.
Carson, the classicist, is really a romantic. As the seemingly remote Deneuve, she nevertheless finds herself thinking that "to breathe is to love," as she watches the student ("in a new earring") doing a translation in class:
Thank you, she says after the girl translates a Greek phrase with extreme vulgarity, making the others laugh. Bell rings. Girl leaves abruptly. Deneuve sits quiet as the room empties. Then puts her head down on the table and laughs. How lungs work. As Sapho says:
To stop breathing is bad.
So the gods judge.
For they do not stop breathing
Later Deneuve goes back down the hall. Inside her office the light is bluing, old ice of April unlacing its fast. She turns to the sound of the five o'clock bell. Comes a knock at the door.
Throughout the collection, Carson adopts various historical masks (though the Deneuve mask seems closest to the author). Akhmatova, Artaud, Freud, Lazarus, Lev and Sonya Tolstoy, as well as many others. The connective is grief, mortality. The presentation is often cinematic, as Carson enjoys pulling in the modern medium with a series of poems about "TV men." The "TV men" poems to some extent are the least enjoyable. These poems come across as clipped bullets lacking depth. But this is exactly what Carson wants, because time and how it is perceived is an important part of Men in the Off Hours.
In the collection's opening piece — the short essay, "Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War," Carson (playfully) explores differences of time perception. Men (Thucydides) see time as linear, with seasons coming and going (along with the ebb and flow of war). But Woolf — portrayed by Carson -- has an epiphany on the subject of time, finding it an interior experience, as described in her essay "Mark on the Wall":
Virginia Woolf concludes her essay "The Mark on the Wall" abruptly. Amidst speculation she notices someone standing over her who says: "I'm going out to buy a newspaper."
The odd thing is, and although incidental it may be the reason why she ends this way, you grasp at once without any mention of the fact that someone is a man. He could no more be a woman than Thucydides. Not only because of his need for newspapers and view of the war ("Though it's no good buying newspapers. . . .Nothing ever happens. Curse this war. . . !") but because he at once identifies the mark on the wall as what it is. A snail is a snail. Even in the off hours, men know marks.
Carson revisits this dialogue later, in a "TV men" poem, but without the depth and nuance of the earlier piece. Carson is simply saying that, as (post)moderns, things are flattening out. It may not make for great poetry but, as a statement placed within the context of the collection, it resonates.
This apparent conflict in the perception of time is ultimately artificial and not some sort of enduring divide between sexes. Ideally, Carson finds a bit of both in all of us (though connection between the two remains a problem) and throughout life we often — gender aside -- shift back and forth as need requires. In an appendix to this essay, Carson closes the ring by writing touchingly of her mother, time, death, Woolf, and Carson's own writing:
Crossouts are something you rarely see in published texts. They are like death: by a simple stroke -- all is lost, yet still there. For death although utterly unlike life shares a skin with it. Death lines every moment of ordinary time. Death hides right inside every shining sentence we grasped and had no grasp of. Death is a fact. No more or less strange than that celebrated fact given by the very last sentence of her [Woolf's:] diaries (March 24, 1941):
L. is doing the rhododendrons.
Crossouts sustain me now. I search out and cherish them like old photographs of my mother in happier times. It may be a stage of grieving that will pass. It may be that I'll never again think of sentences unshadowed in this way. It has changed me. Now I too am someone who knows marks.
Facing these lines is a picture of Carson's mother. For Carson, all divisions — which are ultimately artificial —end with the great leveler (and perhaps comforter) death. Also, for Carson, the Metaphysical (in any traditional and historical sense) is swept aside in a series of "Epitaph" poems that encompass not only the religious but also those cultural items most important to the poet ("Epitaph: Zion", "Epitaph: Europe", "Epitaph: Donne Clown", "Epitaph Evil", etc.). All are bundled up in the shadow of death. In "Shadowboxer," Carson is a fighter (or better, an intellect) fighting death (tongue-in-cheek):
Of the soldier who put a spear through Christ's side on the cross
(and by some accounts broke his legs),
whose name is Longinus,
it is said
that after that he had trouble sleeping
and fell into a hard mood,
drifted out of the army
and came west,
as far as Provencia.
