Anzac Day upstages Anne Carson

Above: "Because he's our Dad!"

By Gregory Wood

Thoughts of Anne Carson and her classical poetry led me to Auckland War Memorial Museum on Friday, April 25. But those thoughts did not last for long as the museum was putting on Anzac Day. If ‘putting on’ sounds too much like a stage-managed event, you had better get used to it. Anzac Day 2008 in front of the museum’s classical columns was a slick 45-minute show complete with a female announcer, three bands and a speech by the Defence Minister Phil Goff before an audience of about 2,000. And it didn’t rain, for once.

Anzac Day is becoming one of the success stories in New Zealand’s myth making. It is now not just an annual event but a daily encounter with your past. Key into your home computer the name of a relative who went to any war since the New Zealand Wars and the museum’s Anzac Day database will give you a readout of what happened to that person, male or female.

I found a soldier named Edward Albert Wood, a tailor. In 1916 he sailed with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force from Wellington. When he returned he did not run down the gangplank into the arms of his loved one. He was carried off a second gangway for the wounded at the rear of the ship, having lost a leg. However, his loved one stood by him, my grandmother.

Forget any notion of Anzac Day dying away with the old soldiers. Technology is letting it reach out to each new generation. It only gets bigger.

Poetry Session 2: Carson / Harlow

Orpheus

"Classics" is the theme of the session, and what I principally mean by that is the Greek and Latin classics -- particularly the former. Anne Carson is a professor of Classics, and has written some prodigiously learned books on the subject. Michael Harlow is part-Greek, and lived in the country for a while in the 1970s.

So much for the superficial connections, at any rate. Does this tell us anything useful about the two poets, or is it just an arbitrary juxtaposition? Watch this space -- this is where we'll be starting off at our session next Monday.

I hope you've all been listening to the cassettes I made you and getting more familiar with our poets in that medium as well as on the page ...

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Some excellent backwards readings of Harlow were made at this session (Kath, take a bow). In general, the Jungian nature of his inspiration came up for a good deal of attention.

For further thoughts on ways into the classical epics, see the latest post on my own blog, The Imaginary Museum.

Carson, Anne

[Poetry International Web]


Anne Carson (b.1950)

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Bibliography:

POETRY:

Glass, Irony, and God. (New Directions Publishing Company, 1992)
Short Talks. (Brick Books, 1992)
Plainwater: Essays and Poetry. (Knopf, 1995)
Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse. (Knopf, 1998)
Men in the Off Hours. (Knopf, 2001)
The Beauty of the Husband. (Knopf, 2002)
Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera.(Knopf, 2005)

TRANSLATION:

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. (Knopf, 2002)
Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides.(Knopf, 2006)

CRITICAL:

Eros the Bittersweet. (Princeton University Press, 1986)
Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Ceos with Paul Celan. (Princeton University Press, 1999)