Tumblr poet laureate

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on how Anne Carson's collagist poetry reflects Tumblr's scrapbook-like ethos.

Critics of the Canadian poet Anne Carson tend to unduly fixate on her fame. “Is Anne Carson the first poet with more fans than readers?” posited one critic’s attempt at a takedown. (The answer, in accordance with Bettridge’s law of headlines, is no; Homer was obviously the first.) These qualms mostly have to do with the institutional praise that her “relentlessly cerebral” work has received. Carson is accused of being “all surface [and] no body.” Her formidable style, according to her harshest critics, is a formal excuse for not making any good sense.

There might be, however, some basis for Carson’s detractors to denounce the popularity of her individual lines. When removed from their proper poetic residence, they easily read as empty truisms. For instance: “The people we love are never just as we desire them” or “Under the seams run the pain” or “When I desire you / a part of me / is gone.” But doing so would contradict her critics’ initial complaints. It would lead them to concede that Carson’s “abstruse, down-tuned music” actually appeals to popular readers—that she is, in fact, nearly quotable to a fault on the feed.

For the unfamiliar, Carson is perhaps one of the most critically acclaimed and widely read poets writing in English today. She is a classicist, which is a fancy way of saying that she teaches and translates ancient Greek. Classics scholars are rarely read (or heard of, for that matter) outside of the academy, but Carson has managed to accomplish the near-impossible: Her books sell. And Carson, despite her reclusive efforts towards reticence, has become a sort of micro-celebrity among the bourgeois literati.

Carson is notoriously averse to genre distinctions, having published 18 books of loosely-defined poetry. She has written winding prose poems, dialogic dramas, highly allusive lyric essays, and meandering philosophical meditations. Her most popular work, Autobiography of Red (1998), is a coming-of-age novel written in free verse that casts the Greek monster Geryon as a young, queer boy struggling with his first heartbreak. The Beauty of the Husband (2001) is a fictional essay told in 29 poetic sequences, or “tangos,” inspired by John Keats. If Not, Winter (2002) is Carson’s translation of the Greek lyric poet Sappho, whose ancient work survives only in fragments.

This experimental verve has not dissuaded contemporary audiences. Academics and creative writing MFA-types read her, as do casual poetry enthusiasts and young, queer aesthetes on the “dark academia” corner of Tumblr. Carson traverses the boundaries between institutional and commercially successful “popular” poetry—the latter consisting mostly of melodramatic banalities sliced by random line breaks. In this disparate poetic landscape, Carson might be the closest thing we have to a “major” modern poet.

If you, like me, are a social media user with vaguely literary leanings, you’ve probably noticed the algorithmic prevalence of Carson’s poetry, even though Carson herself has no social media to speak of. Twitter accounts like @sapphobot and @carsonbot syndicate a new Carson verse every two to three hours, and have respectively accrued over 91,000 and 49,000 followers in their efforts to spread her gospel.

There seems to be a Carson verse suitable for any ruminative occasion (“Is it a god inside you, girl?”) or random outcry (“[scream] [scream] [scream] for my ruined city”). A line from An Oresteia can be repurposed into an ecstatic anti-work mantra: “Gods! Free me from this grind!” No other contemporary poet inspires such a rabid rush of retweets. I rarely repost these verses, but I get why others do: The lines imply a sensuality of spirit. They are tiny delights. I could even excuse a person’s bad tweet, provided they circulate a good Carson verse on my feed.

It would be a disservice to dismiss Carson as a pithy Twitter lyricist. Her poems are neither short nor straightforward, two typical requisites for virality. But her lines, even when stripped of context, seem to be reaching for some emotional apotheosis. The outbursts are wistful, beautiful, and vague (“may you sleep on the breast of your delicate friend”); the condensed assertions seem to verge on spiritual aphorism (“What cannot be said will be wept”). Her diction can sound too commonplace at times, the words “[stooping] so low I had trouble remembering I was dealing with men godlike in their splendor,” writes one critic. This, strangely enough, makes her poetry quite suitable for Twitter.

I am, however, inclined to think of Carson more as a Tumblr poet. The distinction matters, as it’s a testament to her formal inventiveness. Rupi Kaur might be disparagingly hailed as the Instagram generation’s poet laureate, but I think Carson’s work reflects—and remarkably anticipates—the disjointed condition of online life, particularly our desire to derive meaning from the haphazard content-fragments of our feeds. Her writing is defined by discursive logic: “We’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense,” Carson wrote in an email to a reporter. “Every attempt means starting over with language.”