Was a body's carbon not simply carbon.
Jab hook jab.
Slight shift and we catch him
in a moment of expansion and catastrophe,
white arms sporting strangely in a void.
Uppercut jab jab hook jab.
Don't want to bore you,
my troubles jab.
Jab.
Jab.
Punch hook.
Jab. Was a face not all stille
as dew in Aprille.
Hook.
Jab.
Jab.
Less satisfying as a response to the "Epitaph" poems is the poem "No Epitaph," a piece that is meant to evoke the survival of poetry, even in such a vacuum as the Chinese Cultural Revolution. As a poem unto itself, it is shallow, and has the reader remembering Winston Smith's ("1984") utterance of "Shakespeare" without really knowing what it meant. But Carson's equivalence between the memory destroying Communist East and the history haunted West seems forced and unconvincing, especially when the corpse (and the weak light shed upon it) happens to be Poetry:
Was there some trouble? An old worker died of appendicitis
on the night shift and the body could not be cremated
until certain disputes
between the hospital and the family were resolved.
Someone would have to watch the body, they stood in a small circle,
shadows straining away from them toward all high corners of the room.
He was surprised as anyone to hear himself say he would do it.
What was it like? Quiet he says. Each night for a week
he kept company beside the empty arms of the dead.
Looking out the door we can see Venus rising.
Okay there she is.
Cold rushes in.
No need for men to chatter so.
(No Epitaph)
Of course this is Carson's brand of irony, with the unnamed Chinese poet's pure response of "Quiet." The real ones doing the chattering are the Venus lovers. (One wonders how various western professors live with themselves, studying texts they loath for various ideological reasons.) As a suggestion of a new poetical advent, free of history's detritus, the poem seems hokey. Carson's hip disdain for her own erudition comes across glaringly as an act meant to bring the house down.
Some critics doubt that Carson even writes poetry. I think she does write poetry but of a kind unlike any I've read. "Men in the Off Hours" has its ups and downs, for not all the experiments work. But with Carson's writing there is always wit, and usually, underneath the assembled fragments, you detect her passionate heart, which makes it easy to forgive her various sins. But are they sins? Or is Carson writing the modern novel: part prose, part poetry, part essay. How the lines are blurring. Jab. Jab.
(A slightly different version of this review appeared in the Avatar Review.)
February 10, 2023
what is she talking about idk but i love
January 23, 2021
she’s simply a genius and i would die for her, next question
December 30, 2009
I'm not going to lie: I don't understand 98% of this. This does not stop me from saying that it is beautiful. (I understand the essays on classics most, I think, and they are dense and thoughtful and intelligent.) The poetry is bewildering, evocative and free-wheeling. Anne Carson's mind must be an amazing place to live. It made fantastic bedtime reading, because I could read a few lines and lie in the dark and drift off, turning them over in my head.
July 31, 2020
No entiendo la mitad pero incluso así me fascina.
February 3, 2025
Anne Carson me resulta extraordinaria. Las variaciones de sus traducciones son elocuentes, graciosas e inteligentes. Su poesía es profunda, sensible y repleta de saber. Me quedo corta con todo lo que digo sobre ella, me quedo corta
December 26, 2024
Laura me contó que Anne Carson había confesado en una entrevista, cuando le preguntaron qué libro actual recomendaba, que no leía literatura contemporánea.
A pesar de ello, sabe cómo servir coño en pleno siglo XXI.
A pesar de ello, sabe cómo servir coño en pleno siglo XXI.
August 10, 2023
Men in the Off Hours is my introduction to Anne Carson. It certainly makes clear to me why she is such a beloved poet. Anne Carson's work is erudite, piercing, superbly crafted, yet also emotive. Some of her poems leave you caught in your tracks and you don't know why. A lot of them seem highly experimental on first glance but the moment you finish reading it you feel certainly punched in the gut, or affected to think in some other way. There's one poem in which she reuses all the words for the word 'butt' or 'arse' and then makes you feel as if someone let out a fart at the very end. There's another in which she just uses a handful of words to make you feel assaulted.
