If you were to dissect writing,
like a mechanic hobbyist breaks down a small engine and then rebuilds it, whose
writing would you study in order to replicate it.
That’s easy. Anne Carson’s.
Consider the poem, “Clive Song,”
in the current New Yorker (Aug. 7-14).
What rises from these pages is a
curious, searching mind rooted in a classical Western knowledge that limns the
lines but doesn't overwhelm them.
There is none of the preening
showman, the author first. Rather Anne Carson is in service of the story, of
the feeling, of the insight, who then backs away like the director whose signal
act in the debut curtain is to lift up the scrim and let the gift of her
inspired skill speak for itself.
On a related note, Karl Ove
Knausgaard knows he is a pompous ass. Or at least at times he does in his pages
– and that is enough. When the preening is done, the cloud cover that is the
dark sins of the father he carries in his breast cannot be so far behind. My struggle, indeed.
Yes, doubt cripples. In more ways than our wee minds can ever know.
Next: Running for Your Life: The Letter Campaign
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