anne carson from the glass essay

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Anne carson , the art of poetry no. 88, issue 171, fall 2004.

Anne Carson and I first met in 1988 at a writers’ workshop in Canada, and have been reading each other’s work ever since. The interview that follows is a mix of our usual conversation and discussion about topics that preoccupy Carson’s work—mysticism, antiquity, obsession, desire.

Carson was born on June 21, 1950, in Toronto, the second and final child of Margaret and Robert Carson. Her mother was a housewife; her father worked for the Toronto Dominion Bank. During her childhood, the family moved about from bank to bank in small Ontario towns like Stoney Creek, Port Hope, Timmins.

In the 1970s Carson studied classics at the University of Toronto and then ancient Greek with the renowned classical scholar Kenneth Dover at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In 1981, she returned to the University of Toronto to write a Ph.D. dissertation on Sappho, which later became  Eros the Bittersweet — a brief, dense treatise on lack’s centrality to desire. Today, Carson lives in Ann Arbor, where she teaches classics and comparative literature at the University of Michigan.

Although she has always been reluctant to call herself a poet, Carson has been writing some heretic form of poetry almost all her life. 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. Canadian venues were considerably less welcoming, and it was not until Carson was forty-two that a small Canadian pub- lisher, Brick Books, published her first book of poems,  Short Talks. 

By the mid-nineties, Carson was no longer trying to find publishers; rather, publishers were clamoring to find her. In short order, three collections of poems and essays appeared— Plainwater: Essays and Poetry  (1995);  Glass, Irony and God  (1995);  Men in the Off Hours  (2000)—as well as a verse novel,  Autobiography of Red  (1998), which seamlessly blends Greek myth, homosexuality, and small-town Ontario life. Two ostensibly academic books followed:  Economy of the Unlost  and her translation of Sappho’s poetry,  If Not, Winter,  both in 2002.

Awards and accolades came tumbling in: a Guggenheim Fellowship (1995); a Lannan Award (1996); the Pushcart Prize (1997); a MacArthur Fellowship (2000); and the Griffin Prize for Poetry (2001). In 2002 Carson became the first woman to receive England’s T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for  The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. 

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  Decreation —the eponymously titled opera—alongside new poems and essays.

We started the following interview just after Christmas in 2002. Exhausted by the joyous demands of the season, Carson stretched out on an orange velveteen sofa and we talked—fortified by cups of oolong tea—for several hours.

— Will Aitken 

INTERVIEWER

I want to start with your poem “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions.” There’s a line in there that stopped me right in the middle: “My personal poetry is a failure.” It made me wonder two things: What do you call your personal poetry? And do you really feel it’s a failure or is that just the poem’s persona talking?

Well, I think there are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don’t say what I want them to say. And that’s true of the persona in the poem, but it’s also true of me as me.

When you look back on “The Glass Essay,” for example, do you consider it a personal poem? Do you see it as a failure?

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 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.

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. When I think about my writing, I don’t feel that.

Is that because it’s still part of your ongoing personal experience?

Well, that’s possible. But how can one ever judge those things?

Or that it might be a failure to you, but a success for everybody else who picks it up?

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. But I still don’t think I finished the thinking.

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.

I remember that sentence driving at me in the dark like a glacier. I felt like a ship going toward the South Pole and then all of a sudden a glacier comes zooming out of the dark, and I just took it down. I appreciate that it’s accurate of what I both have and choose to have as my effect on people. I don’t know exactly why that’s the case.

You once said you meant  unbearable  in a metaphysical sense.

Well, yes, it couldn’t be physical, could it? Unless I went around hammering people.

There are those days.

With sharp objects. It’s true, that’s why I go to boxing class, to learn those skills. But that’s just, of course, shadowboxing, as they say.

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Season 4 trailer.

The Paris Review Podcast returns with a new season, featuring the best interviews, fiction, essays, and poetry from America’s most legendary literary quarterly, brought to life in sound. Join us for intimate conversations with Sharon Olds and Olga Tokarczuk; fiction by Rivers Solomon, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, and Zach Williams; poems by Terrance Hayes and Maggie Millner; nonfiction by Robert Glück, Jean Garnett, and Sean Thor Conroe; and performances by George Takei, Lena Waithe, and many others. Catch up on earlier seasons, and listen to the trailer for Season 4 now.

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The art of editing no. 4.

By the time I arrived in New York in the late seventies, Lapham was established in the city’s editorial elite, up there with William Shawn at The New Yorker and Barbara Epstein and Bob Silvers at The New York Review of Books . He was a glamorous fixture at literary parties and a regular at Elaine’s. In 1988, he raised plutocratic hackles by publishing Money and Class in America , a mordant indictment of our obsession with wealth. For a brief but glorious couple of years, he hosted a literary chat show on public TV called Bookmark , trading repartee with guests such as Joyce Carol Oates, Gore Vidal, Alison Lurie, and Edward Said. All the while, a new issue of Harper’s would hit the newsstands every month, with a lead essay by Lapham that couched his erudite observations on American society and politics in Augustan prose.

Today Lapham is the rare surviving eminence from that literary world. But he has managed to keep a handsome bit of it alive—so I observed when I went to interview him last summer in the offices of Lapham’s , a book-filled, crepuscular warren on a high floor of an old building just off Union Square. There he presides over a compact but bustling editorial operation, with an improbably youthful crew of subeditors. One LQ intern, who had also done stints at other magazines, told me that Lapham was singular among top editors for the personal attention he showed to each member of his staff.

