Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

My Theatre Arts teacher in high school told me: “You should know the rules before you break them.” It wasn’t an original thought, but most thoughts aren’t – after all, about 108 billion people have been living and thinking on planet Earth for some 200,000 years, so it’s hard to come up with something new. He also told me: “Steal from the best, then make it your own.”

Or as filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard put it: “It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.”

For this last post for Women’s History Month, it seems fitting to highlight a respected Classics scholar and translator who is also a rule-breaker in her own work, which both references and defies poetic traditions and themes – a very tricky thing to pull off.

The poetry of Anne Carson (1950 ― ) was described by Daphne Merkin in the New York Times Book Review as “unclassifiable” even though much of it has been inspired by The Classics, the great wellspring of Western Civilization. Merkin also called Carson “one of the great pasticheurs” ―defined as “an artist who creates a pastiche.”
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This is the first Carson poem that caught my eye, because I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, and the thunderstorms there are “dry and frightening.” The poem of course has nothing to do with Arizona, yet it is an excellent description of the desert storms from my childhood. Note that the ideas jump from Jezebel of the Old Testament Book of Kings to torqued ellipses, which is covering a lot in just eight lines.

Thunderstorm Stack

A bird flashed by as if mistaken then it
starts. We do not think speed of life.
We do not think why hate Jezebel? We
think who’s that throwing trees against
the house? Jezebel was a Phoenician.
Phoenician thunderstorms are dry and
frightening, they arrive one inside the
other as torqued ellipses.

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