Shards of Meaning

...the theologian and poet Peter Abelard eats watermelon in a modern American kitchen and swings at a children's playground...

...Toward the end, as Weil is dying, the "Chorus of the Void" tap-dances around her hospital bed singing about chocolate...

...Joseph's title refers to the compulsion to make sense of what we all experienced on 9/11 and afterward...

...Porete was burned at the stake as a heretic for writing a book about the love of God in French, instead of official Latin...

...The grandchild of Lebanese and Syrian immigrants, he grew up in Detroit, the scene of much of his earlier verse, now collected in Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993...

...The poet trusts words to do justice to the atrocities and the panicked reactions to them...

...Porete and Weil sacrificed themselves in the troubling belief that their absence would increase the divine presence...

...Just as modern disaster movies like the recent remake of War of the Worlds use the demoli tion of cities to illustrate how crisis can improve, say, one father's parenting skills, contemporary writers are more comfortable focusing on personal growth than on the immense panoramas of the Iliad or War and Peace...

...She deploys her wit in unlikely juxtapositions, such as a conversation between Immanuel Kant and Monica Vitti, the glamour girl of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960s films...

...Nonetheless, the preserved lyrics continue to tantalize readers with descriptions of the ecstasy of love as possession...

...Carson imitates this process by examining what various works have to say about sleep—from Elizabeth Bishop's "The Man-Moth" through Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, the Odyssey, and finally a dialogue of Plato...

...In Decreation, she dissects a new emotion too—grief over the death of a parent...

...In the notes to one poem she tells us that at the request of ArtForum she agreed to write an essay about Seated Figure with Red Angle, a painting by Betty Goodwin...

...But when I tried to formulate an opinion on this work I found I had nothing to say...

...A sequence of poems about the death of the author's mother ("Stops") leads into an essay on sleep, "Every Exit Is an Entrance...

...Carson and Joseph also tap into a shared anxiety about Alzheimer's disease: The disintegration of memory may be tantamount to the erasure of the self...

...Each volume requires us to confront gaps in our perceptions and comprehension...

...Decreation is a smorgasbord of forms...

...If you stop the leaks with conditionals...

...By using the most hesitant of syntaxes, the conditional sentence—not the conditional sentence in its entirety which, although hesitantly, does arrive at an opinion by the end: just the if-clause...

...Sappho experienced this not toward another human being but to love itself, personified by the Greek goddess Aphrodite...

...Its vaudevillian sparkle nods to Stein's repetitious prose style and her music hall obsessed era...

...Lawrence Joseph, with his sixth book, Into It (Farrar Straus Giroux, 67 pp., $20.00), evokes the shattered landscape of Lower Manhattan after 9/11 and that catastrophe's effects on the American psyche as well as on the Middle East, where living amid such terrors has long been a given...

...Carson follows the essay with an "opera" on the theme of "Decreation...

...600 BCE), Carson knows the problems of piecing together fragments to construct a more complete picture...

...Conventional wisdom has long held that some historical horrors cannot be treated artistically because the reality defies any imaginative renderings...

...Weil was drawn to Christianity but never allowed herself to be baptized...

...The present phase, with its electronic and its nuclear-powered motors— the era of after, or postmodernism—has proven more difficult to configure...

...Lots of Guns" was composed for performance at the American PEN center...

...In his wrestling with these elements, a near epic tension mounts that renders the disparate sections of Into It whole, albeit with holes and disjunctions...

...Reacting to this ambiguous portrait (reproduced in Decreation) of a person hunched over as if in pain or fear, Carson writes: If it begins, a trickle, this thin slow falling of the mind...

...Being a scholar of Sappho (c...

...But since we cannot live like this, we fall back on the private sphere—whatever we apprehend through our senses and emotions...

...Sleep has been called a little death, but it also suggests that our personal identity survives consciousness...

...works such as T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land, James Joyce's Ulysses or William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury might be labeled "Some Assembly Required...

...What place would that be...

