poetry read:

25
The beauty of the husband a fictional essay in 29 tangos.

unlike antholgies and collected poems, or small lyrical excurusions, this was basically a novel, or a set of small essays, about the usual, husband/wife desire...the thing about it though, is that it managed carson's usual historicism with an incredibly nimble hand, based on keats, who wrote wonderfully, ideally about the beginning of a marriage, to talk about the end of a marriage, is a difficult and lovely trick, like the magician who pulls the table cloth and does not remove any dishes. she also has reticence, and great elegance, an elegance i admire immensely:

money, meetings, mistresses,
the birthplace of his parents,
the store where he bought shirts, the spelling of his own name
He lied when it was not necessary to lie.
He lied when it wasn't even convenient.
Ge lied when he knew they knew he was lying.

He lied when it broke their hearts.

i keep reading that in anne sexton's voice, except it does't seem autobiographical, every single line of sexton is broken and bleeding--we know that it is explcitly, clearly and deeply her.

we dont knwo that about carson, she uses her narrative skill as a dekeing manoveur, her knowledge of cattulus, of keats, her first and second and third hand greek, her parsing of texts and para texts as a way of being v. direct and v. cagey at the same time...and the indirectness sort of kills you.

here is sexton:
when you will burrow in arms and breasts
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair
and answer the call, the curious call.
She is so naked and singular
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.
As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.

all of those shes sound like self aggrandizement, and even the title of tango vii (and to call them tango's a highly ritualized violent and sexual perfomrance made theatrical and safe:

But to Honor Truth Which Is Smooth Divine and Lives AMong the Gods We Must (With Plato) Dance Lying Which Lives Down Below Amid the Mass of Men both Tragic and Rough... it sounds like stein almost, but also carson, it sounds v. modern and v. ancient--the lacuane and the elliptical knowledge contained with in,

so a good start.

(thnx to maggie for reminding me of the work, her grad essay was on anne carson)