Customer Reviews

Men in the Off Hours

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Susan Sontag, one of the foremost thinkers and writers of today, says of Anne Carson: "[Anne Carson] is one of the few writers in English that I would read anything she wrote." Such regard for Carson is justified. One of the premiere poets today re-inventing and rediscovering language to meet our present demands of articulation, in the true post-modernist fashion, Carson has come up recently with a collection called, Men in the Off Hours, finalist to the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Men in the Off Hours contains poems and prose pieces that lay the groundwork for various intersections of opposites: past and the present, the classic and the modern, cinema and print, narrative and verse. Here we can find the paintings of Edward Hopper turned into poems as footnoted by St. Augustine's words in the Confession, Thucydides and Virginia Woolf conversing about war, and a host of other characters summoned in the forefront of contemporary image-making: Sappho, Artaud, Tolstoy, Lazarus, Antigone, Akhmatova. They can be found in the chain of poems titled "TV Men" which re-images and re-imagines the lives of these personages, how they correspond to the contemporary definitions of the gaze, as shaped and articulated by woman-as-director, woman-as-creator.
One of the best poems in the collection is "Essay on What I Think about Most" where Carson exalts the element of mistake, both in art and in our lives. It then makes a literary exegesis of a fragment poem written by Alkman, a 7th century B.C. Spartan poet, of how it masterfully harnesses the conceit of the mistake, and is interspersed with quotes by Aristotle. The persona declares: "The fact of the matter for humans is imperfection."
"Irony is not Enough: Essay on my Life as Catherine Deneuve," on the other hand, is composed of a series of prose poems that narrativizes the days of Catherine Deneuve. Here Carson imagines herself as Deneuve, somewhere in a room in an academy in France, lecturing about Socrates and Sappho, catching all the knowing gazes by one of her female students, as the snow outside her window drives through everything like rain. The prose poems are short and episodic, almost breathless, representing the smallness of Daneuve's life, and the frailty of relationships, against a backdrop of a long, bitter winter.
Carson is at best intellectual and scholarly in this collection. Her far-reaching vocabulary touches various human endeavors like myth, archaeology, science, history. Because of this pre-occupation with facts and quotes, Carson has debunked the lyric, freeing words from imposed musicality that poetry is almost always made to assume. Her poems are minefields, nuclear antechambers, blackholes. They are reckless, energetic, centrifugal. This attitude of Carson problematizes the poem as insular and solitary, breaking up its gates to the gift of intertext, where meaning yields to multiplicity.
Told in such exquisite and piercing language, her long essay (complete with an annotated bibliography), "Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity," meanwhile interprets classical configurations of the woman body's and its supposed vulnerability for defilement. She calls forth thinkers from various epochs who have shaped and structured the constructs with which we define one another as members of the human tribe. She then launches into an analysis of the motivation behind ancient weddings and a fragment poem by Sappho, things that speak well of the kind of boundaries we have put up as a defense from one another, as how Carson puts it: "As members of human society, perhaps the most difficult task we face daily is that of touching one another-whether the touch is physical, moral, emotional or imaginary. Contact is crisis."
Men in the Off Hours culminates with an essay Carson has written for her newly departed mother titled, "Appendix to Ordinary Time." Carson proves that she is indeed a "poet of the heartbreak," as she remembers the simple gestures of her mother when she was still here, articulating the loneliness attendant to the experience of grief, and how she found solace and comfort from the diary entries of Virginia Woolf during her last days. She grieves: "Did she think of me-somewhere in some city, in lamplight, bending over books, or rising to put on my coat and go out? Did I pause, switch off the desklamp and stand, gazing out at the dusk, think I might call her. Not calling. Calling. Too late now..."
Carson is one of the first writers to conquer the frontiers of the 21st century poetry, the first to be able to storm through the paltry and outdated definitions of language and language-making. Here is a poet who is courageous, intelligent, and fierce but at the same time tender and forgiving toward the kind of passages we undertake, solitary or communal. She always reminds us that the love for imperfection is valid and that we are irredeemable from transience, but guides us though the maze of fear evoked by these truths, if only to discover the joy and surprise that come from being here, the ordinary time we seek to mark.
Carson's opus can well be summarized in the epitaph she used for her mother:
such
abandon
ment
such
rapture