...The logic of dreams makes associations through strings of images rather than analytic thinking...

...The two things that are interesting/ are history and grammar," he avers...

...These techniques forced the reader to put the pieces together...

...The volume's title is taken from an essay on Sappho, the 14th-century mystic Marguerite Porete and the 20thcentury philosopher Simone Weil...

...Each woman discussed the experience of a love so overpowering it threatens to obliterate the self to accommodate the beloved...

...But what light there is in that landscape...

...Fundamentally a poet of ideas, he is troubled by the classic argument between Bertolt Brecht and Paul Celan about whether it is immoral to write about pleasure in an era of atrocities...

...Passion, jealousy and abandonment have been Carson's themes from the start...

...An early place, a hesitant place, blinking...

...Joseph concludes thattoo many of our current metaphors— computers, multinational corporations, global networks—have no "heart," no prime mover in the manner of older systems...

...Opinion seems to have nothing to do with it...

...These poems are, alas, impossible to quote because, though fragmentary, their meanings are made clear through context...

...As Dante entered hell "in the middle of the journey," this book plunges into the author's thoughts, sounds and feelings as he struggles to discover the associations that might best describe 9/1l's effects...

...Our age, however, lacks the cosmology that lends the Renaissance poem its coherence...

...What we know of her career is equally sketchy—reported by writers with their own biases who often invented biography from clues in the verse...

...The "incandescence . . . outburning the sunlight" when the planes crashed into the towers reminds him of molten metal in the factories of his youth...

...But how could a denizen of Battery Park City—where for months particles of debris floating in the air altered the light and the landscape was irrevocably transformed—not write about 9/11...

...The cumulative effect of this poem is a clearer understanding of our own impressions when they hover on the "edge of the thinkable," and why we so seldom can express our "own beautiful ideas" when confronted with something out of the ordinary...

...The shift from linear storytelling and the omniscient observer reflected a number of early 20th-century psychological, philosophical, technological, and cultural influences—not least the theory that the unconscious thinks in images and has little use for straightforward logic...

...Her 1943 death from tuberculosis in a London hospital was hastened by a starvation diet she undertook in solidarity with her native France, then suffering a food shortage during the Nazi occupation...

...Into It succeeds in placing what is almost beyond description under the lens of poetry and illuminating the darkness enough for us to make our way forward...

...Two recent collections by seasoned authors, however, suggest that poets are again seeking fresh ways to reflect punctures in our sense of continuity...

...Brecht thought it was, while Celan held that poems were "conversation," so restricting their subject matter abrogated free speech...

...Why Not Say What Happens" distills the author's reactions to the apocalyptic collapse, and his quieter observations are remarkably striking: The sky blue, dark blue yet pure in color, not blackened or tarnished, above the low, old buildings, like a painting of something solid rather than the solid thing itself, a high and low composition...

...On Poetry Shards of Meaning By Phoebe Pettingell Modernist ERA writers tended to veer away from linear narrative and favor fragmentary dialogue or interior monologues from varying perspectives...

...He sees the dilemma facing literature when The immense enlargement of our perspectives is confronted by a reduction in our powers of action, which reduces a voice to an inner voice inclined to speak only to those closest to us...

...Joseph sees the "conversations" that make up Dante's Divine Comedy as a bridge between creating an overview of an entire culture and private reactions to it...

...This phrasing, it will be noted, is not lyrical: Occasionally, despite his poetic enjambments, Joseph sounds as though he is breaking into prose rhythms...

...The poet Lawrence Joseph is also a lawyer and legal scholar...

...How to represent it...

...Since 1981, Joseph has made Lower Manhattan his home...

...Its characteristic machine, the computer, contains no emblematic power...

...Every epoch, Joseph observes, requires its own metaphors...

...Despite the glowing reputation enjoyed by the poet of Lesbos in the classical era, little of her work survives besides lines or phrases quoted by others centuries removed...

...Carson is not interested in costume drama, but rather the way moral and spiritual instincts intertwine and clash with physical and emotional longings...

