By Annie Guthrie

 

Annie Guthrie: Hannah, you're leading this month’s book club on Anne Carson’s Plainwater. Was this Carson’s first recognized work? I think Eros the Bittersweet came out first. What do you know about this book? 

Hannah Ensor: Eros was first, yes, and is a version of her doctoral dissertation. Eros; then Glass, Irony, and God; then Plainwater. The “Short Talks,” which are in Plainwater, were first published separately by Brick Books in this long and skinny version that I bought in a bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but doesn’t seem to be around in bookstores now. (I think you can buy it online, and I know you can find it at the Poetry Center.) (Update: Yes! It’s being reissued in 2015.) That version has a single line-drawing in it, plus the painted cover, all of which is faithful to the thing that she has said about the “Short Talks” first being a set of drawings, then drawings with titles, then “expanded” titles, then she got rid of the drawings because people seemed more interested in the text. Look at the description for the cover art for that book: “Photograph by Patrick Dowdey of a painting by Anne Carson containing an inset photograph of New York City from a now lost postcard.”

Annie: Why did you want to volunteer to try and hold this book up for us—this particular book—what’s your relationship to it?

Hannah: The Short Talks book—the slim one in which those talks are published alone—is the first Anne Carson book I bought. I’m obsessed with the introduction and return often to what she says there. I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough. I’ll admit here that my copy of Plainwater isn’t actually mine, it’s my dad’s, and it has his initials on the inside cover (I’ve had it in my possession for at least seven years, how terrible of me) (thanks, Dad!). And gathering more associations, when I met my first girlfriend, she was in the process of memorizing one of the Short Talks. Now when I go to the talks again, that one still gets to be hers (especially the first few lines, which I heard over and over again, and now I’m repeatedly re-surprised by the last few lines, which I barely remember ever hearing). A third association is that when I was trying to dual-learn how to be a poet and how to be a teacher, a friend I admired (as both) talked about how fun it was to teach “Short Talks” to high schoolers, that they saw a path to writing for themselves through these little paragraphs. That was true for me, too. So maybe my allegiances, or at least the first few of many allegiances, are to Short Talks/”Short Talks”, which is only Part II of V in this Plainwater book. And that’s something that I love about Plainwater: how many different worlds/things/beings/books it is all at once. When I mentioned to a friend I’d be leading this book club, she said, “Oh, Plainwater! It’s the best travelogue of all time.” My brain stuttered for a second, couldn’t fit this sentence in, because when I think of Plainwater I don’t first think of The Anthropology of Water (which is an absolute force, full of questions that will change your breath or your thought patterns or your attitude toward what we’re allowed to wonder about; in some ways it is the core of the book though it comes last; is definitely an amazing travelogue). When I think of the book I think first of Short Talks (Part II) for aforementioned reasons, Canicula di Anna (Part III) for reasons that I won’t get into here (this, a reminder of how much we have to talk about in book club). None of this is about favoritism or even preference, though yes about allegiance and association. One person’s “I love how she inhabits 15^th century art-talking” is another’s “Oh, how she writes travel,” is another’s, “That thing she says about trout, though.” This book, which is to many minds many things, also manages to be one thing, and about that alone we could talk and wonder for hours (in fact, I look forward to you all helping me figure out what one thing that thing is).

Annie: I remember when this book came out; Carson’s cinematic essays and travelogues, her “heretic form of poetry” [1] made scales fall off our collective eyes. How do you think people who are unfamiliar with Anne Carson will find this book now, almost 20 years after its release?   

Hannah: Well it’s funny, coming back to this book now. Plainwater is as much a “heretic form of poetry” in 2014 as in 1995; it’s a mind-blower, a game-changer, all those other phrases one can use about a really good book, especially the ones that don’t concern themselves with what other books have done already. I imagine for readers new to her work it’ll be startling and bright, a work that brings us to a big shudder—and also, for readers who have been following the work she’s done in the world in the last ten to fifteen years, Plainwater feels ahead of a moment that isn’t ours. Like how The Jetsons (1962!) can seem futuristic to us, forward-thinking, even now, but isn’t our current idea of the future (or is it?). So let me say again that this Plainwater book is wholly startling and bright and its brilliance exceeds us, even on 8^th or 9^th or 25^th reading—and there is also something “sorted” about it in ways that her later work doesn’t. There are moments, reading Plainwater, when I get the sense that this author sat down to write a “poem” or to write an “essay” and that’s what came out. Really amazing and, yes, heretic, varieties of “poem” and “essay,” but still: poem, essay. I find this interesting. Rare and exciting, given what she has gone on to do. An analogue could be that one time I went to that exhibit of Picasso’s earliest still lifes and was stunned, how could anyone have ever seen an orange that well.

Annie: What is Book Club, anyway? Who comes? How many people come? Do people share, talk, what? Explain! Describe!

Hannah: I’m excited to talk about this book that vexes and pokes at us. I’ll ask some questions, and you all (whether “you all” is you-five or you-thirty) probably will too. I’d love it if we could take turns reading parts of it aloud together. Whoever’s in this room will guide where we go together in the process of getting into this magical, odd, bright book. I’m of the opinion that the process of reading Anne Carson lets us all be her for a second or two, in a kind of sublime and flickering way, try that skin on and feel whether or not it fits (it won’t, but how does and doesn’t, what stretches what seams, etc.). I can’t read her without (e.g.) dropping commas in my thought-patterns as much as in my writing. But there are people who believe that this is what all good immersive reading does: inhabitation, trying on. In my reading-body, though, there’s something specific about this one author’s work, though: maybe that’s one thing this book club will look at closer: what that quality is about this book or this author, if we can find it, if you agree (and if you don’t).

Annie: “What are we doing here, and why are our hearts invisible. [2]

Hannah: I was recently startled to realize it had been a little while since I’d checked in on my heart, just even to say, hey, what’s going on, little buddy? We get “busy.” What are we doing here? Why are our hearts invisible? Anne asks the best questions, all I can do is repeat them. Maybe we can start there on the 20^th.

 

Photo of Anne Carson by Graeme Mitchell.