The poems are full of power, in other words. I'm eager to get a hold of Carson's collected works once they come out so I can savour her entire oeuvre. Until then I look forward to rereading some of the poems in this collection, so I can enjoy Carson's wittiness and attention to language, time and time again.
The poems are full of power, in other words. I'm eager to get a hold of Carson's collected works once they come out so I can savour her entire oeuvre. Until then I look forward to rereading some of the poems in this collection, so I can enjoy Carson's wittiness and attention to language, time and time again.
August 14, 2022
Anne Carson escreve belíssimos poemas e ensaios, mas acredito que possa fazer uma leitura mais proveitosa depois de ler a Ilíada, Sophocles e a Eneida, dadas as referências da autora.
March 7, 2020
4,5
Ville inte att den skulle ta slut. Blandningen och essän i slutet. Språket, stilig och lurig. Ett bus en lek men också ett allvar
Ville inte att den skulle ta slut. Blandningen och essän i slutet. Språket, stilig och lurig. Ett bus en lek men också ett allvar
Read
February 13, 2020Anne Carson är på en gång vår främsta klassicist och vår främsta postmodernist, och den av våra samtida som bäst förlänger den "tid det tar för ljudet att dö ut".
October 31, 2024
2.75/5
"Imitation (mimesis in Greek) is Aristotle’s collective term for the true mistakes of poetry. What I like about this term is the ease with which it accepts that what we are engaged in when we do poetry is error, the willful creation of error, the deliberate break and complication of mistakes out of which may arise unexpectedness.”
I'm surprised at how much I didn't like this, considering how much I enjoyed If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho and Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse.
I think my main issue with this collection is that it felt like Anne Carson's outtakes (because that's essentially what it is). I read this only for the essay "Dirt and Desire: Essay on The Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity" and that felt like the only fully-formed and fully-thought-out work in this collection. The collection included a couple of other essays, none of which I connected with, largely because I am unfamiliar with the people she is writing about/referencing. I don't think it's for me to say that most of the works in this didn't need to be published, but I will say that a lot of this felt aimless and incomplete, which is fine if you're familiar with the people she's talking about, which again, I am not, so I was immensely bored. I felt especially disconnected from the poems (which make up a majority of this connection) because I don't know most of the people she's writing about and was, surprisingly, not a fan of her poetic style. I love Anne Carson's writing and I think she excels at essay-style, sometimes prosaic, writing, so most of this was just not for me.
The sad thing is I didn't even end up enjoying the Female Pollution essay all that much and I cannot for the life of me remember why I wanted to read it in the first place. Don't get me wrong, it had a lot of good ideas, but I wish it was longer and more fleshed out.
Anyways, I still love Anne Carson and I think she has such a unique perspective on Greek antiquity, so I for sure will be picking up more of her work.
"Imitation (mimesis in Greek) is Aristotle’s collective term for the true mistakes of poetry. What I like about this term is the ease with which it accepts that what we are engaged in when we do poetry is error, the willful creation of error, the deliberate break and complication of mistakes out of which may arise unexpectedness.”
I'm surprised at how much I didn't like this, considering how much I enjoyed If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho and Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse.
I think my main issue with this collection is that it felt like Anne Carson's outtakes (because that's essentially what it is). I read this only for the essay "Dirt and Desire: Essay on The Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity" and that felt like the only fully-formed and fully-thought-out work in this collection. The collection included a couple of other essays, none of which I connected with, largely because I am unfamiliar with the people she is writing about/referencing. I don't think it's for me to say that most of the works in this didn't need to be published, but I will say that a lot of this felt aimless and incomplete, which is fine if you're familiar with the people she's talking about, which again, I am not, so I was immensely bored. I felt especially disconnected from the poems (which make up a majority of this connection) because I don't know most of the people she's writing about and was, surprisingly, not a fan of her poetic style. I love Anne Carson's writing and I think she excels at essay-style, sometimes prosaic, writing, so most of this was just not for me.
