[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the complexity of emotions expressed in poetry and the struggle for self-control amidst chaos.
In this quote, Anne Carson examines the nuanced and often painful relationship between a poet's internal expressions and external perceptions. It highlights the contrast between raw emotions, often associated with wildness and chaos, and the more measured, composed responses that can emerge, suggesting that art can convey both suffering and strength while navigating personal and creative boundaries.
In practice
In a workshop on creative writing, this quote can illustrate the tension between personal expression and societal expectations.
Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.
Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp--brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.
What we want from art is whatever is missing from the lives we are already living and making. Something is always missing, and so art-making is endless.
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Working in Hollywood does give one a certain expertise in the field of prostitution.
The body says what words cannot.
Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
Music, at its essence, is what gives us memories. And the longer a song has existed in our lives, the more memories we have of it.
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