<![CDATA[Men in the Off Hours]]>

false <![CDATA[Men in the Off Hours]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172595412m/195725.jpg 195725 4 Yes, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds--and minor poets. The major ones tend to operate in a trough-and-peak pattern, producing a dozen lesser works for every masterpiece. Still, Anne Carson pushes this tendency to extremes, and nowhere more markedly than in Men in the Off Hours, which contains some of the best and worst lyrics of her entire career. First, the good news: Nobody has written more acutely about perception--about the chaotic collision of our senses with the real world--since the glory days of Wallace Stevens. Not that Carson echoes the airborne rhetoric of her great predecessor. Her fractured, zigzagging lines deliberately avoid the kind of gravity that was his trademark, and she likes to deflect the grand manner by ratcheting her diction upward (into Delphic utterance) or downward (into baby talk, if the baby happens to be Gertrude Stein). Still, like Stevens, she makes us think about how we think. She dislikes any attempt to remove cognition from its rustling Heraclitean framework. No wonder she ends up scolding taxidermy freak John James Audubon, whose point-and-shoot portraiture rubs her the wrong way: "In the salons of Paris and Edinburgh // where he went to sell his new style / this Haitian-born Frenchman / lit himself // as a noble rustic American / wired in the cloudless poses of the Great Naturalist. / They loved him // for the 'frenzy and ecstasy' / of true American facts." We comprehend things only in flux and, as Carson explains in "Essay on What I Think About Most," by mistake: <blockquote> ...what we are engaged in when we do poetry is error, the willful creation of error, the deliberate break and complication of mistakes out of which may arise unexpectedness. </blockquote> Now for the bad news: Men in the Off Hours includes too ample a serving of Carson's weaker, semiprecious work--short lyrics in which she bends over backwards for an antipoetic poetic effect (if such a thing is possible). "Epitaph: Europe" is precisely the kind of freeze-dried surrealism she should avoid. And the spitballs this classicist fires at television in a piece like "TV Men: Thucydides in Conversation with Virginia Woolf on the Set of The Peloponnesian War" are truly puzzling. Why blame the tube for our cultural sins, particularly when the average NYPD Blue rerun contains more experiential fiber than most contemporary poetry? Still, Carson's blazing successes easily overshadow her failures. And those who have found her too recondite, too forbidding, need only take a look at the concluding poem, "Appendix to Ordinary Time." This elegy to the poet's mother is touching, emotionally direct, and completely original: an instant (to use a phrase Carson would probably loathe) classic. --James Marcus 189294 2000 Men in the Off Hours total:279|5:88|4:111|3:66|2:11|1:3| 279 1107 390 20 4 0 false false Tue May 01 00:00:00 -0700 2001 Sun Jun 14 02:51:25 -0700 2009 Sun Jun 14 03:11:17 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 0 false false Mon Oct 05 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Mon Oct 05 23:37:51 -0700 2009 Wed Oct 07 00:00:55 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 0 false false Mon Dec 08 23:36:52 -0800 2008 Mon Dec 08 23:40:04 -0800 2008 4 0 false false Wed Dec 03 18:45:04 -0800 2008 Wed Dec 03 18:45:04 -0800 2008
i need footnotes

i liked the poems about edward hopper paintings]]> 4 0 false false Mon Jul 02 21:51:15 -0700 2007 Mon Jul 02 21:54:00 -0700 2007 more...]]> 0 0 false false Sat May 24 11:37:52 -0700 2008 Mon May 26 04:04:40 -0700 2008
Not really my cup of tea as poetry goes (though my range is pretty ...more...]]> 5 0 false false Wed Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Oct 20 06:22:49 -0700 2008 Mon Oct 20 06:30:43 -0700 2008 Men in the Off Hours has a careful construction, with the peak of the work coming in her "TV Men" poems. The selectivity film or television uses in telling a life is a fairly consistent trope for her, but with each use I still feel an intellectual fresh...more...]]> 4 0 false false Fri Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Mon Mar 26 07:32:54 -0700 2007 Mon Jun 04 13:22:01 -0700 2007
I've now read it all, except for the ends of the essays because they were DEAD boring. Anne Carson, I do not care for your essays. They are boring. Please write more fake poems.

Anyway, three stars until I read it a...more...]]> 3 0 false false Fri Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Thu May 24 21:33:38 -0700 2007 Wed Jun 20 09:27:42 -0700 2007 more...]]> 5 0 false false Sat May 31 08:13:53 -0700 2008 Sat May 31 08:17:15 -0700 2008 ]]> 4 0 false false Thu Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Tue Feb 27 19:50:49 -0800 2007 Wed Apr 04 12:34:04 -0700 2007 5 0 false false Mon Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Sun Sep 09 12:45:00 -0700 2007 Sun Sep 09 14:30:23 -0700 2007 5 0 false false Sun Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2004 Wed Feb 20 19:56:49 -0800 2008 Sun Jun 08 18:47:49 -0700 2008 5 0 false false Sat Jan 05 15:07:13 -0800 2008 Sat Jan 05 15:10:19 -0800 2008
ESSAY ON WHAT I THINK ABOUT MOST
Error.
And its emotions.]]> 3 0 false false Sat Dec 01 03:25:50 -0800 2007 Sat Dec 01 03:27:44 -0800 2007 3 0 false false Wed May 14 02:52:09 -0700 2008 Sun Mar 16 08:12:57 -0700 2008 Wed May 14 02:52:09 -0700 2008 5 0 false false Wed Apr 23 02:40:05 -0700 2008 Wed Apr 23 02:41:13 -0700 2008 4 0 false false Sun Dec 01 00:00:00 -0800 2002 Thu Jul 12 10:52:31 -0700 2007 Thu Jul 12 10:53:55 -0700 2007 3 0 false false Sat Sep 13 17:46:04 -0700 2008 Sat Sep 13 17:47:16 -0700 2008 3 0 false false Thu Aug 09 13:59:21 -0700 2007 Thu Aug 23 14:55:04 -0700 2007 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=195725