The sad thing is I didn't even end up enjoying the Female Pollution essay all that much and I cannot for the life of me remember why I wanted to read it in the first place. Don't get me wrong, it had a lot of good ideas, but I wish it was longer and more fleshed out.
Anyways, I still love Anne Carson and I think she has such a unique perspective on Greek antiquity, so I for sure will be picking up more of her work.
January 10, 2023
I wish I would've known Anne Carson sooner. Yet, the more I think about it, I probably met her at the right time.
April 1, 2022
oh anne . the review for this will just be me copy pasting 'appendix to ordinary time' . :
“My mother died the autumn I was writing this. And Now I have no one, I thought. “Exposed on a high ledge in full light,” says Virginia Woolf on one of her tingling days (March 1, 1937). I was turning over the pages of her diaries, still piled on my desk the day after the funeral, looking for comfort I suppose—why are these pages comforting? They led her, after all, to the River Ouse. Yet strong pleasure rises from every sentence. In reflecting on the death of her own father, she decided that forming such shocks into words and order was “the strongest pleasure known to me” (Moments of Being [London 1985], 81).
And whom do we have to thank for this pleasure but Time?
It grows dark as I write now, the clocks have been changed, night comes earlier—gathering like a garment. I see my mother, as she would have been at this hour alone in her house, gazing out on the cold lawns and turned earth of evening, high bleak grass going down to the lake. Or moving room by room through the house and the silverblue darkness filling around her, pooling, silencing. Did she think of me—somewhere, in some city, in lamplight, bending over books, or rising to put on my coat and go out? Did I pause, switch off the desklamp and stand, gazing out at the dusk, think I might call her. Not calling. Calling. Too late now. Under a different dark sky, the lake trickles on.
How vanished everyone is, Virginia Woolf wrote in letters to several people in 1941. And to Isaiah Berlin, Please knock on my little grey door. He did not knock; she died before. Here is a fragment from February of that year:
It is strange that the sun shd be shining; and the birds singing.”
“My mother died the autumn I was writing this. And Now I have no one, I thought. “Exposed on a high ledge in full light,” says Virginia Woolf on one of her tingling days (March 1, 1937). I was turning over the pages of her diaries, still piled on my desk the day after the funeral, looking for comfort I suppose—why are these pages comforting? They led her, after all, to the River Ouse. Yet strong pleasure rises from every sentence. In reflecting on the death of her own father, she decided that forming such shocks into words and order was “the strongest pleasure known to me” (Moments of Being [London 1985], 81).
And whom do we have to thank for this pleasure but Time?
It grows dark as I write now, the clocks have been changed, night comes earlier—gathering like a garment. I see my mother, as she would have been at this hour alone in her house, gazing out on the cold lawns and turned earth of evening, high bleak grass going down to the lake. Or moving room by room through the house and the silverblue darkness filling around her, pooling, silencing. Did she think of me—somewhere, in some city, in lamplight, bending over books, or rising to put on my coat and go out? Did I pause, switch off the desklamp and stand, gazing out at the dusk, think I might call her. Not calling. Calling. Too late now. Under a different dark sky, the lake trickles on.
How vanished everyone is, Virginia Woolf wrote in letters to several people in 1941. And to Isaiah Berlin, Please knock on my little grey door. He did not knock; she died before. Here is a fragment from February of that year:
It is strange that the sun shd be shining; and the birds singing.”
May 29, 2024
sadly not as impressed by carson's own poetry as i am by her criticism of others. her verse reads as sticky, gloopy treacle: enormous vats of big ideas (television! representation! time! gender! communism!) with very little of its matter express in solid form, everything either gaseous or liquid. lethally modern. i like the idea of the perception of time folding people into different worlds, women and men, virginia woolf and sapho, but i find the total effect more or less kind of deadening. that said, every now and then, a few lines of the poetry erupt from the syrup and stand so beautifully true it can take your breath away...
"God's choice can be seen emerging
from the dark side of reason
like a new planet. No use being historical
about the planet
it is just an imitation.
