The Brooklyn Rail

It’s almost a punchline at this point: every writer is a little in love with and a little afraid of Anne Carson. Perhaps less with Carson herself (who is famously private, and allergic to the spotlight) and more with what she gets away with: living an unquestioned life of the mind on the page. This wide, catholic span of writing, on anything and everything that piques her interest, has earned her an unusually broad fandom for someone writing on subjects often deemed dusty or intellectually intimidating.

For example: do you love experimentally pointed retellings of stories from classic Greek mythology and literature, sometimes peppered with otherworldly drawings and ancient mourning cries? Then you’re probably a fan of Autobiography of Red, Grief Lessons, or H of H Playbook. Or do you adore difficult poetry surrounding questions of gender dynamics, relationships, and grief? You may be a fan of The Beauty of the Husband, or of Nox. Then there are the readers who appreciate that her original, blazingly intellectual, and utterly uncategorizable body of work ranges from poetry on Emily Brontë to essays on the weather in Iceland to text on opera and desire. 

Reading Carson’s work is often an uncanny experience; we begin to feel that we are reading a brilliant extraterrestrial’s notebook of observations on humanity, and we wriggle a bit under examination. But then she disarms us by dropping in small, often wry mentions of her own personal griefs and struggles, avoiding any hint of the overwrought, instead achieving a kind of holy reserve: cathedral emotions. 

Happily for all her fans, her new book, Wrong Norma, is a collection with a little bit of everything. Greek mythology references abound, Carson the relationship detective is in residence here, and the sheer variety of subject matter could fill a book-length index of its own. As Carson herself writes of the collection: “the pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong.’” 

In one of the early poems in the collection, Carson writes that “the limits of human wisdom remain.” And perhaps if Wrong Norma is concerned with anything thematically, it is concerned with the limits of human wisdom. But if wisdom remains capped, intellectual curiosity is free-roaming and boundless. An essay that starts with snow soon detours into First Corinthians, the death of Carson’s mother, and the origins of the word “idea.” A short story combines the playfully outlandish vibe of Calvino’s Cosmicomics with transmutation, the Enlightenment, a very funny parody of a journalistic interview, and conversations with Christopher Hitchens and Virginia Woolf. (I hesitate to say in a piece of purportedly serious criticism that “you just have to read it,” but, you just have to read it.) Throughout the book we have ample evidence that Carson’s fascinations—relationships, the Greeks, particularly Herakles (always), weather, etymology, intellectual history, her mother—still drive her writing in wild, unpredictable directions. 

In Wrong Norma, Carson continues to wrestle with considerations of memory and how it weighs on us. Her quoting of John Cage in “Lecture on the History of Skywriting:” “Something has to be done to get us free of our memories,” echoes an oft-quoted line from her Glass, Irony, and God: “You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold on to all of that? And I said, Where can I put it down?”  She struggles with the idea of grief in memory throughout Wrong Norma, writing, “What do answers answer anyway. They fit onto questions like a stocking onto a leg but the blood stains still refuse to evaporate.”

Translation fans get a wild little number called “Oh What a Night.” It’s a signature postmodern Carson translation, this time of Alkibiades’s speech from Plato’s Symposium. Carson On the Yearning, Absurd Nature of Relationships fans get much to love here, including “Getaway,” an essay about her mother’s death, and the lines, “She is reading only books written by people named Margaret so as to feel close to her mother. Not too close.” We even get Carson’s collage method here, both in small clippings throughout the book and also a full collage essay on the time Paul Celan visited Heidegger in the mountains and wrote a poem about it. The destabilization of the contrast between Celan’s deep admiration for Heidegger’s intellectual ideas and his deep revulsion for the philosopher’s silence on the Nazis is illustrated by the juxtaposition of bright, childlike pictures and plain, typed text of the kind found in a newspaper. Carson has created almost a horror story here out of a famous but unknowable historic meeting. 

But it is rarely all heavy with Carson, and certainly not here, where humorous pieces and clever lines disarm us throughout the collection. A conversation between ex-lovers, “What I Like About You Baby” made me laugh several times before dropping the line “then he lifts his gun and shoots her in the heart” on me like a piano. On Freud: “In old age, he looked like a shrunken monkey, according to Engel.” And in a translated letter from Socrates to Krito: “My life is guys, you know that! Guys and drinking.” (Anyone who bristles at the new generation of classical translations by women has clearly never read any translation by Carson.)

Ultimately, though, it is the singular sense of originality that makes reading Anne Carson’s books such a pleasure, and Wrong Norma follows that formula—or rather, that lack of formula. Reading it feels like a madcap chase through the backlot of a golden era film studio, each piece with its own period, its own pace, its own marvelous parlor trick. Despite her assertions, nothing here feels wrong—every poem, every essay, every story feels intentional and new and right. We know we are back in good hands, sketching some new view we’d never considered before. No, Carson isn’t coddling us, but she’ll forever show us a weird time. As she writes in “Thret,” “May the cat eat you, and the devil eat the cat.”