Susan Sontag, one of the foremost thinkers and writers of today, says of Anne Carson: "[Anne Carson] is one of the few writers in English that I would read anything she wrote." Such regard for Carson is justified. One of the premiere poets today re-inventing and rediscovering language to meet our present demands of articulation, in the true post-modernist fashion, Carson has come up recently with a collection called, Men in the Off Hours, finalist to the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Men in the Off Hours contains poems and prose pieces that lay the groundwork for various intersections of opposites: past and the present, the classic and the modern, cinema and print, narrative and verse. Here we can find the paintings of Edward Hopper turned into poems as footnoted by St. Augustine's words in the Confession, Thucydides and Virginia Woolf conversing about war, and a host of other characters summoned in the forefront of contemporary image-making: Sappho, Artaud, Tolstoy, Lazarus, Antigone, Akhmatova. They can be found in the chain of poems titled "TV Men" which re-images and re-imagines the lives of these personages, how they correspond to the contemporary definitions of the gaze, as shaped and articulated by woman-as-director, woman-as-creator.
One of the best poems in the collection is "Essay on What I Think about Most" where Carson exalts the element of mistake, both in art and in our lives. It then makes a literary exegesis of a fragment poem written by Alkman, a 7th century B.C. Spartan poet, of how it masterfully harnesses the conceit of the mistake, and is interspersed with quotes by Aristotle. The persona declares: "The fact of the matter for humans is imperfection."
"Irony is not Enough: Essay on my Life as Catherine Deneuve," on the other hand, is composed of a series of prose poems that narrativizes the days of Catherine Deneuve. Here Carson imagines herself as Deneuve, somewhere in a room in an academy in France, lecturing about Socrates and Sappho, catching all the knowing gazes by one of her female students, as the snow outside her window drives through everything like rain. The prose poems are short and episodic, almost breathless, representing the smallness of Daneuve's life, and the frailty of relationships, against a backdrop of a long, bitter winter.
Carson is at best intellectual and scholarly in this collection. Her far-reaching vocabulary touches various human endeavors like myth, archaeology, science, history. Because of this pre-occupation with facts and quotes, Carson has debunked the lyric, freeing words from imposed musicality that poetry is almost always made to assume. Her poems are minefields, nuclear antechambers, blackholes. They are reckless, energetic, centrifugal. This attitude of Carson problematizes the poem as insular and solitary, breaking up its gates to the gift of intertext, where meaning yields to multiplicity.
Told in such exquisite and piercing language, her long essay (complete with an annotated bibliography), "Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity," meanwhile interprets classical configurations of the woman body's and its supposed vulnerability for defilement. She calls forth thinkers from various epochs who have shaped and structured the constructs with which we define one another as members of the human tribe. She then launches into an analysis of the motivation behind ancient weddings and a fragment poem by Sappho, things that speak well of the kind of boundaries we have put up as a defense from one another, as how Carson puts it: "As members of human society, perhaps the most difficult task we face daily is that of touching one another-whether the touch is physical, moral, emotional or imaginary. Contact is crisis."
Men in the Off Hours culminates with an essay Carson has written for her newly departed mother titled, "Appendix to Ordinary Time." Carson proves that she is indeed a "poet of the heartbreak," as she remembers the simple gestures of her mother when she was still here, articulating the loneliness attendant to the experience of grief, and how she found solace and comfort from the diary entries of Virginia Woolf during her last days. She grieves: "Did she think of me-somewhere in some city, in lamplight, bending over books, or rising to put on my coat and go out? Did I pause, switch off the desklamp and stand, gazing out at the dusk, think I might call her. Not calling. Calling. Too late now..."
Carson is one of the first writers to conquer the frontiers of the 21st century poetry, the first to be able to storm through the paltry and outdated definitions of language and language-making. Here is a poet who is courageous, intelligent, and fierce but at the same time tender and forgiving toward the kind of passages we undertake, solitary or communal. She always reminds us that the love for imperfection is valid and that we are irredeemable from transience, but guides us though the maze of fear evoked by these truths, if only to discover the joy and surprise that come from being here, the ordinary time we seek to mark.
Carson's opus can well be summarized in the epitaph she used for her mother:
such
abandon
ment
such
rapture