Our conversation took place over several sessions, each around ninety minutes. Despite the heat, he was always impeccably attired: well-tailored blue blazer, silk tie, cuff links, and elegant loafers with no socks. He speaks in a relaxed baritone, punctuated by an occasional cough of almost orchestral resonance—a product, perhaps, of the Parliaments he is always dashing outside to smoke. The frequency with which he chuckles attests to a vision of life that is essentially comic, in which the most pervasive evils are folly and pretension.

I was familiar with such aspects of the Lapham persona. But what surprised me was his candid revelation of the struggle and self-doubt that lay behind what I had imagined to be his effortlessness. Those essays, so coolly modulated and intellectually assured, are the outcome of a creative process filled with arduous redrafting, rejiggering, revision, and last-minute amendment in the teeth of the printing press. And it is a creative process that always begins—as it did with his model, Montaigne—not with a dogmatic axiom to be unpacked but in a state of skeptical self-questioning: What do I really know? If there a unifying core to Lapham’s dual career as an editor and an essayist, that may be it.

— Jim Holt

From the Archive, Issue 229

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Introduction

• Published: August 2023
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Coles sets out the book’s argument for Carson as an experimental scholar and reader, introducing her distinctive relationship to form and her tendency to reproduce and explain her compositional processes. Context is provided on current creative dissent around the categories of criticism and literary creation, and on the work of several scholar-poets with whom Carson is compared here. Coles explores the extraordinary formal, vocal, and material versatility of the Carson “essay,” and argues for compelling forms of transparency in her handling of sources: from exposures of working and feeling to complex citational mirror games. Her experiments in form are explored in relation to her early scholarly writing, including key readings of Plato, Aristotle, and Ancient Greek lyric. Carson’s strong mediating presence, coupled with forms that work against it, is presented as a singular reckoning with the emotive demands of scholarship, where scholarly apparatus coexists with the means for its sabotage.

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A Glass Essay

Reading anne carson post-breakup.

An interior view of the Radcliffe Camera at Oxford University, where the author spent a summer re-reading Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay." Getty Images / Lonely Planet

In the last week of june 2018 , I got unexpectedly dumped. During the month that followed, I did the only thing that felt right: I read Anne Carson’s long poem “The Glass Essay” every day. I had come to Oxford to teach a summer class as England endured a historic drought, and the sun shone heartlessly, beautifully every day. Every morning I woke up, ran around the park, rushed through a shower and a coffee, and ascended to the upper reading room of the Radcliffe Camera, one of Oxford’s extravagantly beautiful libraries. I would claim my favorite desk, with my favorite graffito (“LIBIDINAL COMMUNISM”) etched in its wood frame, and lean back in my chair, staring up into the rotunda’s scrolled dome. Then, once my mind was blank and still, usually around 9:25, I’d open Carson and begin. The poem starts:

I can hear little clicks inside my dream. Night drips its silver tap down the back. At 4 A.M. I wake. Thinking

of the man who left in September. His name was Law.

From the first time I read them after the breakup, these lines laced me into the poem good and tight. “The Glass Essay” is a complex structure, holding two disparate elements together in a surprising balance: an intimate meditation on a romantic breakup, and a critical reading of the life of Emily Brontë. The poem immediately became the frame I required to shape the posture of my hours. I needed to read it to stay upright during the day and to stay lying down at night. I too know that slow, cold drip down the spine because I’m a bad sleeper; at 4 a.m. I’m always either going to bed or suddenly starting awake. But the main point of identification was so obvious I didn’t even bother to note it: I was going through a breakup, and “The Glass Essay” is indisputably the greatest breakup poem ever written. (Don’t try to argue with me on this.) The urge to reread flowed out of my desire to sink further into the poem and its speaker and remain there, a desire that in turn flowed out of the deeper, inane desire (Carson’s, my own) to sink further into the memory of the departed lover and remain there . On the cusp of dark and dawn, I would lie in my narrow bed and try to memorize the whole thirty-eight-page poem. I never got very far, but certain lines snagged in my mind. The moments that really cut were where the language is plainest, most painful: “His name was Law.”

The name of the man in Carson’s poem puzzled me every time I read it. I wondered, always, what I was supposed to take from this solemn pun. Was “Law” his real name? Is it a name at all, or is it a talisman, perhaps a command? I knew I could seek out answers or speculations from other readers, or perhaps even by emailing or speaking with the writer, as other scholars of contemporary literature might. But I didn’t then and still don’t want to. I prefer to stay alone with this poem.

And so I sank and took “The Glass Essay” down with me, not yet understanding that it had much more to teach me than the loss of love.

This yearning for a lost lover named Law raises a question: Is to be loveless to be lawless? If Law equals love, then is love—when requited, respected—the thing that keeps us in line, restrained and civil? Certainly, both loss and longing are states of emergency, outside the law. Perhaps to be with Law is to be governed by him, or by desire for him. Or is it the opposite? One brief moment in the poem seems like it might offer an answer, but then flatly refuses to:

Well, there are different definitions of Liberty. Love is freedom, Law was fond of saying. I took this to be more a wish than a thought

and changed the subject.

The man who fractured my heart that summer, and cleanly broke it later on, was also fond of speculating about love and freedom. For someone who talked and wrote a lot to friends and strangers, he didn’t put much stake in the verbal as a mode of emotional honesty. Looking back, I see now that he thought love was the freedom not to explain yourself, a millennial version of “Love is never having to say you’re sorry.” Love, to him, was something like a complete freedom of self-expression so expansive and natural it didn’t have to be contained in words but could instead be communicated purely through gaze, or touch, or atmospheric resonance. I believe in gazes and touches and atmospheres, but I cannot—and would never—forsake my belief in words. I am most free and real when jostling around restlessly in the human laboratory of dialogue.

