Anne Carson and Robert Currie in Conversation With Sara Elkamel & NYU Undergrads — On Starting in the Middle

By Sara Elkamel

Anne Carson and her partner-collaborator Robert Currie currently reside in Iceland, where a volcano in the Reykjanes peninsula is leaking black and red lava out its mouth. Inspired by her reading of the sagas of Icelandic history, Carson has been spending more time drawing than writing. Meanwhile, Currie is working on adapting Carson’s astounding verse novel Autobiography of Red (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998) for the stage. 

I first met Carson and Currie last spring, when I enrolled in “EgoCircus,” a class they taught collaboratively at NYU and elsewhere. Prompt-based and focused on collaboration, experimentation and performance, EgoCircus coincided with the start of the pandemic; it moved online in March, radically changing the prompts, the collaborative process, and the outcome, and somehow, the class never stopped. 

Because I had been captivated by Anne Carson’s Plainwater (Vintage, 1995) for years, I assigned an excerpt (“The Anthropology of Water”) to the Introduction to Poetry & Prose undergraduate class I am currently teaching at NYU. Focused on work emerging from states of movement and stasis, my syllabus used the lyric essay that narrates a pilgrimage to Compostela at the center of “The Anthropology of Water” as a starting point.

The students’ enthusiasm for the text compelled me to invite Carson and Currie for a class visit, and they generously agreed to join us. Carson admitted that she had not revisited Plainwater since she wrote it. The peculiar laws of pilgrimage and penance, however, have lingered in her mind, she told us. In the conversation below, a few of the students and I talk to Carson and Currie about creative rituals, drawing, questions, and more. 

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Elaine Yue: Anne, I was wondering if you have any rituals that you engage in before writing? 

Anne Carson: Nope. I just scribble around on a piece of paper.

Robert Currie: There’s no order? I mean, you don’t write, then go to the pool and then come back?

AC: No. There is no order to anything. Nowadays, I draw more than write, and that's different because drawing has implements. So it has implementing poses, not rituals, but certain ways of using — so that's different. But my writing no, has no rituals.

I think the only thing I know about writing is: start in the middle. Wherever you're doing, start in the middle. Starting at the beginning is just ridiculously frightening. And of course, the end, you know, will be there when you arrive.

RC: You know, I was going to say, and this is inside information, I don't think you have ritual, but you have the luxury of having space, where you always have the writing available. You have a studio, not here [in Iceland], but in America, which has a desk for each of those practices: you have your drawing desk, your writing desk, and your translating desk.

AC: That’s the topography. 

RC: Yeah, you've made a topography in which the ideas can happen instead of —

AC: I think it's important to have a topography, where you have a desk or a table or something where you can leave the work out. If you work on the dining room table, and you have to put it away every time the family wants to have supper, you’ll just go mad. You’ll lose your orientation. You have to be able to leave it out somewhere.

Robert Shettlewood: What you get from drawing that writing lacks?

AC: I get to be away from words. 

Robert Shettlewood: What do you like to draw? 

AC: Well, usually just whatever. Presently, because we're living in Iceland, I’m reading what they call the sagas of Icelandic history, which are epic stories about imaginary people who lived here a thousand years ago —

RC: So much for getting away from words!

AC: I’m thinking about those stories and drawing pictures that occur in my mind when reading them. So yes, so it's just whatever is in my head, and then whatever I can draw. Frankly, I'm not very good, so it's a limited repertoire of things that I can actually manage to draw and even then, a lot of the times I just draw paint. I like paint. If you use paint as itself, not drawing anything, it’s quite liberating and sometimes you get a nice picture.

RC: The same way I just like paper.

AC: Yeah, paper in itself can be really nice. 

RC: I just go to paper stores and look at paper. Do I want to do anything with it? No. 

I think it's interesting in a way that Anne started drawing, but it was the titles that people liked. I was thinking about how many artists I know have that kind of weird twist. Laurie Anderson, a New York artist, started out as a painter and sculptor, I believe, and like almost everyone in the early 70s, was making films. She then realized that her films were backdrops for the stories she told. So, the films were no longer the central notion in the work. They were the backdrop. With you [Anne], you started out drawing…[To Sara] Did she ever tell you about that about the titles? About Short Talks?

AC: Oh, Short Talks is a book I wrote that exists as a bunch of little essays. When I made it first, it was a bunch of drawings with titles, and I thought the titles were interesting, yes, but the drawings were more interesting to me. When I showed them to other people, they thought that the drawings were kind of irrelevant, and the titles were kind of neat. So, I began to expand the titles and the titles became talks, and the talks became a book of talks. The drawings were lost, which always made me sad, but I mean, they weren't that good, I had to agree. It would have been a kind of a dopey book. Anyway, that was the direction of my thinking.