Carson doesn’t just start over; she repurposes. She is a textual collagist, who has likened her writing process to “painting with thoughts and facts”—a phrase that is also an apt description of blogging. The tactile, visual nature of Nox (2010) is better compared to an artist’s book or a handmade fan zine, rather than a traditional book of poetry. Carson’s work embodies Tumblr’s bloggy, scrapbook-like ethos, and resonates with the intertextual instincts of its young users. She has, to no surprise, an ardent and active fan base on the platform. (The term intertextuality, coined by 20th century philosopher Julia Kristeva, considers the semiotics, or the system of signs, that undergird a text. In other words, a literary work is not an independent product by a single author; it should be assessed alongside other cultural texts that precede it.)

Tumblr is technically a social media site, though it functions more like a socially-driven thought network. Users aren’t pushed to prefer one form of content over another. Their feeds are also not as algorithmically driven, but curated by certain tags and accounts that users choose to follow. Since Tumblr is quite non-discriminatory with how posts are formatted, text remains essential to the platform. Image and language go hand in hand. This has given rise to all sorts of mixed media compilations, including a practice called “web-weaving,” where users cobble together cultural ephemera under a common theme. These posts are compiled in a similar spirit to Carson’s process, and her poetry can be found under many such tags.

Carson’s first-person speakers are often in dialogue with another, an absent “you,” mourning some oblique tragedy or occurrence. These poems are confessional, even if the core vulnerability is hidden away. She constructs a complex web of associations, connecting concepts and subjects that, on the surface, seem unrelated. She writes about love and loss, desire and death, greed and God—universal subjects that have plagued humans (and poets) for centuries. She flits from Sappho to Simone Weil, Aristotle to arithmetic, Catallus to Catherine Deneuve. A reader of “The Glass Essay” might wonder: What does Emily Brontë have to do with a breakup? Or chewing lettuce with your mother? Carson may be “reaching,” but her topical pivots are undergirded by a vigorous, narrative logic.

Some critics have remarked upon the essayistic essence of Carson’s writing, how it’s more prose than poetry. Carson was an early adopter of the contemporary lyric essay before its commercial boom, and can be grouped alongside writers like Claudia Rankine and Maggie Nelson. Their work eschews linear chronology for recursive inquiry, preferring to talk around or about a subject (like the color blue in Nelson’s Bluets).

Young readers on Tumblr also seem to be drawn to the obvious queerness of Carson's most popular works. Before Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, which helped spawn a sub-genre of YA Greek myth reimaginings, there was Autobiography of Red, followed in 2013 by Red Doc>. The books’ relative brevity make them an ideal gateway to more experimental Carson texts. But so are the gnomic snippets found on social media.

If not for her elusiveness, I often worry that Carson’s popularity puts her at risk of becoming a “Wild Geese”-level meme. (Sorry, Mary Oliver. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves, and I love good taste to a fault.) It’s disheartening to witness a good poem lose its luster from chronic circulation. Classic lines begin to sound stale, and closing epiphanies stop hitting different. Even so, social media is a powerful mechanism for the distribution, awareness, and curation of literature. This tension is palpable in the publishing industry and literary discourse online.

A friend recently asked me if I think it’s possible for the average reader, like her high school-aged sister, to read outside the algorithm. I told her I didn't know if such a thing would be possible. The words we see and scroll through every day are delivered to us by many algorithms; most of the language output online probably isn't even written by humans. It's a matter of what readers choose to give our attention to. I was first introduced to Carson in high school through Tumblr excerpts. It was also how I discovered writers, from the now-clichéd to the formal avant-gardists: Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Frank O’Hara, Richard Siken, e.e. cummings, John Cage. But I think there’s a small lesson we can learn from Carson. Evading easy categorization can be a minor form of resistance—no matter where the purveyors of genre and algorithms try to slot you in.

The Dirt: Anne Carson, my captain!

 🌱 JOIN THE DIRTYVERSE

• Join our Discord and talk Dirt-y with us. It’s free to join! Paid subscribers have access to all channels.

• Follow @dirtyverse on Twitter for the latest news and Spotify for monthly curated playlists.

• Shop for some in-demand Dirt merch. 🍄