Hello, Radio Readers! I’m Jane Holwerda from Dodge City, Kansas, thinking about Plainwater, a multilayered work from early in the career of Anne Carson, a writer pegged as a contender for a Nobel. Trained as a classicist, Carson is known for her poetry, which, laid out on a page, looks more like paragraphs; which, when read, meanders like a creek through the landscape.
For example, in “The Anthropology of Water,” which makes up about half of the book Plainwater, Carson writes of water as essential to physical and emotional life arson is richly allusive even in her most matter-of-fact moments, which means even when we might not make sense of what we’re reading, we feel its truth. And actually about 60% of the human body is water; 70-80% of our brains, lungs, muscles, skin, and hearts are water. And without replenishment, without regular intakes of water, we don’t last long. Metaphorically, water represents the quality of our lives, our emotions and spirit – which may be free-flowing, pure, or stagnant. Across belief systems, in rites of passages, water represents blessing, healing and transformation, new life, motion and emotion, creativity. In Carson’s words, we live when we give water and when we hold water in our hearts. Life and love, Carson writes, are as simple as the give and take of water. And when we reach the end, we fall off cliffs into water where some of us drown and some of us don’t.
Another thing Carson does is to set her explorations of water-as-thing and water-as-concept within the framework of two journeys – both with well-defined destinations, yet related as wandering and roaming, exploratory. The first, lush in topography and history, spans a hiking trail known as a European pilgrimage; the second, a dry, hot and windy route through mid-America to the west, via state highways and camping sites. Of western Kansas, Carson writes: “Wind does not stop by day here, does not stop by night, it keeps belling, boasting, wrestling, rinsing, disheveling, bonfiring, boistering down.” Colorado rivers, Carson writes, are loud: “river water jumping, sparkling, lavishing itself down the riverbed.” But most of the journey is marked by intense sun, heat, and aridity, a journey which decouples the two travelers, who, midway, are “like two particles in a complex sentence, [sitting] side by side moving forward, eyes on the road.” At Death Valley, the couple’s “desert syntax is hot and transactional.” In LA, the journey ended, Carson writes, “I have no story to tell.”
Inexplicably, I’m reminded of Sharon Olds and her poem, “Topography,” which, like Carson’s Plainwater, is a late 20th century work also about travel and coupling. Olds’ topography figures the bodies of two as maps, “laid /face to face, East to West,” the Idaho of one next to the Great Lakes of the other, Eastern Standard Time of one next to the Pacific time of the other. But the Kansas of the two align perfectly…one’s Kansas burning against the burning Kansas of the other.
Kansas. Arid and often droughty. And hot.
For High Plains Public Radio, I’m Jane Holwerda.