... Anne Carson's two previous books string their wonderful perturbations along narrative lines, but "Men in the Off Hours" is a deliberately unstrung chaos, which Carson calmly, almost academically sorts through. Metaphor, she decides, is "the willful creation of error," and poetry consists of misunderstandings and mistranslations (even by a classics professor like herself). Since "The fact of the matter for humans is imperfection," the poet must try not only to accept mistakes but to enjoy them. Can she learn to accept the death of her mother as a kind of mistake, or to enjoy having taken as her "true love" a man who left her?

Such a wholesale interpretation of the book is risky. Carson is always, as she says in "Men," "uneasy with any claim to know exactly / what a poet means to say," and her poetry generally avoids the confessional mode. But this collection is filled with refugees from torments as searing as love's betrayal. Lazarus, the mad Artaud, Anna Akhmatova, the birds Audubon shot, wired and plumped into lifelike poses--their agony tells us truths. So do Carson's wisecracks, little word salads, and sardonic hurrahs ("At our backs is a big anarchy. If you are strong you can twist a bit off / and pound on it-- our freedom!"). This is a wickedly disquieting book, with footnotes. Its reassurances are its glinting intelligence and confident, humorous voice--when Carson read in Seattle last month, every syllable was as clear and knowing as laughter.

Few great literary figures are absent from these poems, there are comparisons of views of Virginia Woolf, Thucydides, Emily Dickinson, Freud, Augustine, Sappho, Tolstoy, Akhmatova, just to name a few. Carson's deftly goes into the minds of these greats and with convincing conviction from the female brain, not just a female perspective compared to that of a dominating male perspective. These poems are skillful and some will not doubt argue brilliant. These poem's flaws (both individually and collectively) are that they go only far enough to engage the mind, ignoring the rest of the reader's body. No chills. No growls. No tears. No laughs. This leaves us with beautiful, but flat poems. This is a sad departure from Carson's last book, _Autobiography of Red_. Some of the poems fall apart due to meticulous overwriting as in the case of the Tolstoy selection of "TV Men" where Carson combines her own lines with Tolstoy's giving far too much precedence of the intellect of the poem over the rest.

Anne Carson recently won a MacArthur, the "genius" grant, and deserved every penny of it, in my opinion. Yes, this book is crammed with historical allusions and persona poems in one form or another. No, it is not emotionally involving. And yes, occasionally she skates the fine line between postmodern cleverness and gimmicks, with all of the "tv scripts" and so forth. Nevertheless, the quality of writing and intellect at work here is absolutely stunning--and makes Anne Carson one of the most exciting, adventurous, and brilliant lyrical poets I've been reading. Unlike the "glass" essay in "Glass, Irony, & God," you will not get anything remotely resembling an intimate first person narrative here. If that's the kind of poetry you're looking for, this is definitely not the book for you. On the other hand, if you're looking for expanded possibilities in lyrical writing--the lyric operating in an intellectual/philosophical arena--or you enjoy experimental lyrical poets--then this book is well worth the money. It's a sheer tour-de-force in intellectual imagination and breathtaking lyrical lines that spin intelligently, if not emotionally, as some of the reviewers here have cited as a criticism.

As is to be expected from Anne Carson, the breadth of her knowledge results in thought-provoking writing even when it fails as "poetry". An example Hopper:Confessions begins with a quotation from Edward Hopper, followed with 9 separately title poems accompanied by quotations from Augustine's Confessions, and ending with a piece by Hopper.

Her essay on female pollution in antiquity is excellent scholarship made enjoyable reading for the "common reading".