...The events of September 11,2001—"everything immense and out of context"—set the tone for Into It...

...Joseph sides with Celan, but only after serious consideration of Brecht's contention...

...Carson beats against the boundaries of expression, using her sharp analytical mind, her encyclopedic knowledge of literature and philosophy, and her talents for imagery and verbal precision...

...The effect of staring at it was to find myself in a place in my mind prior to opinion...

...Joseph does not limit himself to painterly impressions...

...If conditionals are of two kinds, real and unreal...

...What we call history is therefore merely a construct of the moment...

...If you reach instead the edge of the thinkable, which leaks...

...Lots of Guns: an Oratorio for Five Voices" is a homage to Gertrude Stein's wordplay, weaving political ideas and verbal hijinks into snatches of Stein's favorite American folksong, "On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine...

...When mass destruction arrives in Manhattan his imagination reverts to the destruction of the Byzantine Empire, to war-torn Lebanon, and to the racial battles and economic burnout of the Motor City...

...In a related way, the destruction of historical artifacts, as in the looting of the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad during the 2003 American invasion, damaged a historical legacy belonging not only to the people of Iraq, but to all Western civilization, which came into being between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers...

...In another jeu d'esprit the poet brings on a chorus line of inquisitors who chant in doggerel Latin—the tongue used in all heresy trials and usually unknown to hapless defendants...

...If you want to know why the sliding affects your nerves...

...Elsewhere, there is a screenplay about two of history's doomed lovers...

...Her words illuminate these works the way dreams can seem to clarify something not understood in waking life...

...But he complains that Lebanon has become an abstract noun: "the Lebanonization of" something or someplace...

...Today, engineering has replaced the controlling deity: Each phase had its machines (in phase one, steam-driven motors, electric or combustion motors in phase two) and its critical structure (realism in the first phase, modernism in the second...

...The device strips away the Merchant-Ivory soft focus that often blurs stories distant from our own day...

...This medieval fable about the conflict between illicit desire and religion benefits from being transposed into something like a road movie with bleak stills that could have been painted by Edward Hopper...

...If nothing sticks...

...In her ninth collection, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (Knopf, 245 pp., $24.95), Anne Carson experiments with an array of forms as she tries to fathom the emotional scars left by death or desertion and the seduction of allowing one's own ego to be subsumed in love...

...If we slip into "the precious and the turgid language/ of pseudoerudition," he cautions, we will not be able to find words or images that haven't been contaminated by overexposure to sort out the disorder in our lives...

...In poems, lengthy prose meditations and libretti for strange verbal operas, she analyzes feelings so powerful yet difficult to articulate that they threaten to render us speechless...

...If you want to know why you cannot reach your own beautiful ideas...

...As the 20th century wore on, linearity crept back into fashion...

...Pathos, sublimity and farce are simultaneously brought on stage, and Carson's music echoes after the curtain comes down...

...For all her experimentation, Anne Carson's shards of meaning, like Sappho's, dazzle us with a vision of what wholeness of spirit might look like...

...Amid the disruption of two wars, the arts were believed to require new forms of expression to mirror the confusion of the times...

...Joseph's own perceptions are shaped by his Christian Arab heritage and his Detroit childhood...

...In Carson's script, the 12th-century nun Héloise wears short white gloves, drives a car and takes a room at a Best Western...

...Even quantum physics suggests that the universe was created outside time, so that past and future are actually part of the present...

...Nonetheless, his point is well taken...

...For Dante's age, theology shaped a worldview...

...His 1997 prose work, Lawyerland, captured the world south of Manhattan's Canal Street and was optioned for a film by John Malkovich...

...And it is true that we have imprinted on our minds news footage scenes of huge fireballs bursting from the Twin Towers, of fleeing crowds, of homemade posters pleading for information about missing family and friends...

...I sat down and stared at the reproduction and passed through a process of thought of which I can still recall the (dark) taste...