But dialogue requires someone who will talk back: that is its fundamental rule. It is proof of the lawlessness of love that I could love him when we didn’t even agree that this rule existed.

his name was luck.

Luck because I met him at a time when I was stoutly resisting the temptation to declare myself terminally unlucky in love. I did not want to let myself off the hook like that, did not want to make lame cosmic excuses for my loneliness with abstractions like fate or doom. But then I met him, and knew that luck was real, because he just appeared one day, out of the ether of a dating app. We found that we craved the same foods, laughed at the same small things, liked the same smells and colors. It was plain good fortune to have met. In fact, it was the first major stroke of fortune I’d had since I’d gotten my teaching job, a fancy position at a prestigious university in which I had been flailing—unfit and unwell, rather than unlucky—for several years. And now here was Luck, another outwardly successful person who had his own share of doubts and regrets, and empathized with my feeling of unfitness and unease. We were both sad, lucky people who felt that our luck was unearned, a problem that is understandably very annoying to most. What luck to have found each other!

When Luck left me that June, I gave in to the mortifying feeling that I was loveless, outside the laws of normal life. The months in England were a mourning time, I told myself with false confidence. When I went home in the fall, it would be over—not better, just over . And so I sank and took “The Glass Essay” down with me, not yet understanding that it had much more to teach me than the loss of love.

for most of my life , the only thing I could call myself with any certainty was a reader. A reader of books and, I realized somewhat late, a reader of people. Many of us who were lonely children see ourselves this way. In elementary school I saved my quarters for slim Bantam paperbacks, read under the covers, and lived almost wholly in my imagination—the whole starter kit of clichés that compose the shy, bookish child.

I realized early that the idea of age appropriateness in books was a sham, and for years I read anything that captured my imagination. Even in college, I rarely did the assigned reading; instead, I wound my way through an idiosyncratic personal canon. I was always reading the wrong thing at the wrong time, it seemed—and often in the wrong place. (I got fired from a library job for getting caught reading a fantasy novel in a study carrel when I was supposed to be shelving books.) But these choices were right to me . Finding the right books to love felt as natural and unplanned as finding the right people to love.

In graduate school, though, there suddenly seemed to be consequences for reading indiscriminately. My reading, and my writing about reading, were often considered irresponsible, by which my professors and peers meant that they were undertheorized, uninformed, and unresearched. This was a brutal lesson that I came to appreciate. I developed parameters of thought and rigor that shaped how I read, learning to channel even the most randomly stumbled-upon texts into my dissertation’s overarching argument. And so, I became accustomed to (and even dependent upon) a kind of disciplined liberty. I accepted that while objectivity was impossible, subjectivity was perhaps avoidable. I became a professional reader.

That summer abroad, I hadn’t intended to read “The Glass Essay,” as I’d never considered myself a responsible reader of Anne Carson. Since I was not a classicist, and her work is suffused with Classical references and texts, I felt I would not have permission until I learned enough about the ancient poets to read her properly— and so, realistically, never. But a couplet from “The Glass Essay” I had seen quoted in a friend’s dissertation stuck in my mind:

When Law left I felt so bad I thought I would die. This is not uncommon.

When Luck left me, these lines resurfaced. That’s it, I thought. That is love. The blank honesty of the couplet made me need Carson; I had to give in to her.

In Oxford, I was supposed to be writing the scholarly book I never ended up finishing; instead, I summoned up a short stack of Carson from the depths of the Bodleian. Slim books with great, epic names: Glass, Irony, and God ; Eros the Bittersweet ; Economy of the Unlost. I encountered “The Glass Essay” upon opening the first of these. For a few days it was just something I was muddling through, a poem I was still in the midst of deciphering. But by the end of that week I had read it and annotated it and read it again, and I still felt a need for it. I could not read anything else until I had satisfied that need. “The Glass Essay” stood in the way of any other text. That’s how it became part of my daily schedule: run, shower, coffee, read “The Glass Essay,” work. On the weekends, when the reading room was closed and LIBIDINAL COMMUNISM inaccessible, I’d change it up a little: read “The Glass Essay” upon waking, run, coffee, shower, work. As someone who thinks mostly about novels, I am shy around poetry; I feel often as though it is reading me more than I am reading it. After years of feeling that way, it was strange to wake up and read a poem every day, and to feel I had grown intimate with it , tender with its idiosyncrasies of form and rhythm. For four or five weeks this went on, the poem becoming as falsely natural as a piercing, a foreign body fitted snugly into the internal and external material of my life.

To make clear the strangeness of this, I must first admit to being a compulsive failed self-improver. My parents hope to attain eternal life through dietary restriction; trained from childhood to respect other people’s regimens, I’ve always admired those who can develop systems of personal organization and live consistently within them. Perhaps in reaction to the strictness of my childhood, I am not one of those people. At the beginning of every school year, I make detailed schedules for days of teaching, days of writing, days of reading, but after a week or two, everything falls apart, and the only plans I can follow are my lesson plans. I am addicted to working and thinking as the spirit moves me, in the maddening way that only the unattached, often depressive person can get away with: seventy-two-hour writing benders, followed by days or weeks of melancholic collapse; periods of mental slog punctuated by a sudden sprint through five or six books without breaks for food or movement. I recognize the decadence of this lifestyle. In the brief neutral moments between these altered states I find it extremely embarrassing and self-indulgent. Yet no matter how many rules I attempt to impose upon myself, the only predictable cycle I maintain is the endless loop of plans made, plans broken, self-flagellation.

