Posts Tagged ‘ Anne Carson ’
Room in the Brooklyn
This
slow
day
moves
Along the room
I
hear
its
axles
go
A gradual dazzle
upon
the
ceiling
Gives me
that
racy
bluishyellow
feeling
As hours
blow
the
wide
way
Down my afternoon.
Let us not say time past was long, for we shall not find it.
It is no more. But let us say
time present was long,
because when it was present it was long.
da Men in the off hours –
Anne Carson
What a stupendous pairing!! Thanks, to dmf.
As I was interviewing the classicist, poet, and author Anne Carson in June, 2017 via e-mail about her new translation of The Bakkhai, the question-and-answer process felt like a consultation with the ancient Pythia. Much like an ancient Greek attempting to get an answer from the priestess of Apollo, I had to go through a few layers — book publicist and agent—and the answers I received back can best be described as intriguing and esoteric; they varied in length from a few words to a paragraph to no response at all. Every reply was also written in all lower case, including the first-person singular “i,” an idiosyncrasy that seemed almost playful, and is something I usually see in the prose or text messages of a student or a younger person. Like a Greek hearing those ambiguous missives given by the Pythia, I was repeatedly surprised by the puzzling, thought-provoking answers I received.
“Lucas de Lima’s stunning book affected me so profoundly at all the stages of reading it, encountering it—before it was a book and afterwards, when it was. In the work of this extraordinary writer, the fragment is not an activity of form. It’s an activity of evisceration.” — Bhanu Kapil