Hello, Radio Readers! Jane Holwerda from Dodge City, Kansas, here to reflect on Anne Carson’s Plainwater, an eclectic collection of essays and poetry – and just in time for April, National Poetry Month.
Trained as a classicist, Carson’s 20 books include translations of ancient Greek and Latin works, as well as collections of her own poetry and prose in which she references Aeschylus, Euripides, Homer, Sappho and Simonides and 19th and 20th century poets, novelists and philosophers, such as Dickinson, Hegel and Heidegger, Keats, Stein, Weil and Woolf. She’s taught classics, literature and creative writing for McGill, Michigan, Princeton and NYU. As an academician, she defies categories, titling herself for short appointments as “’a visiting whatever.’” She is usually labeled a poet, though genres are diffused by subtitles such as “A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangoes” or “Poetry, Essays, Opera.” The complete title of the book included in Radio Readers 2024 Spring Read is Plainwater: Essays and Poetry which sounds pretty straightforward for a book including time-bending essays on a 15th century painter attending a 20th century philosophy conference, cryptic descriptions of towns, and a pilgrimage “in pursuit of the elusive and intimate anthropology of water.” This last stands as a blurb on the back cover of Plainwater.
Carson herself writes that “anthropology is a science of mutual surprise.” So don’t worry about making sense; she writes: “Let’s not get carried away with exegesis. [Because] A scholar is someone who knows how to limit himself to the matter at hand.” Water, Carson states, “is something you cannot hold” then relates a myth in which 49 women, having spilled the blood of others, are condemned forever to gather water in sieves. In a section titled “Thirst,” she chooses words emblematic of water flow to describe cognitive changes in a parent: a spring having sprung, syllables stream from his mouth, he babbles; his chuckles float. She realizes that her way of talking with her father was a way of “taking soundings—like someone testing the depth of a well. You throw down a stone and listen.” She begins to question and to “thirst for God.” She sees that “a question can travel into an answer as water into thirst,” she decides to take a pilgrimage, the Road to Campostelo, from the French Pyrenees to Spanish Galicia. And so, “to look for the simplest question, the most obvious facts, the doors that no one can close, is what I mean by anthropology.”
And when I think about it, isn’t a pilgrimage at the heart of each of the books in our spring read? Surprise, thirst, exploration, a search for meaning. Carson’s is probably the most metaphorical, the least linear in its design and scope, but rich in humanity and deep in word play. Explore, meander and drift with her words, be an open door. Or a flood gate…
For Radio Readers, I’m Jane Holwerda, from Dodge City, Kansas.