Tuesday, April 1, 2014

national poetry month, day one: anne carson

Short Talk On Walking Backwards

My mother forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.


Short Talk On Reading

Some fathers hate to read but love to take the family on trips. Some children hate trips but love to read. Funny how often these find themselves passengers in the same automobile. I glimpsed the stupendous clear-cut shoulders of the Rockies from between paragraphs of Madam Bovary. Cloud shadows roved languidly across her huge rock throat, traced her fir flanks. Since those days, I do not look at hair on female flesh without thinking, Deciduous? 


Short Talk On The Youth At Night

The youth at night would have himself driven around the scream. It lay in the middle of the city gazing back at him with its heat and rosepools of flesh. Terrific lava shone on his soul. He would ride and stare.


Short Talk On the Truth To Be Had From Dreams

Seized by a sudden truth I started up at 4 a.m. The word grip pronounced ‘gripe’ is applied only to towns, cities and inhabitations; the word gripe pronounced ‘grip’ can be used of human beings. In my dream I saw the two parts of this truth connected by a three-mile long rope of women’s hair. And just at the moment all the questions of male and female soul murder, which were to be answered as soon as I pulled on the rope, broke away and fell in a chunk back down the rocky chasm where I had been asleep. We are the half and half again, we are the language stump.


Short Talk On The Sensation Of Aeroplane Takeoff

Well you know I wonder, it could be love running towards my life with its arms up yelling let's buy it what a bargain!


Carson, Anne. "The Moment" Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets. Queyras, Sina, ed. New York: Persea Books, 2005. 64-9.

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