So the Carson program came as a real surprise. The closest experience I’d had to it were the summer days, governed by animal schedules, that I’d spent working on farms on and off throughout my life. In fact, there was something reassuringly animal-like about the predetermined hours of that month, as though the poem were the morning scoop of grain I needed to ruminate on to give me enough energy to move through the day. The poem was necessary sustenance.

in staring at carson’s words day after day, I found myself doing something I’d been trained in graduate school not to do: I started to see myself reflected in them. I fell deeply and unquestioningly into identification with the speaker, seeking out similarities, imagining that we felt the same emotions and sensations. It was like falling in love.

The line “Mother and I are chewing lettuce carefully” brought back the diet-ruled dinners of my childhood, my parents and me silently chewing cold leaves and roots with grim concentration. The speaker doesn’t like to lie late in bed in the mornings, and neither do I. (Her: “Law did. / My mother does.” Me: Luck didn’t, either.) Soon I even felt a tug of fond familiarity reading about things that I don’t do or feel. Standing at the open refrigerator, the speaker says,

White foods taste best to me

and I prefer to eat alone. I don’t know why.

I don’t feel any particular way about white foods, and I prefer to eat in company. But rereading those lines, I was momentarily certain that I too felt as the speaker did and had to remind myself that this was not the case. These tiny, domestic sympathies, embedded in a poem that deals with the very biggest questions—What is love? What is God? What is art, who dares attempt it, and at what cost? What are mother and father and self?—folded me into the text with a bodily immediacy, rather than keeping me at the cool distance of scholarly reading.

Looking back, I wonder if cultivating intimacy with the text in this way was a self-soothing mechanism. I don’t think it was. Processing the breakup through this act of rereading, redoubling, and remembering revolved around the neutral cruelty of repetition. As Carson writes,

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its days. It is as if I could dip my hand down

into time and scoop up blue and green lozenges of April heat a year ago in another country.

I can feel that other day running underneath this one like an old videotape…

After you walk away from a last good-bye, the terrain of everyday life is suddenly overlaid with the haunted geography of an entire relationship. Every space is layered with the fine sediment of recollection. Any time you trip and reach out for balance, your hand might accidentally slip “down // into time” and dredge up something beautiful or awful from those years or months or weeks past.

Did he really want to see me, or did he simply want to be allowed to see something, to be granted the pleasure of mere access?

The self, too, is multiplied, and might cross itself if you are not careful. As time slides and aligns and blurs, so too does Carson’s speaker feel her present self slip into a past self of the hot last April, inhabiting simultaneously a then-“she,” trapped in memory, and a now-“I,” writing in the present. Typing these lines, even now I feel my heartbeat double for a moment with syncopated desire. I feel the chilly presence of my own ghostly double from this time last year; she is sitting at this same desk, awaiting Luck’s response to a long email of supplication, nauseated by the mingling of hope and exhaustion.

The looped rereading of “The Glass Essay” made everything feel like the present, rather than the past. All the moments with Luck were there at once, and all the selves that I had been in relation to him, too. The self reading Carson in the library; the self lying on my floor a few weeks earlier, asking him what he thought love was; the self dashing around cooking dinner with him in his tiny kitchen. Il punto a cui tutti li tempi son presenti, to crib Dante’s mystical phrase: “the point when all the times are present.” The ritualized rereading of “The Glass Essay” summoned all these times and held them in shimmering alignment, just as Carson’s speaker feels moments overlapping in the poem. I wonder if a part of me still believed, childishly, that the repeated incantation of a name or a phrase is a powerful summoning spell—you know, “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary,” “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.” (Luck, Luck, Luck.) Could the repeated reading of a poem bring its words into my actual life in a consequential way? In those weeks, I did feel something uncanny was coming over me and Oxford, which was bleached unfamiliar shades of straw and gold by the drought. I couldn’t tell if this was an effect of the text or of my compulsive rereading of it.

Of course, Carson’s poem enacts a similar question: it is itself a lyric essay on rereading Emily Brontë, and how this rereading leads the speaker to view the conditions of her life differently.

When it opens, the speaker has retreated to her mother’s house in the remote North to convalesce from the loss of Law. She takes with her:

…a lot of books—

some for my mother, some for me including The Collected Works Of Emily Brontë . This is my favourite author.

We find “Three silent women at the kitchen table”: Carson, her mother, and Emily, communicating blurrily as through an “atmosphere of glass.” The odd presence of Emily at that kitchen table, quietly lurking inside her book, made me think about the presence of Anne Carson in my own day-to-day activities, an Anne Carson I began to half-imagine as embodied rather than em- booked . Anne Carson jogging lightly beside me in the park, Anne Carson absent-mindedly humming behind me in the coffee queue, Anne Carson sitting opposite me in the library, leaning back coolly in her chair like a rebel in a high school movie, watching me read her poem for the thirteenth or twenty-third time.

This strange feeling of possession was itself mimetic of the poem. For just as I felt myself inhabiting Carson’s “I,” so does Carson’s speaker feel herself doubling her “favourite author.” Yet Emily, writes Carson, is also

…my main fear, which I mean to confront. Whenever I visit my mother I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë,

my lonely life around me like a moor, my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation that dies when I come in the kitchen door.

