ANNE CARSON
"My Religion"

My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.

When we see
how simple it would have been
we will thrash ourselves.

I had a vision
of all the people in the world
who are searching for God

massed in a room
on one side
of a partition

that looks
from the other side
(God’s side)

transparent
but we are blind.
Our gestures are blind.

Our blind gestures continue
for some time until finally
from somewhere

on the other side of the partition there we are
looking back at them.
It is far too late.

We see how brokenly
how warily
how ill

our blind gestures
parodied
what God really wanted

(some simple thing)
The thought of it
(this simple thing)

is like a creature
let loose in a room
and battering

to get out.
It batters my soul
with its rifle butt.

ANNE CARSON
“Town of the Sound of a Twig Breaking”

Their faces I thought were knives.
The way they pointed them at me.
And waited.
A hunter is someone who listens.
So hard to his prey it pulls the weapon.
Out of his hand and impales.
Itself.

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Anne Carson
WRONG NORMA

ANNE CARSON
"My Show"

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.

Hands, feet, vowels, hair, shadow, feelings of community,
strings (you do not see) all flat.
The epic model I guess I’ll

pass over. Homer likening stalemate in war to a carpenter’s
chalkline. My flat world cost only $2 to view
at first, later this price like others went up.

Brute natures and angles in transparent draperies all alike
enjoyed the show. Flowers fell
transparently off them as they entered my tent

where air was of course planar. In some other world they
could have stayed organized but something about me
cast their placards down (flat, yes):

Brechtian. See a flat rat escape that one-dimensional skull.
And then, and then, what whispers there.
Your agony, mine, in the fully consensual design

of this play of light—you crowd of missing ones,
return the ball to me! whispers, whispers and her voice
(she never arrives) froze on the knock.

Flat thunder, all my heart, you might use Brahms behind it.
Dull, whitish, deadly as a carpenter’s chalkline.
Not Beethoven—Beethoven I cannot flatten.

ANNE CARSON

“Town of the Sound of a Twig Breaking”

Their faces I thought were knives.
The way they pointed them at me.
And waited.
A hunter is someone who listens.
So hard to his prey it pulls the weapon.
Out of his hand and impales.
Itself.

COLM TÓIBÍN
Restlessness: A Syllabus

I am interested in texts that are pure voice or deal with difficult experience using a tone that does not offer relief or stop for comfort. Sometimes, the power in the text comes from powerlessness, whether personal or political. Sometimes, death is close or danger beckons or violence is threatened or enacted. Sometimes, there is a sense of real personal risk in the text’s revelations. Sometimes, there is little left to lose. All the time, the tone is incantatory or staccato or filled with melancholy recognitions.

• Euripides, Medea
• Sophocles, Electra
• Sophocles, Antigone
• Sylvia Plath, Ariel
• Louise Glück, The Wild Iris
• Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
• Juan Goytisolo, Forbidden Territory
• Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer
• Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
• Nadine Gordimer, The Late Bourgeois World
• Ingmar Bergman, Autumn Sonata
• John McGahern, The Barracks
• Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, The Turin Horse
• Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing
• J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron
• Béla Bartók, Bluebeard’s Castle
• Constance Debré, Love Me Tender

ANNE CARSON

"Her Beckett"

____________________

Going to visit my mother is like starting in on a piece by

                                                                                  Beckett.

   You know that sense of sinking through crust,

         the low black oh no of the little room

            with walls too close, so knowable.

Clink and slow fade of toys that belong in memory

   but wrongly appear here, vagrant and suffocated

         on a page of pain,

            Worse

         she says when I ask.

   And as in Beckett some high humor grazes

her eye—

         “we went out rowing on Lake Como”—

              not quite reaching the lip.

                  Our love, that half-mad firebrand,

         races once around the room

   whipping everything

and hides again.

ANNE CARSON
"Town of the Dragon Vein"

____________________

If you wake up too early listen for it.
A sort of inverted whistling the sound of sound.
Being withdrawn after all where?
Does all the sound in the world.
Come from day after day?
From mountains but.
They have to give it back.
At night just.
As your nightly dreams.
Are taps.
Open reversely.
In.
To.
Time.

ANNE CARSON - "My Religion"

My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.

When we see
how simple it would have been
we will thrash ourselves.

I had a vision
of all the people in the world
who are searching for God

massed in a room
on one side
of a partition

that looks
from the other side
(God’s side)

transparent
but we are blind.
Our gestures are blind.

Our blind gestures continue
for some time until finally
from somewhere

on the other side of the partition there we are
looking back at them.
It is far too late.

We see how brokenly
how warily
how ill

our blind gestures
parodied
what God really wanted

(some simple thing)
The thought of it
(this simple thing)

is like a creature
let loose in a room
and battering

to get out.
It batters my soul
with its rifle butt.

ANNE CARSON from “Short Talk On Who You Are”

I want to know who you are. People talk about a voice calling in the wilderness. All through the Old Testament a voice, which is not the voice of God but which knows what is on God’s mind, is crying out. While I am waiting, you could do me a favour. Who are you?

ANNE CARSON
“Town of the Sound of a Twig Breaking”

Their faces I thought were knives.
The way they pointed them at me.
And waited.
A hunter is someone who listens.
So hard to his prey it pulls the weapon.
Out of his hand and impales.
Itself.

ANNE CARSON

“Town of the Sound of a Twig Breaking”

Their faces I thought were knives.
The way they pointed them at me.
And waited.
A hunter is someone who listens.
So hard to his prey it pulls the weapon.
Out of his hand and impales.
Itself.

ANNE CARSON - "TV Men: Lazarus"

Repetition is horrible. Poor Lazarus cannot have known
he was an
imitation Christ,
but who can doubt he realized, soon after being ripped out of his
warm little bed in the ground,

his own epoch of repetition just beginning.
Lazarus Take 2!
Poor drop.
As a bit of salt falls back down the funnel. Or maybe my pity
is misplaced. Some people think Lazarus lucky,

like Samuel Beckett who calls him ‘Happy Larry’ or Rilke
who speaks of
that moment in a game
when 'the pure too-little flips over into the empty too-much.’
Anne Carson, from “TV Men: Lazarus”