Brij Nath Pandit Watloo Betab
Hailed as ‘a Classicist for blending classical forms with the modern trends’, Anne Carson’s poetry is credited for ‘Creating new forms for contemporary literature”. She achieved this by blending tradition and modern thought, defied notions and styles.
Anne Carson, the 1950 born Canadian academician, poet and translator, is a citizen of Iceland since 2022. Today she is the 2026 Nobel Prize winner for literature. she wrote and experimented in all genre, prose, poetry, autobiography and explored everything concerning the Humans,Psychology, Emotions, Relations Desires and Urges.
She learned ancient Greek during her school days and after securing a PhD from the University of Toronto, exploring the themes of desire and philosophy, Anne Carson became a professor of classics and taught comparative literature and creative writing at many of the American Universities.She wrote about two dozen books that include translations of some ancient Greek tragedies and few collections of her prose and poetry.
Carson is married, a second time, to Robert Currie, a Canadian visual artist whom Carson calls “ Collaborator-husband person” and to whom she credits for ‘ helping shape the visual presentation of some of her most unconventional books and literary project’.
In her childhood , she had a passion for drawing images. In her poetry also we can see images, not just words or lines.
I like being with you all night with closed eyes
What luck- here you are
coming
along the stars
I did a road trip
All over my mind and heart
And
There you were
Kneeling by the roadside
With your little tool kit
Fixing something.
This poem depicts the intense desire of being in the arms of one’s beloved.Love, that is about feeling someone there even in the dark, or with eyes closed. It’s an ecstasy that is “small and sad – not loud, not happy like in movies.
In such a love, both the heart and the mind are synchronized with such intensity that the lover goes searching everywhere inside himself/ herself – all over one’s thoughts and feelings – like a long drive. And in the middle of nowhere, there is the lover, ‘kneeling by the roadside with a little toolkit, fixing something’… maybe the poet, the beloved.
In, the context of Indian tradition, literature and poetry this is what Mira said expressing her complete merger with Lord Krishna.
Mere To Girdhar Gopal Doosro Na Koi. ( I only belong to Gopala, who lifted the mount Govardhan).We could also quote the famous rendering by the 14th century mystic Hazrat Amir Khosrow says, ‘ Chhap Tilak Sab Chheen Li Re, Mose Nainaa Milaaike….’
( My spiritual master, Murshid, completely stripped away my worldly identity with one glance….)
So, for Carson, the poet ( Beloved) is finding someone quietly fixing the broken roads inside her, and realizing she can’t go back to who she was before the lover met the beloved. And when the merger takes place, destruction of the individual, the re-construction has to be there to culminate the process.
And here comes the catch line, “Give me a world, you have taken the world I was”. The beloved says, : “You took my world. Now give me a new one.” And this is what exactly Lord Krishna himself said, “ Devotion becomes identity and the individual soul merges with the divine”.
It’s love as total destruction and total rebuilding. You lose yourself, and you need the other person to give you a new self to live in.
Like Mira did.“Shyam piya mori rang de chunariya”
( Oh my dark colour beloved, please colour my veil / my soul)
“Laal na rangaun main, hari na rangaun, Apne hi rang mein rang de chunariya”
(I don’t want to dye it red; I don’t want green, dye it in your own colour).
Traveling through life, each one of us goes through certain experiences that change our concepts about certain aspects of life. One faces the harsh reality.
Anne Carson also went through one such experience, a separation .
I had made a mistake.
Before this day.
Now my suitcase is ready.
Two hardboiled eggs.
For the journey are stored.
In the places where.
My eyes were.
How could it be otherwise?
Like a current.
Carrying a twig.
The sobbing made me.
Audible to you.
Carson is hesitant and does not talk much about her personal life, but a poet in her can no longer suppress the emotions. She is saddened but she does not blame the fate. She accepts that she herself made a mistake. That is realization.
And when she prepares to leave, she does not claim any share from the physical belongings. She just has two boiled eggs for the journey, backwards. And she has cried so much that her eyes seem to be not only dried, but hallowed to the extent that eggs can be stored there. This is extreme pain.
“The sobbing made me. Audible to you.”
This is the final punch.
Before, she was invisible to him, he didn’t hear her, didn’t see her. Only when she breaks down and sobs, does she finally become audible, become real to the other person. This means it is the pain that makes us heard.
It’s a poem about how humiliating physical leaving for someone really is .Anne Carson’s depiction of grief in her poems is very intense.
There is another poem of her that depicts pain and suffering.The poem opens with striking imagery of freezing daffodils in April snow and a tense food store queue, grounding the tragedy in real-world isolation and loss.
Freezing daffodils nod against April snow
Long queue at the food store
Brilliant deaths cut the day
Hal was only 64
He had sung kaddish for someone
else not long ago and no one expected –
even the lark does not see the Open,
someone said in another time.
The imagery of a frozen daffodil during the onset of Spring is very scary. Then the poet describes the scenes of hoarding of essentials, as moving out would not be possible In the coming days. Death can never be brilliant. But when it snatches away a brilliant person, it becomes brilliant. That is oxymoron, an ironic figure of speech use by the poetess to provoke a thought-provoking effect.
The poem reminds that while we may sing kaddish, a Jewish prayer for someone dead, praying and praising God, and think that ‘he has gone, not me’, but that is not the reality. Tomorrow someone else is bound to mourn my death. That is the cycle of life.
Carson’s poetry is not only about human suffering, misery and death. She believes that God has made human being like a sieve.
It was a November night of wind.
Leaves tore past the window.
God had the book of life open at PLEASURE
and was holding the pages down in one hand
because of the wind from the door.
For I made their flesh as a sieve
Wrote God at the top of the page
And then listed in order.