As Lazarus is an imitation of Christ.
As Tv is an imitation of Lazarus"
"God's choice can be seen emerging
from the dark side of reason
like a new planet. No use being historical
about the planet
it is just an imitation.
As Lazarus is an imitation of Christ.
As Tv is an imitation of Lazarus"
August 29, 2015
Who else but Anne Carson would have Hector (of Trojan War fame) appearing in a TV series fighting off helicopters in the desert. Poor man didn't make it but Carson's imagination survives. There's no adequate way to explain Anne Carson; just read her.
October 22, 2022
i only know what this woman is talking about like half the time but it does sound nice
December 4, 2023
I guess around sunset we started to drink.
And lay on the floor writing lines
For songs that cold
Night smell coming in
The window I left about four went
Home.
Opened the fridge.
Closed it lay down got up.
Lay down.
Lay.
Turned.
Not morning yet.
I just want to talk to you.
Why does love happen?
So then I grew old and died and wrote this.
Be careful it’s worldsharp.
And lay on the floor writing lines
For songs that cold
Night smell coming in
The window I left about four went
Home.
Opened the fridge.
Closed it lay down got up.
Lay down.
Lay.
Turned.
Not morning yet.
I just want to talk to you.
Why does love happen?
So then I grew old and died and wrote this.
Be careful it’s worldsharp.
January 26, 2025
so so smart. referential, transformative, intertextual. wild!!! my favorite pieces: Essay on What I Think About Most, Irony Is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve, Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity, and of course Appendix to Ordinary Time about her mother. i loved the experience of reading this.
March 30, 2022
unique writing and concept but I'm not sure I understood a lot of it :,)
March 26, 2025
3,5
you go girl
no la entiendo casi nada pero qué señora más lista
you go girl
no la entiendo casi nada pero qué señora más lista
January 23, 2022
Anne Carson, this Canadian gem of a poet and professor, is the master of venturing into the ancient with modern wit and writing. Beautiful! The poem on Anna Akhmátova and the last work called "Dirt and desire: Essay on the phenomenology of female pollution in antiquity" are outstanding.
September 28, 2022
i liked alot of this and thought the rest was ok
December 30, 2024
Le da igual lo que la tradición diga. Ella ha venido a jugar y a reescribir.
July 3, 2023
got half way thorough n i genuinely thought i was gonna die of boredom omfds
November 15, 2024
Challenging collection of prose and poetry. A couple sections felt like a bit of a slog, but moments of brilliance in terms of the writing and ideas made this a very worthwhile read.
Read
April 20, 2012Canadian classicist Anne Carson shares the High Modernist attraction to the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome, but with an inimitable style some might deride as "post-modern," or even pastiche. But what does "post-modern" mean, anyway? As for "pastiche," some will remember the same charge was leveled against THE WASTE LAND. Carson's work seems the obvious product of an era that exists only in small fragments--as do Sappho's poems, which Carson translated in IF NOT, WINTER (2002)--or timelessness. That same great continuum in which Pound and Eliot read and wrote their masterpieces differs only in its expansion and even greater multiplicity of forms: in GLASS, IRONY, AND GOD, for example, among the chief treats are the abandoned TV scripts Carson wrote.
The classical inheritance behind the work that introduced Carson to most American readers, EROS THE BITTERSWEET (Princeton University Press), became material for her own poems. When I first wrote this reviews, in 2000, I stated that Carson seemed to be "channeling Sappho," not knowing that IF NOT, WINTER was on the horizon, but I also mentioned the other characters populating MEN IN THE OFF HOURS: Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Socrates, Freud, Catullus, Edward Hopper, St. Augustine, Tolstoy, and Longinus. Yet if Carson has moved from scholarship solely to the larger and less confined realm of poetry, which she has done much to enlarge and re-invent in terms of definition, her primary subject hasn't changed from EROS THE BITTERSWEET: the eternal conflict between men and women. That conflict’s central fury lies in what Carson perceives as the former’s cold, flat, and harshly restrictive objectification of the latter.