Several pieces, or portions of pieces, consider Lazarus raising interesting issues from the perspective of Lazarus ... what is his reaction at being called forth (rotting?) from the grave?

While many of the pieces, especially the very short pieces, are not impressive, the book is worth your time - for the reflections it provokes in the reader.

And she flops BIG TIME. It's true--I think--that Carson is very likely a genius. Her debut, as far as literature is concerned, was about as great a collection as any published that year: Plainwater. But here, in her fourth collection, the follow-up to the woefully over-hyped "Autobiography of Red," Carson is struggling to "make" poetry--out of appropriated texts, out of nonsense, out of little precious epigramatical sayings. . .it's a hodge-podge that makes little sense as a collection, and whose individual poems make even less of an impression.

If I have my math right, Carson has averaged about a book every other years since the mid-nineties. I think she needs to take a break. I think she needs an editor. I think she needs to stop paying attention to the folks who so eagerly want to claim her as the late twentieth-century's answer to the American tendency to love the unknown writer late discovered in his or her life, a la Dickinson, Clampitt, etc.

This review appeared, with discussions of Giacomo Leopardi and Jane Cooper, April 20, 2000, in the Seattle Weekly and is available online at http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0016/arts-lightfoot.shtml

Anne Carson's two previous books string their wonderful perturbations along narrative lines, but "Men in the Off Hours" is a deliberately unstrung chaos, which Carson calmly, almost academically sorts through. Metaphor, she decides, is "the willful creation of error," and poetry consists of misunderstandings and mistranslations (even by a classics professor like herself). Since "The fact of the matter for humans is imperfection," the poet must try not only to accept mistakes but to enjoy them. Can she learn to accept the death of her mother as a kind of mistake, or to enjoy having taken as her "true love" a man who left her?

Such a wholesale interpretation of the book is risky. Carson is always, as she says in Men, "uneasy with any claim to know exactly / what a poet means to say," and her poetry generally avoids the confessional mode. But this collection is filled with refugees from torments as searing as love's betrayal. Lazarus, the mad Artaud, Anna Akhmatova, the birds Audubon shot, wired and plumped into lifelike poses--their agony tells us truths. So do Carson's wisecracks, little word salads, and sardonic hurrahs ("At our backs is a big anarchy. If you are strong you can twist a bit off / and pound on it-- our freedom!"). This is a wickedly disquieting book, with footnotes. Its reassurances are its glinting intelligence and confident, humorous voice--when Carson read in Seattle last month, every syllable was as clear and knowing as laughter.

I don't know what happened here but Carson's last two books have really gone down hill. Men in the Off Hours, her first book since Autobiography of Red, is a mess. I don't know how else to describe it. It's not that I'd expect an easy read after her last book--just a consistent one. There are poems in here that first appeared in prose elsewhere and now are in lines! This suggests a lack of understanding of the line and its history and uses on the part of the writer, which shocks me since Plainwater and Autobiography of Red I truly liked.

I would not suggest this book if you like Anne Carson. It will disappoint you!

Exactly when did Anne Carson become the biggest thing since Bishop? Why these last few books of hers have sold as quickly and as widely as they have (she's the best-selling poet in America, supposedly) is a question for posterity, I guess. Whether we'll be reading her in twenty years is hard to say, but in light of the gimmicks she's been pulling out of her sleeves lately it's likely we won't even remember her in less than a decade. Plainwater is brilliant. Glass, Irony and God is very interesting. But Autobiography of Red and this new book, Men in the Off Hours, are both examples of a writer pushing too hard to make a mark; and, in the case of Men in the Off Hours specifically, she's also pushing too hard to simply fill out a book. Every other poem in the book is something she calls an "Epitaph": trite, gimmicky, nonsensical clever turns of phrase without any literary or emotional or even intellectual pay-off that have become all the rage lately in graduate writing programs and lit magazines. Add to this her usual tricks (interviews with dead authors, prose converted into flat unimaginative lines, etc.) and what's left are about a half dozen interesting works that should have been the starting point for a book still long in the making.