All the things I was warned away from as a professional student of literature—not to confuse the poet with the speaker, not to get mired in biography, not to be fooled by the cheap lure of identification—went out the window as this possession overcame us. We were three silent women, moving through the pages of books and years. Carson peered into Brontë’s poems as I peered into her own poem, looking for—something.

It was never clear what Emily herself was looking for. Such is the mystery of her strange life and her strange work. In her 1850 preface to Wuthering Heights, Emily’s sister Charlotte writes with the awed fascination of a villager peering into the darkness of an anchorite’s cell. Emily, in Carson’s quotation of the preface, “was not a person of demonstrative character.” Indeed, even “those nearest and dearest to her” could not “with impunity, intrude unlicensed” into the recesses of her mind. Even Charlotte expresses a fearful respect for the secrecy of those alarming “recesses”: the deep, secret self that her sister guarded so sternly. Emily is always one more locked door away from both those who loved her in life and those who love her work. To get closest to her work is to accept that you will never see to the bottom of those recesses. Charlotte recognizes this, and Carson does too.

luck was always trying to plumb my depths, in a manner I found both sweet and offensive. He always wanted more and wouldn’t believe me when I said I’d told him everything. When eventually he saw that I really had given him everything I knew about myself, he found the offering wanting. A few weeks into our relationship, I began to experience the well-intentioned ferocity of his desire to understand me better than I understood myself. He wasn’t really a drinker, but he poured us both a scotch and alternatingly interrogated and flirted with me. I was attracted and confused. Here was someone who wanted to know more about me, but his playful manner of asking very serious questions made his desire seem like part of a game. Did he really want to see me, or did he simply want to be allowed to see something , to be granted the pleasure of mere access?

The idea of seeing, really seeing, was more important to him than it was to anyone I’d ever known. On our second or third date, he casually told me that he was face-blind—a condition I’d never heard of. He was, as he said, “bad at faces.” This was a self-deprecating understatement. Over the next few weeks, he told me more about his particular condition. It would take him, he estimated, twenty or thirty meetings with someone to be able to recognize that person’s face. If I put my hair up or let it down, took my glasses off or put them on, he suddenly saw me as a stranger. This explained, I thought, the way he’d pause and examine my face every time we met, a smile playing around his lips, looking for the person he was coming to know. The longer we were together, the more his face-blindness confused me: How much did he recognize me? How much did it matter if he didn’t or couldn’t ever? I came to terms with this, telling myself that at the very least, I would always know if he found me attractive. My fear was that one day, out of the blue, he wouldn’t. It worried me—and in some way I’ll never understand, I’m sure it worried him too.

Thinking about him now, I have to stop myself from narrative reduction, the cruelest thing I could do to a person I still care about. Luck is not just a character in my story; he has his own. It’s too easy to draw a neat, simplistic parallel: Luck felt he never really recognized me emotionally because his brain actually couldn’t recognize me physically. That’s not it, though. Looking back, I begin to understand that he was also peering into me in the hope that he would find a mirror that could show him his truest self, that would instructively reveal what he looked like in love. I don’t say this with resentment but rather with what remains of love. I wonder how many relationships between mindfully, often proudly, self-reflective people are like this—how often do we look into our partners in order to see ourselves more clearly? Another kind of compulsive rereading, you might say. To look into the person you’re with over and over again, telling yourself that you’re trying to comprehend them more fully, can simply be a means of understanding your own reading self. This self that reads other people is not exactly the same as the self that might read a poem—but it is not entirely different. It took me a long time to realize that I did not want to be a mirror to reflect Luck or a text to enable his readings. I grew tired of being peered at and tired of trying to see through the thick, impenetrable glass of his own surface.

the metaphor is so obvious I barely need to articulate it. Luck peered into me to see himself, then I peered into Carson to see myself, as she peered into Brontë in turn—a nested series of readings and rereadings in the search for newer, deeper meanings. I didn’t realize I was doing it at the time; my immersion in Carson’s poem was so total that I couldn’t take even a step back. I only started to perceive these twinned phenomena somewhere around week three of the Carson regimen.

For Carson, the intense peering activates a powerful, frightening mode of self-reflection, wherein she seems to see right through the illusory exterior of emotion into somewhere more profound and, eventually, more generative. She supplements her reading with periods of rhapsodic meditation, in which a series of twelve female “Nudes” appears to her, visions that she understands to be “a nude glimpse of [her] lone soul, / not the complex mysteries of love and hate.” The Nudes are primitively symbolic, tarot-like, their imagery at once hotly interior and coldly objectified. They are violent: a woman’s body in agony, flesh ripped away, or pierced by thorns, or stitched by a giant silver needle. They infiltrate me as profoundly as the poem’s images of passion. They summon up familiar visions I’d long held at bay: flashbacks to fantasies of my body rendered down, sliced or melted away, accompanied by the familiar scent of self-harm’s alchemical compound of desire and terror.

The poem hurt me and made me think about the nature of that pain after I’d felt it over and over again.