Carson is not only a classicist but also an inventor, restlessly seeking new shapes with each book, as readers of her most recent book, NOX, know: some may still be clumsily unwrapping the packaging, itself a sort of pun on the difficulty of "getting at" poems. Carson is always hyper-conscious of presentation: in fact, the "TV Men" sequences MEN IN THE OFF HOURS contain are a perfect embodiment of her subject matter. ”Lazarus is an imitation of Christ,“ says one of her speakers, ”As TV is an imitation of/Lazarus. As you and I are an imitation of/ /TV.“
Is this the newest incarnation of "life imitates art"? Or has it been decided that "art imitates life" is a truer take on how we live, given our increasing reliance on media instead of direct experience? Or, in fact, to continue with questions to which I have no answers, how much of daily life can said to be unbuffered against a world some see as now twice removed from "reality"? "What so real as the cry of a child? / A rabbit's cry may be wilder, / But it has no soul," wrote Sylvia Plath, or Lady Lazarus herself.
(revised and expanded from a 2000 review originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE; Dinitia Smith also provides an excellent commentary published close to the original publication of MEN IN THE OFF HOURS in that same year)
The classical inheritance behind the work that introduced Carson to most American readers, EROS THE BITTERSWEET (Princeton University Press), became material for her own poems. When I first wrote this reviews, in 2000, I stated that Carson seemed to be "channeling Sappho," not knowing that IF NOT, WINTER was on the horizon, but I also mentioned the other characters populating MEN IN THE OFF HOURS: Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Socrates, Freud, Catullus, Edward Hopper, St. Augustine, Tolstoy, and Longinus. Yet if Carson has moved from scholarship solely to the larger and less confined realm of poetry, which she has done much to enlarge and re-invent in terms of definition, her primary subject hasn't changed from EROS THE BITTERSWEET: the eternal conflict between men and women. That conflict’s central fury lies in what Carson perceives as the former’s cold, flat, and harshly restrictive objectification of the latter.
Carson is not only a classicist but also an inventor, restlessly seeking new shapes with each book, as readers of her most recent book, NOX, know: some may still be clumsily unwrapping the packaging, itself a sort of pun on the difficulty of "getting at" poems. Carson is always hyper-conscious of presentation: in fact, the "TV Men" sequences MEN IN THE OFF HOURS contain are a perfect embodiment of her subject matter. ”Lazarus is an imitation of Christ,“ says one of her speakers, ”As TV is an imitation of/Lazarus. As you and I are an imitation of/ /TV.“
Is this the newest incarnation of "life imitates art"? Or has it been decided that "art imitates life" is a truer take on how we live, given our increasing reliance on media instead of direct experience? Or, in fact, to continue with questions to which I have no answers, how much of daily life can said to be unbuffered against a world some see as now twice removed from "reality"? "What so real as the cry of a child? / A rabbit's cry may be wilder, / But it has no soul," wrote Sylvia Plath, or Lady Lazarus herself.
(revised and expanded from a 2000 review originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE; Dinitia Smith also provides an excellent commentary published close to the original publication of MEN IN THE OFF HOURS in that same year)
August 25, 2012
sigh. to explain why you should read this book now would be to write my MFA annotation on it --- and let's face it, that's not going to happen.
suffice it to say, you should read this book. it has all of Carson's poetic depth, insight into both language and human experience, and a heart-boggling take on gender, history, and power. I literally had to put the book down several times to recover from the beautiful tragedy of it.
standout work: TV Men (Antigone, Akhmatova, Catherine Deneuve and the Woolf/Thucydides conversation particularly) and the essay on feminine boundaries in antiquity.
suffice it to say, you should read this book. it has all of Carson's poetic depth, insight into both language and human experience, and a heart-boggling take on gender, history, and power. I literally had to put the book down several times to recover from the beautiful tragedy of it.
standout work: TV Men (Antigone, Akhmatova, Catherine Deneuve and the Woolf/Thucydides conversation particularly) and the essay on feminine boundaries in antiquity.
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