People don’t swim the same way they used to. This may seem like a strange topic for conversation, but there was a time when sociologists found it fascinating. They said that the shifting rules for how a body propels itself in water tell us how societies govern our bodies and minds. Opening her latest collection of poetry and prose, Wrong Norma, with a piece about swimming, Anne Carson turns that insight in her own direction. Her longtime readers would expect nothing less. “1=1” is spoken by a woman who goes swimming twice. The first time, someone on the shore is walking a dog, which makes her feel anxious about how she looks swimming. The second time, she loses herself in the water. “Swimming has a stoniness, water being as different from air as stones,” she writes:
You find your way among its structures, its ancientness, its history as an entity without response to you and yet complicit in the intrusion. You have no personhood there and water is uninterested in itself…. There is no renunciation in this (cf. meditation), no striving to detach, all these things, all the things you can name, being simply gone. Meaning, gone.
The instructions for losing personhood here are simple: pay attention to what “is uninterested in itself.” Meditation empties the mind. Attention (Carson’s word) fills it with what’s before, under, and around it, with the world at hand. We love those moments when the tide of what we observe pulls us in, when anxiety (also Carson’s word) evaporates. So what exactly happens in those moments?
This question runs like a wave through Carson’s work. For her, anxiety grows out of self-consciousness, which is why elements like water are so tantalizing. They represent existence unbound by selfhood. Her writing often stages a shedding of consciousness through the discipline of “attention.” In almost every one of her collections you will find an instance of a subject becoming totally engrossed by something or someone else, the stranger the better. Carson will use different terms for the feeling that ensues (“thrill,” “sublimity,” “ecstasy,” “pain”), and all sorts of things bring it on (God, water, a bird). If you don’t possess this skill of self-forgetting attention, don’t worry, there are plenty of people who can train you. Socrates and the ancient Greek poet Sappho are Carson’s favorite role models, but a few modern filmmakers and authors also make the cut.
A writer cannot really erase herself from her writing. “To be a writer is to construct a big, loud, shiny center of self,” she admits, “and any claim to be intent on annihilating this self while still continuing to write and give voice to writing must involve the writer in some important acts of subterfuge.” Still, one can galvanize something like this loss of self in readers. Even in the act of writing about writing, Carson makes us forget ourselves, as she does in this poem from Decreation, published two decades ago:
First line has to make your brain race that’s how Homer does it,
that’s how Frank O’Hara does it, why
at such a pace
Muses
slam through the house—there goes one (fainting) up the rungs
of your strange BULLFIGHT, buttered
almost in a nearness
to skyblue
Thy pang—Pollock yourself!
Just to hang on to life is why
Here plosives bust up the rhythm like the Muses “slam through” the house. The brain races in the end, turning an insight about how poets work into a poem of the same kind. That’s what we expect from poetry, at least sometimes. “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” as Emily Dickinson writes, “I know that is poetry.”
When we lose ourselves in this way, though, don’t we risk losing sight of our obligation to the world around us? This is where Wrong Norma departs from Carson’s usual path. On the back cover, she catalogs the unrelated subjects that make up the collection: “Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night.” Most of these are business as usual for Carson, whose range is wide and eclectic. But global warfare, detention camps, and poverty haunt this collection in a way they do not haunt her previous work. They often show up in close proximity to acts of deep attention, like swimming. So what is the relationship between the immersive joy of swimming or reading poetry and the enormity of war, forced migration, or hunger? As the United States engages in proxy warfare in Europe and the Middle East, Carson asks us to revisit that question.
It may disappoint you to hear that, for her, poetry does not offer a straight answer. Shaking herself off from that meaningfully meaningless swim, the speaker of “1=1” turns on the television and sees images of suffering refugees fleeing a war zone. Poetry and philosophy, she decides, could never make sense of how her pleasure coexists with such misery. Yet they could be used to explain away ethical responsibility. “Sentences are strategic,” the speaker observes: “They let you off.” Wrong Norma is full of assertions like this one that limit poetry’s ability to create meaning out of violence. Elsewhere the sky—yes, the sky—is interviewing Godot, the character from Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play Waiting for Godot who never arrives. He goes by “Rusty.” When asked whether his absence bears witness to the age’s atrocities, Rusty answers, “Nope.”
But even if poetry is unable to make sense of war or suffering, Carson suggests that it can at least provide a kind of relief. The most compelling pieces in her new book live in the nexus between violence and the trance of a swimmer in water, but these can feel “wrong” in the sense that they seem to evade the pain of others by means of aesthetic epiphany. For example, there is the scene with Faisal, a Yemeni refugee petitioning a court for aid after losing family in a drone strike. Each event in the poem’s narrative is presented as a product of fate—the fate of the drive to the courthouse, the fate of the plaintiff’s attorney, the fate of the conversation afterward, then “[t]he fate of his smile, which seems to invite the soul, centuries ago, serving tea, let’s say, to guests. The moon above them. Joy.” Why is joy here? It strobes briefly and vanishes, while all those other fates remain. Or again, Carson writes about someone being whipped by home invaders and reflecting on the relationship between “sole” and “soul.” She writes about a woman who, while driving to visit her sick father, recalls a work of art someone told her about and momentarily forgets about her father. John Ashbery, “a personality disposed to careless joy in any situation,” entertains bad interview questions at ninety. Socrates, a drafted soldier, stands motionless in thought from dawn to dawn or wanders through a warzone unphased. Watching him induces
a wild feeling
like a heart attack, or like dancing—
those nights you dance as if in a trance
and glance in the mirror to find you’re in tears.
Each of these acts of attention generates something necessary but ephemeral—a bolt of empathy or bewildered admiration or distraction from physical or mental pain.
These hard swerves of thought define the collection and do not always place Carson’s characters—or her readers—in a very flattering light. The feeling they produce is bittersweet, a word that Carson often used in her early work to describe the pain and bewitching pleasure of love in classical literature. Many of the speakers in Wrong Norma are aware and a bit ashamed of their privileged safety. At the same time that Carson calls us to attention, she wants us to remember the awkwardness and confusion that arise out of encounters with “the scapegoat”—the unhoused, the stateless, the variously desperate who live at the mercy of circumstances beyond their own control. Poetry cannot, and should not, allow us to hide from such encounters.
Poverty closely parallels God in this collection. Carson has an affinity for mystics. When I once asked her why she revised her translation of Sappho’s celebrated poem “fragment 31” to include the elliptical final line “but even a person of poverty,” she replied that it was because she had become interested in the mystic Marguerite Porete, who was burned at the stake. Her essay on Sappho, Porete, and Simone Weil views poverty in a spiritual sense, as a renunciation of self that opens us up to a radically other God. In Carson’s earlier poetry, God is a power similarly signified but unseen:
Moonlight in the kitchen is a sign of God.
The kind of sadness that is a black suction pipe extracting you
from your own navel and which the Buddhists call
“no mindcover” is a sign of God.
The blind alleys that run alongside human conversation
like lashes are a sign of God.
When asked more recently what her idea of God is, Carson replied, “I don’t have an idea of it anymore at all.” She does not look to “sacred oaks” for answers now, but to “Eddy,” an attorney who defends Guantánamo detainees. Poverty is poverty. Moonlight is moonlight. Wrong Norma makes us feel the gravity of both.
Wrong Norma
Anne Carson
New Directions
$17.95 | 192 pp.