Do you draw, Robert?

Robert Shettlewood: No, because I’m not very good but when I do draw, it’s fun. 

AC: I have learned to not worry about being good. It’s hard to get to that, but once you do, you realize that most people are not good at drawing. Renoir was not good at drawing, he just had a few lucky days. You can get past that and have fun anyway. I recommend just doing paint as paint, because that doesn’t require any drawing, it’s just about the stuffing. 

RC: You can even draw with both hands at the same time. 

Sara Elkamel: “On Walking Backwards” is definitely one of my favorite poems. Anne, I have a question about Short Talks, which I really love. Were the titles attached to the drawings — “On Walking Backwards,” “On Ovid,” “On Sunday Dinner With Father” etc. — or were the original titles elsewhere within the poems?

AC: As I recall, I think there were a few different ways it went but most of the drawings had an implicit short talk in them, which generated some sort of comment. Sometimes, the comment was “Walking Backwards,” but mostly it was something out of the drawing altogether. I can’t exactly explain that, but it was not a consecutive procedure, like: here’s the drawing, here’s the title —take the title off and it’s exactly the same. It didn’t work that way. It was a little more...confusing. I like confusion. 

Sara Elkamel: I feel like the relationship between text and image can go so many different ways…

AC: Yeah, it can, and it’s very interesting when it goes the wrong way, and then you have a text and a drawing with a caption or a text that’s about something else entirely, and then the reader has to think: where did this story go that makes this caption relevant to this whole procedure? It’s good to make them think. 

RC: Well, here’s a question for all of you that might be difficult to answer because she's sitting here. Close your eyes, Anne. Did anybody not like Plainwater, and what was it that didn't work for them? 

Sara Elkamel: I don't think anyone said they didn't like it, but some people expressed difficulty, right?

Brede Baldwin: I thought so, yes, because reading pieces like this is not something I've done very many times in my life. In songwriting, for instance, you only have so many words. So everything has to be super obvious and work towards your narrative. However, your work is so image laden, and there's so much information that it's often hard for me to find what the purpose of each line is. I just feel like I'm in a little bit of a different world. Sometimes I get a bit overwhelmed, but that makes it equally impressive. So, I'm reading something, and I'm like, that's super dope, but I have no idea what it means. Is that what it's supposed to do? 

RC: I sometimes wonder though...we all read stuff, right? Let's say you're working with a musical score. Because it's a secondary language, you would commit yourself to working on it and understanding it; you’d think about how the tempo was changing, and blah, blah, blah. But I think because we all use language all the time, we expect to be able to understand literature without the same work we put into understanding another art form. I think language has this extra burden of being familiar to everybody. So, it undermines [the reader], and makes them think that they should understand it immediately and that's just not the case. I mean, I had to read the New York Times three times to be able to understand it, to get the nuances of it. let alone poetry.

AC: I also have this experience that you had when reading other people, of being lost. I think it's a good thing, because when I'm writing something, and I assume this is true for other writers, I make layers in it, and there are layers that are on the surface and layers that are underneath, and the layers I don't even know about that emerge because the different layers already there interact with each other. Those different layers aren't going to be apparent the first you read the thing. It's good to be able to read something a second time and find different layers, I think. I mean, I wouldn't be satisfied with a piece of writing if it didn’t offer that experience to the reader, to be able to find layer and layer and layer in it because you're different people every time you approach a work, you know. You are different. The work is different.

Jillian Olesen: That whole conversation about the layers and not being able to grasp certain ideas immediately reminded me of my frustration while reading Plainwater. I mean, obviously, it's incredible, but I kept wanting the text to just come out and tell me outright what the symbolism of water was throughout, because it appeared in so many different ways, with different emotional implications each time. But I'm realizing that it would probably take me many more reads through to actually really understand and appreciate what water means. 

AC: Yeah, me too. I write something like that in order to figure out what I mean about water but it doesn't come out anywhere that I can paraphrase. It just comes out in all the different ways that it comes out, as part of the story or as part of the imagery but it's more of an investigation — any piece of writing — than a conclusion, I think. If it’s any good.

Ethan Williams: I’ve noticed that you work with references to other media and historical events fairly often, and I know that you're a classicist as well. So it seems that you use these references like a vehicle for the writing itself, or as supplementary material — you have the Camino de Santiago of course, Helen, and other Greek myths, but also all the epigraphs in Kinds of Water or The Beauty of the Husband [Vintage, 2001]. What strikes you about another literary work or a story that compels you to reinterpret it or apply it to yourself?