Alcohol
Blood
Gratitude
Memory
Semen
Song
Tears
Time.
The poem is too philosophical. Anything that is pleasure for the body is temporary. It shall ooze out. But its background is the religious concept wherein the Book of Life is described as ‘a heavenly record of those who inherit eternal salvation’. Thus, the poem says that when the God opened the book and found the page of Pleasure, he wrote what the poet describes as “ Liquids that come out of the body”.
This is not totally out of sync with our traditional Indian thought. While we believe that the body is a temple, where the Lord resides, emphasis is always laid on keeping the body ‘ clean and pure’.
Ablution, Vazu, in Islam, before prayers or before recitation of the Holy Quran, signifies physical and spiritual purification.
Brahmacharya, meaning “ Conduct consistent with Brahman, divine reality’, is one school of thought . This means mastery over the senses. And this is what Laleshwari or Lal Ded, the 13th Century Shaivite mystic from Kashmir preaches when she says ,”
Kya karh pancstsan dahan te kahaan, Vakshun yeth leji yim karith gay…
How do I handle the five elements, ten Senses and the mind. She explains that by not working in harmony, and without the control , they simply drain the “ Pot”, the body of its divine purpose.
Anne Carson says that a human (Body) finds pleasure in those things which are not true pleasures. Their pleasure is momentary. This type of pleasure drains out of the body.
Recently Indian ascetic and spiritual Guru, Premanand Maharaj, based in Vrindavan, Uttar Pradesh, in a talk said the same thing. In mundane explanation, he said humans find pleasure in sex. And sex parts are the dirtiest points , as the entire dirt of the body comes out from there. Since his talk was on spiritualism, he did not touch the philosophical angle. Anne Carson has given this thought a modern outlook by using words like alcohol and memory, without touching upon logic and rationalism. Her craft is realistic , realism with artistic authenticity.
Carson says, “A poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page” . This means that a poem is a process. The words that describe the thought are the outcome of a process. Kashmir Shaivism elaborates this in the form of a Vac or Shabda. And Vac is the creative energy of the Creator , Shiva. Vac has four stages, Para being the highest. Para is the Divine awareness , (The transcendent level). The second one is Pashyanti. Here the intention starts to take shape in the, before it appears. Madhyama is the third stage where inner thoughts appear, the center is the human brain. And finally, it is the Vaikhuri, meaning ‘ gross audible level’. This is what we hear and share.
So, in the above poem, it is the complete process where the action of the mind is involved with the creative outcome of an individual experience. The experience that moves from individualism to the universality. A full circle from blood ( Birth ) to time ( death). And as Pleasures are not solid, the God holds the book pages down. A notable thing is that there is an alphabetical order in mentioning the liquids. This implies that one follows the other , a vicious circle.
And with regard to the body, or in continuation of the above poem, Anne Carson has a feminist view also.
It’s good to be a neuter
I want to have meaningless legs,
There are things unbearable
One can evade them a long time
Then you die.
The ocean reminds me
Of your green room
There are things unbearable
Scorn, princes, this little size
Of dying.
Neuter, in Latin /Greek is neither masculine nor feminine . And the poet says it is better to be a neuter as that helps to escape the erotic gaze. Meaningless legs indicate the poet’s desire to be pure, where the body is not an object of pleasure. It is perishable. ‘ Then you die’. So, the pleasure, even if it is present, is not everlasting. And the question is do we need pleasure to evade death. Death that is inevitable. The poetess reduces dying to a small size. Because Love is greater in size, greater than an empire, a Roman concept.
Greek mythology is evident in many of her poems.
When someone gazes on her, she feels the gaze is like a knife.
There 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.
In Greek mythology Goddess Artemis, uses faintest sounds to aim at her prey. But she also would protect the pregnant animals, simply understanding them through sounds of their movement. This is being in sync with the nature. Self-awareness.
In Indian mythology, Lord Rama’s father King Dasharatha accidentally killed Shravan Kumar with an arrow while hunting in the forest, when Shravan Kumar was filling a pot with water for his blind parents and King Dasharatha listening to the bubble sound thought that an animal is drinking water. A bad Judgement.
In our own context, the poet says that if you have to kill, your prey, the enemy, the ego, listen to the inner voice and do not make a wrong judgement. Before the hunter hunts you down, kill yourself. This in terms of Shaivite thought is self-realization.
Poetry is emotions and the craft of drawing those emotions on paper using a pen as brush and ink as paint. It is difficult to completely peek into another person’s mind, sane a poet, to realize what the poet conveys.
May be at some point , even Anne Carson also realizes the limitations of a human mind. My personal poetry is a failure.
I do not want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.
Lover to lover
the greenness of love
Cool, cooling.
Earth bears no such plant.
Who does not end up
a female impersonator?
Drink all the sex there is.
Still die.
Here the word poetry is not about her poems, but it denotes her persona. What we pretend to be is someone masked. It is the outer appearance. She wants to destroy the visible persona and be simply a lover. A lover that passes the greenness of love. A Roman love elegy.
One has to be unbearable in love. Not just exist to vanish. And in order to be loved, one must perform being a female. It doesn’t matter if he/she is biologically male or female.
Here I am reminded of the traditional Kashmiri poetry. In almost all the romantic poetry, up to early twentieth century, each of the male Kashmiri poets, while writing poetry, wrote as if he was a female. My understanding was that this was due to the impact of the devotional poetry of Radha Rani and Mira Bhai, the two prominent and major contributors of the fifteenth century Bhakti movement, the movement of Loving Devotion to God, that started in the South in the seventh India and reached its pinnacle in the fifteenth century in northern India. Carson lends a new meaning to this. .
Brij Nath Beetab is a well-known Kashmiri poet and former broadcaster.