Here, though, my identification with Carson begins to unravel and lift away. The instant that I’ve followed her into the madness of these barest visions of her inner self and my own, she turns back to Brontë’s complex visions, which seem at once to face inward and outward, a mobile vantage from which she does not peer but rather radiates. In Emily’s poetry (Carson writes), she “had a relationship…with someone she calls Thou,” who may be God or Death, or something undefined. Emily, in her apparent isolation, seems to have had a clearer understanding than I of how to relate to the other, even if her other is a force, not a person. It seems strange to turn for advice on love to Emily Brontë, a woman who was “unable to meet the eyes of strangers when she ventured out,” and according to her biographers led a “sad, stunted life…Uninteresting, unremarkable, wracked by disappointment / and despair.” Yet it is through Brontë that Carson—and through Carson, I—begin to really ask the fundamental questions: How are we to look at the loved one, and how are we to look at ourselves? Weird Emily, communing intermittently with Thou, might offer some kind of better answer than what I’d gleaned from human relationships for how to be held closely yet at a distance, in some state of perpetual transit between the “inside outside” and the “outside inside.” “Thou and Emily influence one another in the darkness,” writes Carson, “playing near and far at once.” Something about this seeming paradox of location, near and far, inside and outside, and the way that Emily flits between the two, seems to hold some promise of escaping the mere self. Her word for this is “whaching”:

Whacher, Emily’s habitual spelling of this word, has caused confusion.

Whacher is what she was. She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night. She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather.

She whached the bars of time, which broke. She whached the poor core of the world, wide open.

Whaching is not simply watching; while she whached things we can all observe, like “humans” and “actual weather,” she also whached those things that cannot be seen or known, like “God” and “the poor core of the world.” Whaching somehow allows her to be at once inside and outside of herself; by whaching, Emily breaks “the bars of time” and seems to exist outside its prison. Somehow, whaching is less an action than a state of being:

To be a Whacher is not a choice. There is nowhere to get away from it…

To be a Whacher is not in itself sad or happy.

To whach, it seems, is a calling. If Emily is a Whacher, then so too is Carson by the end of the poem—but only after she stops trying so hard to watch, to “peer and glance,” seeking symbolic meaning or resolution, seeking to solve the problem of herself with and without Law. After the period of rereading Brontë, staring into herself, and seeing the Nudes, the whole thing simply stops:

I stopped watching. I forgot about Nudes. I lived my life,

which felt like a switched-off TV. Something had gone through me and out and I could not own it.

At first, this moment feels deflating, emptied of the exhilaration of what she earlier calls her “spiritual melodrama” and intense feeling. But then something amazing happens. When the speaker, and the reader, least expect it, the poem ends with a final vision, a thirteenth Nude. Though it resembles the first Nude—the woman standing naked and bloody on a hill, strips of flesh flayed by the wind—this figure is not in pain. It stands, neutral and unflinching,

…a human body

trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones. And there was no pain. The wind

was cleansing the bones. They stood forth silver and necessary. It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all. It walked out of the light.

This Nude is not flesh, but bone: shining, bright bone, “silver and necessary,” somehow stripped of individual identity but not of communal feeling. This Nude, I think, is somewhere between “I” and “Thou,” between body and what we might call spirit, at once physical and mystical, “the body of us all.”

On one of the late Carson days, maybe Tuesday or Wednesday of the fourth week, this moment gave me a new shock. I did not know what it meant; I think I still do not understand it. But it led me to consider my own spiritual melodrama, and my ways of peering and rereading. All that bloody revealing, that squinting and seeking, hadn’t gotten down to the bones of the situation. It didn’t open up the poor core of my world or any other; it only abandoned me in the foggy region between past and present, my vision clouded by layers of feeling. Suddenly, these methods of reading were clearly insufficient. I was not whaching right, and I knew it. But I was learning.

Learning to whach meant getting both closer and farther away from my deep identification with the poem’s speaker. It meant realizing that my reflection was not the thing to look for, despite the shining surfaces of the poem. The closer I got to the poem as a whole, the farther I got from myself; the farther I got from the self, the more clearly could I see it. The poem hurt me and made me think about the nature of that pain after I’d felt it over and over again. It taught me a lesson in how to slip, like Emily, outside the prison of the self-in-time to see that self from the inside and the outside simultaneously. To whach.

Thinking of what it means to whach, I wonder if it is some form of the discipline I was trained in, which scholars call criticism, and which I am tempted now just to call “reading.” Perhaps not reading as it is usually performed by so-called professional readers (critics, teachers, writers), but reading as it might be wholly integrated into lived experience. “The Glass Essay” is not just a breakup poem that demands to be read as a critical essay, or a critical essay that demands to be read as a breakup poem; it is somehow neither and both of these at once. Carson learns to whach from Brontë, and in so doing, learns finally to whach herself. A critical stance, the poem suggests, is needed to read and reread the most intimate feelings in ourselves and in others. This kind of reading is the necessary approach to personal experience, an imperative that demands a reinvention, or perhaps a radically earnest reaffirmation, of criticism’s scholarly intent.

I read “The Glass Essay” differently now. In that month of rereading, I was peering so intently at it for my own reflection, trying to scry my own feelings, the resolution of my own sadness. But now that those feelings are gone, I can look at the poem and the breakup through the transparent pane of that old reading, which both keeps me outside that old reading self and lets me see her from the inside, clearly. I can see her, and the poem, and the loss of Luck more lucidly than before because I am not looking for anything anymore. I am not looking for myself in Carson’s reading of Brontë, or in Carson’s Nudes, or in Carson’s breakup story. I stand outside it now, whaching, but no longer reflected, no longer reflecting.

The Shapes of Grief

Writing in pictures, garth greenwell, you might also like, short talks, the wild, sublime body, the subject of pain, new perspectives, enduring writing.

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Words for the Year

"drink from the well of your self and begin again" ~charles bukowski

“The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson

Yet her poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons, vaults, cages, bars, curbs, bits, bolts, fetters, locked windows, narrow frames, aching walls.

