Anne Carson, Wealthy & Great Canadian (or, It's Entirely Possible This Amuses Only Me)

While paging through Harold Bloom's Genius, your pal the Rake ran across this sentence:

[Samuel] Johnson, fierce classicist, would reject our current debasement of the idea of "genius." We still value originality in a scientist or technocrat, but not in masters of language. Were another James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, or Samuel Beckett to arise, we would be slow to recognize such a figure, though I judge us to have one now in Canadian poet Anne Carson.

Like me, you might be thinking: Anne Carson? Really? Hell, I've heard the name, but I still had to Google to find where I'd heard her mentioned lately. (Here, for starters. And she wrote this.)* Mostly, it seems that a few pixels have been, um, spilled in consideration of her About the Author note, which goes like this:

Anne Carson lives in Canada.

Pithy, no? It doesn't seem like much, but apparently it's a springboard for the ol' Reading Group:

The biographical note for The Beauty of the Husband offers only the statement, "Anne Carson lives in Canada." While it is a general rule in poetry that the speaker of any given poem is not necessarily the author and is often an invented persona, does Carson's work lead you to certain assumptions about the facts of her life, her habits, her intellectual world, her losses, her griefs? Does her work have a deliberately confessional aspect--like that of Robert Lowell or Anne Sexton--or is it difficult to tell with Carson what has actually been experienced and what has been imagined? What issues, experiences, and concerns are repeated throughout her work?

So, Anne Carson, Canadian.** What do we make of all this? Moby Lives once responded:

Take the Canadian poet Anne Carson. I know she's Canadian because on her last book, "The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos," the author's bio on the back flap said, "Anne Carson lives in Canada." In fact, that's all it said. Now, some would say there was a certain pomposity to this, but for me, it worked to confirm the bio note on her previous book, "Men in the Off Hours," which stated, "Anne Carson lives in Canada." This, in turn, had cleared up my confusion over her previous bio note, on "The Autobiography of Red," which said, "Anne Carson lives in Canada."

So anyway, just last week, Carson, who lives in Canada, won a new award called the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, which in the common parlance means $40,000. She was presented with the check at a fancy soiree where 300 of Canada's "literati glitterati," as the Griffin's promo material put it, "dined on oysters, beef tenderloin and Swiss chocolate and danced until after midnight."

As to what Carson, a renowned classics professor at McGill University, was doing there, the judges cited her "rigorous classical scholarship," her "dialectical imagination, and her quizzical, stricken moral sense," before Carson, according to the Calgary Herald, stepped up to the microphone and said, "Geez."

So what I'm getting at is this: Young Americans, when they reinstitute the draft, escape to Canada and become weathy poets. Ask for Anne Carson. She lives there, sleeps on a mattress filled with grant money, and cuts her bangs herself with pinking shears (it looks like).

________________________________________________________

*--A critic recently took her apart, calling her reading voice "a near-monotone, as if Lilith from Frasier were using Stephen Hawking's voice-synthesiser." (Trust me, there's nothing about this post that doesn't amuse YPTR.)

**--Additional research also indicates that she teaches "at least one semester in the United States" per year. The plot thickens. Question: How does this affect your reading of the Reading Group Question above? Of the Moby Lives passage? Does Anne Carson's semester-per-year in Michigan negate (for you) the truth value of the Author Note "Anne Carson lives in Canada." Why or why not?

Bonus--Do you find Author Notes valuable in general? Why or why not? Do you have a favorite one you can recite from memory? (It's OK to consult a book, if your memory fails you.)

Comments

[Jimmy Beck]

Hey, come on now, "lives in Canada" certainly narrows it down, no? Not geographically so much, but Canada's got, what, 30 million people? Shit, I reckon if you parachute into downtown Alberta you'll probably bump into her at the laundromat. And I'll bet she meticulously separates her colors from her whites.

[lizpenn]

i love ac's poetry, and hearing her read in person is swoonworthy, but that bio line has always annoyed me. for one thing, it deliberately ignores the fact she teaches at mcgill, thus dissociating her from the academic world (which despite the grants -- she got the macarthur genius award once too -- is after all the hand that feeds her.) for comparison, i just looked at the bio in pamela anderson's "star" (shut up! i got a promotional copy, ok?) and it says, "pamela anderson is one of the most recognizable women in the world and the mother of two. she lives in a small town on the california coast." conclusion: pam anderson is easier (if less fun) to stalk than anne carson. at least, as jimmy says, she narrows it down.

[Rake]

Fun Fact: Pamela Anderson...also Canadian! So she could've gone with "Pamela Anderson used to live in Canada." That's what Dave Eggers woulda done, I assure you.

(This merriment still begs the question: Is Carson's work on par with that of Joyce, Stein, and Beckett? Or is Bloom just dipping into mother's laudanum cabinet again?)

[CAAF]

What I'm wondering is what the woman who remarked "Geez" as she stepped up to the microphone, would have said when Bloom put his hand on her thigh and told her she had "an aura of election" upon her. "Holy cats"? "Krikey"? "Harry, you so crazy"?

[Rake]

BLOOM: My dear, you have the aura of election upon you.

CARSON: [Blushing slightly] Fo shizzle!

[red clay]

to me, her bio says "it's none your damn bidness."