AC: I don't know. I guess it is be something different for every quotation, or every bit that becomes useful. It's just what grips me. It’s the thing that can’t read and digest and pass on. 

RC: Is it chance discovery or something you’re looking for?

AC: Neither really, it's just part of what happens. But most reading or experiencing of other people's artworks is a matter of looking at it and saying, oh yes, I sort of know what that is, and then going on, unchanged, to the next moment of life. But once in a while, something will trip you and then you have to stop and stare at that thing and puzzle over it or be annoyed or argue or something. That's the thing that gets taken out and becomes useful, I believe.

RC: So you look forward to tripping?

AC: Uh-hmm. 

Jillian Olesen: I have a question about self, and internal references. Whenever I’m reading poetry, I’m often finding myself wanting to know more about the author's experience and their life with regards to what they might be talking about. To what extent do you think divulging too much autobiographical can be effective or harmful to poetry.

AC: Let's see. Seventeen percent harmful. [Laughs] I think everybody essentially writes autobiography; it's your basic raw material but you don't have to name names. Again, it's different for every piece, every page or every thing that you write is going to have a different relation to your inner self and your history of self. It just varies from time to time. I think for most people, it seems that in the earlier part of their life they write out their own history, and then they kind of run out of that and turn to other subjects in later life, so maybe that's a good trajectory to follow? I don't know. I think you have to write what is a question for you, inner or outer.

Ethan Williams: I'm curious about something somewhat more specific to Plainwater. I noticed when reading through “The Anthropology of Water” that there are a lot of questions peppered throughout, and they don't seem to be addressed to anything specific. I mean, sometimes it's dialogue, but specifically, the passage that you read ends with: “What is a blush?” A lot of these passages end with questions. I'm curious if that's just part of your stream of consciousness, as in, that's how the thought came to you, or if those are meant to be rhetorical and unanswered, or if you have an answer in mind, or if that's just another way of presenting your thoughts. Sometimes, they seem to be non-sequiturs to the passages that they're in, and that's the most interesting part to me.

AC: Yeah, exactly. I think that's the point. The thing that’s good to do while writing is to keep the reader awake, as in, awake in your mind and droning on in declarative sentences can put the listening brain to sleep. Asking questions is a little bit like pricking the skin suddenly, especially if it's unanswered, or seems to be unanswered. I think most of those questions are a way of getting into whatever the next paragraph says, without direct indication of that. However, the question form is provoking, and it’s good to provoke the reader. You don't want the reader to get comfortable.

RC: What's the reason behind making readers uncomfortable or provoked?

AC: Because they think then. You don’t think when you’re comfortable. You just doze off. 

RC: Ah! That explains everything… [Laughs]

Sara Elkamel: We’ve been talking about questions in your work, and how they shift the narrative, or the thought, from place to place. I think the same can be said of metaphor, which we were also talking about in relationship to your text. So, I wanted to ask: What do you think makes a good metaphor? 

AC: I have no idea. I never thought about it that way. I mean, it would illuminate whatever question you’re asking but I don't have any rules for it. It’s a mechanism of thought, isn't it? It's a way of putting your thought on a fast train and sending it over the hill somewhere else. But you don't know why a particular one works or doesn't work. That would be good to know. 

Maybe an aspect of a good metaphor is it has space in it for thinking in more than one direction about whatever the matter at hand is. Space.

Miguel Mazo: I don’t know if this is necessarily a question about metaphor, but I find that when modern poets reference God, they show God as having human emotions. I was reading your poem Book of Isaiah, and one of the lines talks about human brittleness, and later in the poem, it says that God displays that same brittleness. I was wondering if you were trying to display God as being more human than people normally think?

AC: I’m not, as far as I recall, trying to characterize God in that poem, so much as characterize Isaiah’s concept of and relationship with God because I always was struck by those Biblical characters, prophets, supposedly, who know something more than normal people know about the world and the future. But it isn't clear to me how they know that they know it. Like, how do you wake up one day and know you're a prophet, and the inside of your head is different, and more useful than anybody else's?

I wanted to get inside the way it feels for Isaiah, to be dealing with this other entity that supposedly is filling him with the kind of knowledge that He, God, has all the time, and Isaiah gets in these little spurts of prophecy. So it’s more about characterizing the tension between them, as it exists in Isaiah’s mind, because we can only access it through Isaiah’s mind. Not God Himself, which I wouldn't attempt.

Elaine Yue: Can I ask something a little more vague? How do you ever feel like you're done with a piece? 

AC: I think, for myself, if I'm wondering how to end the thing, it already ended, two pages ago. I've gone too far.

RC: So how do you go back? 

AC: Just go back. Look back. You'll see it. You'll see it there. You see this big boulder saying: I am the end. Stop here.