“Why all the fuss?” asks one critic. “She wanted liberty. Well didn’t she have it? A reasonably satisfactory homelife,

a most satisfactory dreamlife—why all this beating of wings? What was this cage, invisible to us, which she felt herself to be confined in?”

Well there are many ways of being held prisoner, I am thinking as I stride over the moor. As a rule after lunch mother has a nap

and I go out to walk. The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April carve into me with knives of light.

Something inside it reminds me of childhood— it is the light of the stalled time after lunch when clocks tick

and hearts shut and fathers leave to go back to work and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering

something they never tell. You remember too much, my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down? She shifted to a question about airports.

Crops of ice are changing to mud all around me as I push on across the moor warmed by drifts from the pale blue sun.

On the edge of the moor our pines dip and coast in breezes from somewhere else.

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its days. It is as if I could dip my hand down

into time and scoop up blue and green lozenges of April heat a year ago in another country.

Anne Carson , “The Glass Essay” (excerpt) from Glass, Irony, and God . Copyright © 1994 by Anne Carson.

Via Poetryfoundation.org  (visit site to read full poem)

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Poems & Poets

Anne Carson

Anne Carson is a poet, essayist, professor of Classics, and translator. “In the small world of people who keep up with contemporary poetry,” wrote Daphne Merkin in the New York Times Book Review , Carson “has been cutting a large swath, inciting both envy and admiration.” Carson has gained both critical accolades and a wide readership over the course of her “unclassifiable” publishing career. In addition to her many highly-regarded translations of classical writers such as Sappho and Euripides, and her triptych rendering of An Oresteia (2009), she has published poems, essays, libretti, prose criticism, and verse novels that often cross genres. Known for her supreme erudition—Merkin called her “one of the great pasticheurs”—her poetry can also be heart-breaking and she regularly writes on love, desire, sexual longing and despair. Always an ambitious poet whatever her topic or genre, Merkin wrote of Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband , “I don’t think there has been a book since Robert Lowell ’s Life Studies that has advanced the art of poetry quite as radically as Anne Carson is in the process of doing.” Carson’s recent collections include Nox (2010), Red Doc> (2013), and Float (2016). Her honors and awards are many, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin. She has also received the Lannan Literary Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Carson was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1950. A high-school encounter with a Latin instructor, who agreed to teach her ancient Greek over the lunch hour, led to her passionate embrace of classical and Hellenic literature, influences which mark her work still. Carson attended the University of Toronto, though she dropped out twice before earning her BA, MA and PhD in Classics. Carson has taught at many universities in both the US and Canada, including McGill and the University of Michigan. Her publishing career began with Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (1986) , which also established Carson’s style of patterning her writings after classical Greek literature. Such works as Glass, Irony, and God (1992), Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (1995) and Men in the Off Hours (2001) have helped seal the author’s reputation as unique among contemporary poets. But perhaps the most widely received examples of her particular specialty are Carson’s verse novels, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998) and The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001) . Autobiography of Red  (1998) takes its cue from the legend of Hercules—Herakles in the traditional spelling from the tale by Steischoros—whose tenth labor was to slay the red-winged monster Geryon. Recasting the story in modern time, Carson makes some significant choices. “In Steischoros, Herakles kills Geryon and steals his red cattle,” explained Adam Kirsch in New Republic. “In Carson, Herakles breaks Geryon’s heart and steals his innocence.” The two characters are introduced as teenagers, Geryon (still red and sporting wings) a sheltered, sensitive high-school boy and Herakles a sexy, rebellious roughneck. The two begin an affair that ends as “Herakles cannot match the soul-tearing totality of Geryon’s adoration,” as Chicago Review contributor Mark Halliday described it. Years later the two characters meet in Buenos Aires where Geryon falls into a destructive ménage a trois with Herakles and his new boyfriend, Ankash. The book drew strong reactions in several periodicals. Halliday felt that the book was “willfully whimsical and delightedly peculiar.” The Nation critic Bruce Hainley pronounced Carson “a philosopher of heartbreak” and said her epic-length poem made for “a brilliant book about desire, the ancient Greek poet Steischoros, volcanoes and the joyful brutalities of seeing and blindness” Echoing debates that continue to swirl around the Carson’s prose-like poetics, Kirsch wondered if Carson had indeed produced the verse promised in the book’s subtitle. “The writing is clearly prose,” he maintained, “laid out in alternating long and short lines, with no strictness of measure or rhythm; the division between a long line and a short one is typographical only, or at best syntactic.” Carson’s fable went on to earn nods from prize committees, though Autobiography of Red “did not start out a winner,” according to Time International reporter Katherine Govier. “Published to scant notice . . . it was mainly talked about by writers here and there. Talk became buzz when the book won Quebec’s QSPELL poetry award.” From there the volume went on to earn a National Book Critics Circle nomination, making the Canadian-born Carson one of the first two non-Americans to appear on the Circle’s short list. Such word-of-mouth echoes the reception of another Carson book, her early volume Eros the Bittersweet (1986). According to John D’Agata in the Boston Review, the book “first stunned the classics community as a work of Greek scholarship; then it stunned the nonfiction community as an inspired return to the lyrically based essays once produced by Seneca, Montaigne, and Emerson; and then, and only then, deep into the 1990s, reissued as “literature and redesigned for an entirely new audience, it finally stunned the poets.” D’Agata sees Carson’s earlier work as an essayist everywhere in her poetry, along with her deep absorption in Classical languages. Carson’s work, D’Agata alleges, asks one to consider “how prosaic, rhetorical, or argumentative can a poem be before it becomes something else altogether, before it reverts to prose, to essay?” Men in the Off Hours, a book of shorter poems which incorporate “epitaphs, love poems, verse-essays, commemorative prose, ‘shooting scripts’ for purported TV dramas and poems addressed to paintings,” noted Publishers Weekly writer Stephen Burt , was met with great acclaim. Reviewing the collection for Salon , Kate Moses described it as a meditation on time, noting too that it “encompasses all of that picnic that time spreads behind itself: life and sex and love and death.” It was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and that National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2001 Carson also published The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, a verse novel whose subject is “the waywardness of lust and the disaffection of the heart as seen through a marital breakup,” as Daphne Merkin wrote. It also received high praise and was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2000, Carson was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant

Since her success of 2001, Carson has gone on to publish a volume of “poetry, essays and opera,” Decreation (2005). Comprised of short lyrics, a screenplay, oratorio, and long prose sections that combine literary criticism with philosophical investigation, the book takes as its title and impetus an idea of the philosopher Simone Weil. As Carson explains, Weil’s notion of “decreation” is “an undoing of the creature in us—that creature enclosed in self and defined by self.” As Deryn Rees-Jones noted in the Independent , “in decreating we would, in our extinction of the self, find a metaphysical fullness, in tune with the universe.” Decreation received high praise from all quarters and Fiona Sampson , reviewing the book for the Guardian alleged that it “outlines one of the most idiosyncratic intelligences at work in contemporary literature,” and despite its genre-bending contents is “most of all…inimitable poetry.” Carson continues to be an important and exciting translator of classical writers. Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (2006) and An Oresteia (2009) both sparked critical debate. A shocking playwright in his time, Euripides reached his highest fame during the Peloponnesian War. Grief Lessons presents four of his lesser-known tragedies and offers “a kind of primer on the intrinsic dangers of blind devotion to ideology,” wrote Hilton Als in the New Yorker. A Publisher’s Weekly reviewer found that “Carson is nothing less than brilliant—unfalteringly sharp in diction, audacious and judicious in taking liberties.” Carson’s next translation, An Oresteia, is a composite of plays dealing with the fate of the house of Atreus and includes Agamemnon by Aeshcylus , Electra by Sophocles and Orestes by Euripides. The volume received somewhat mixed reviews for just those liberties; Brad Leithauser in the New York Times Book Review found Carson’s choice of diction irregular and often jarringly contemporary and “failed to find…in Carson’s translations a feeling of a composite whole. There are moments when her diction stoops so low I had trouble remembering I was dealing with men godlike in their splendor.” Emily Wilson , in the Nation, found that though Carson as a scholar is acutely aware of the differences between the three tragedians, she “does not entirely succeed in making them sound properly distinct from one another,” though Wilson described Carson’s translation as a “movement…away from the clear ideology of Aeschylus’ Oresteia toward the much more complex, ambiguous world of Euripides’ Orestes ,” which makes the work all the more important and “pertinent to the current political climate. “

Speaking to poet-critic Stephanie Burt, Carson admitted that at heart she considers herself a visual, not verbal, artist: “I didn’t write very much at all until I guess my twenties because I drew. I just drew pictures, and sometimes wrote on them when I was young, but mostly I was interested in drawing. I never did think of myself as a writer!” Even after several acclaimed volumes, “I don’t know that I do yet. I know that I have to make things. And it’s a convenient form we have in our culture, the book, in which you can make stuff, but it’s becoming less and less satisfying. And I’ve never felt that it exhausts any idea I’ve had.”

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The Glass Essay

Learn about this topic in these articles:, discussed in biography.

…but wildly expressive poem, “The Glass Essay,” in which the narrator, while visiting her mother, meditates on a relationship gone bad, on English novelist and poet Emily Brontë (whom she is reading), and on a variety of other interrelated topics. In Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998),…

Downloadable Content

13 Nudes: a stage adaptation of Anne Carson's The Glass Essay

• Masters Thesis
• Nara Reitta Dahlbacka
• Michelle Carter
• San Francisco
• Liberal & Creative Arts
• Creative Writing
• San Francisco State University
• AS36 2015 ENGCW .D345
• 2015-06-23T18:25:15Z
• http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/141474
• Copyright by Nara Reitta Dahlbacka, 2015

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The Glass Essay

27 pages • 54 minutes read

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The Different Meanings of Emily Brontë

Aside from adding to the themes of imprisonment, voices, and heartbreak, Emily Brontë functions as a symbol in “The Glass Essay.” Throughout the poem, Emily symbolizes companionship, fear, the speaker, and competition.

At the start of the poem, Emily symbolizes a friend. The speaker is going to visit her mother, who lives alone. For companionship, the speaker brings “a lot of books” (Line 15). The one book the speaker identifies is The Collected Works of Emily Brontë , while none of the other books are ever named. The Collected Works of Emily Brontë is special—the speaker has a rapport with Emily and speaks to her as if they are friends. “What meat is it, Emily, we need?” (Line 25) she asks her. At the start of the section “THREE,” the speaker portrays Emily as if she is no different from her or her mother, noting, “Three silent women at the kitchen table” (Line 26). It is as if Emily is alive and has joined the speaker at her mother’s house.

Related Titles

By Anne Carson

Autobiography Of Red

Red Doc>

Some Afternoons She Does Not Pick Up the Phone

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