Bakkhai Variations:
Villanova Theatre
Anne Carson bio
Born in 1950 in Toronto, ON, Anne Carson quickly took to classical literature. She credits a high school Latin instructor for bringing her into this world. Even when her work is not directly related to ancient texts, the influence of classical writers is apparent. While she now holds a post teaching creative writing at NYU, Carson had a rocky relationship with academia for much of her early life. She left the University of Toronto BA program for a time after her first year and then again after her second curricular year due to disagreements about required courses. She did eventually return and receive a BA in 1975, an MA in 1975, and her PhD in 1981 all from University of Toronto.
Her first official publication, Eros the Bittersweet, burst her onto the international literary scene in 1986. Widely considered one of the best nonfiction books of the 20th century, the book traces the use and meaning of the Greek word eros throughout history. After Eros, Carson continued to publish poetry, essays, and novels including Plainwater (1995) and Autobiography of Red (1998). She pivoted to directly rendering classical texts at the turn of the 21st century with her translation of Electra (2001). She tended to favor the works of Euripides, going so far as to recreate Aeschylus’ Oresteia by combining passages from Euripides’ Agamemnon, Elektra, and Orestes (2009). The play Villanova Theatre is producing this fall, her translation of Bakkhai (2017), is her most recent published work to date.
Her other work can be broadly described as varied and incisive. English scholar Robert Gilbert praises how Carson “deploys her scholarly voice as a dramatic instrument whose expressive power lies partly in its fragility.” She has been recognized many times, including receiving a MacArthur Grant in 2000 and being inducted into the Order of Canada in 2002. While much more could be said about this dynamic artist and scholar, Anne Carson’s prowess beyond the master stroke of Bakkhai can be summarized by her recent poem, Pronoun Envy, provided below.
Pronoun Envy
by Anne Carson
February 3, 2014
is a phrase
coined by Cal Watkins
of the Harvard Linguistics Department
in November 1971
to disparage
certain concerns
of the female students
of Harvard Divinity School.
In a world
where God is “He”
and everyone else
“mankind,”
what chance
do we have for
a bit of attention?
seemed to be their question.
Cal Watkins—
how patient a man_—_
did not say you carry-tale mumble-
news mar-plot find-fault spoil-
sports!
but rather that
pronouns themselves were
not to blame. It’s the Indo-
European system of markedness.
A binary system.
Which regards masculine as the
unmarked gender. As if all
the creatures in the world
were either zippers
or olives,
except
way back in the Indus Valley
in 5000 B.C. we decided
to call them zippers
and non-zippers.
By 1971
the non-zippers
were getting restless.
They began bringing
kazoos to their lectures
to drown out certain pronouns
and masculine generics.
Now, a kazoo
is a toy, a noisemaker.
It scrubs away the air
in that place.
What
can you do
with a piece of scrubbed-away air?
Various things.
You can fill it with neologisms.
Or with re-analysis. Or with
exaptation.
Let’s explore
exaptation. To exapt
is to adapt in an outward direction.
You may have seen
pictures of a kind of dinosaur
called the archaeopteryx.
Which had feathers
but did not fly.
Its feathers kept the archaeopteryx
warm.
Meanwhile everywhere
ice was melting.
Feathers for
warmth
became redundant.
One night
the archaeopteryx
exapted its feathers—as wings_—_and
over
the yards of Harvard
rose divinity students
in violent flight,
changing everything,
changing nothing,
soaring and banking
under the moon,
intending (no
doubt) to never come back
but of course
that proved impossible.
They did come back,
they finished their degrees,
they used their wings
to shoot pronouns around
on a big hockey rink
back of the Divinity School.
Nightcold
rushes onto my forehead
and an area of emotion up under
my tongue
when I
recall those games.
But because a binary system
uses numbers in base 2,
requiring
only 1 and 0
to express its differential,
we had to score our games
in scandal and sadness,
in tungsten and long twisting
streets, in bride-habited,
maiden-hearted, thief-stolen,
wind-led, marble-constant
wonder-wounded, to-and-fro-
conflicting, world-without-end
marks
of our own invention.
And to this day
if you look behind the Divinity
School (and if you know
what to look for)
you may see a slight residue of
those nights.
Here’s
what to look for:
a pony
standing quiet with one ear
bent.
He seems to have
a bit of capture caught in it.
He shakes his head and all around
you, soaking
the night
and the yards and whatever is
alienable or inalienable there,
comes
a smell like
a new tuxedo