Plainwater (Vintage Contemporaries): Essays and Poetry

Product Information

Currie, Robert (2012). "The Artist Searches etc. Water Log". In Sillars, Laurence (ed.). Jim Shaw: The Rinse Cycle. London: Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in collaboration with Koenig Books. pp.136–137. ISBN 978-3-86335-277-6.

Plainwater, subtitled “Essays and Poetry,” opens with a series of poems inspired by fragments from an ancient poet, to which are added “interviews” with the poet. The volume ends with a long prose piece on “The Anthropology of Water” (the human significance of water), which is subdivided into three parts. The celebrated “Kinds of Water” is about the pilgrim road to Compostella, with a personal introduction; “Just for the Thrill: An Essay on the Difference Between Men and Women” is a parallel study of camping in North America; “Swimming” is a brief essay that acts as a kind of memoir of Carson’s older brother, as if he were the author as well as the swimmer. “Short Talks” could be characterized as a series of prose poems, but also as a series of essays. Selections have been reprinted in anthologies of American poetry and short stories. The lyrics gathered in “The Life of Towns” offer three dozen different lines of perspective on the phenomenon of a collective character. Those in “Canicula di Anna” (literally, “the dog days of Anna”) have fifty-three carefully imagined moments in the life of a woman in sixteenth century Italy. Eastham, Ben; Testard, Jacques, eds. (2017). The White Review Anthology. London: The White Review. ISBN 978-0995743717. Summer 1996). "TV Men: Artaud". The Iowa Review. 26 (2): 29–30. doi: 10.17077/0021-065X.4582 . Retrieved 12 July 2020.Robert Currie: The idea of pilgrimage is interesting to me because I was working on a piece a few years ago with another artist where we were fascinated with this nun, and we were trying to figure out how to film her. She was quite elderly, and she wanted to go on this particular pilgrimage, but Mother Superior wouldn’t let her. So she walked the interior of the monastery until she covered the distance of the pilgrimage. So she had her pilgrimage, but she did it on her own, within the walls of the monastery, which I thought was kind of amazing. I think most writers live half lives. You’re half in your life and half in your head, going on with what you’ve been writing. Winter 1992). "The Brainsex Paintings: Mimnermos (Translation, Essay, Interview)". Raritan. 11 (3): 1–15. August 2002). " 'Swimming Circles in Copenhagen: A Sonnet Sequence ', 'Spring Break: Swallow Song ' ". London Review of Books. 24 (15): 33 . Retrieved 8 September 2020. Rankine, Claudia. " The Mile-Long Opera: Libretto and Prose Pieces" (PDF). The Mile-Long Opera . Retrieved 17 July 2020. April 2002). "Ode to the Sublime Monica Vitti". London Review of Books. 24 (8): 8 . Retrieved 8 September 2020.

October 2019). "Final Choral Ode from Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (A Translation of Euripides' Helen)". London Review of Books. 41 (20) . Retrieved 9 September 2020. February 2007). "Alive That Time". London Review of Books. 29 (3): 24 . Retrieved 9 September 2020. May 2006). "Two Poems by Emile Nelligan". London Review of Books. 28 (9): 12 . Retrieved 9 September 2020. Spring 1980). "Aphrodite and After". Phoenix. Classical Association of Canada. 34 (1): 1–19. doi: 10.2307/1087755. JSTOR 1087755. [Published under the name Anne Giacomelli]

Summer 1987). "Kinds of Water". Grand Street. Ben Sonnenberg. 6 (4): 177–212. doi: 10.2307/25007020. JSTOR 25007020. An empty house is indefinite as a horse. It is an echo chamber, born to convince us of ourselves. As I was saying that, I was distracted. I was withdrawing into boxes that will later be unboxed. It is easy to be distracted by random objects on the walls. The bedside table spilling over with books and coffee mugs. Kitchen, Judith; Jones, Mary Paumier, eds. (1999). In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 9780393319071. The word “pilgrim” derives from the Latin “peregrinus,” meaning “foreign.” A foreigner moves across the earth, through a new land, seeking what? Near the beginning of the journey, Carson writes, “Spanish bread is the same color as the stones that lie along the roadside—gold. True, I often mistake stones for bread. Pilgrims’ hunger is a curious thing.” Though primary observation drives the speaker forward, it is not to be relied upon: “Breaking points appear.” The poetry and prose collected in Plainwater are a testament to the extraordinary imagination of Anne Carson, a writer described by Michael Ondaatje as "the most exciting poet writing in English today." Succinct and astonishingly beautiful, these pieces stretch the boundaries of language and literary form, while juxtaposing classical and modern traditions.

Anne Carson: I follow the thought, whatever that thought is, through whatever story occurs to me to attach to it, but the parts that attract me are the parts that are unknown, fundamentally. And so it’s just searching around in those dark subjects for whatever I can figure out to think about them. This spring, I started teaching an undergraduate class at NYU, assembled around ideas of the poetry and prose of pilgrimage and stasis. Naturally, I assigned excerpts from Plainwater, and to my delight, Anne Carson and Robert Currie accepted my invitation for a class visit. In the conversation below, a few of the students and I talk to Carson and Currie about the color red, finding a lyric voice, their collaborative creative process, and more. Williford, Lex; Martone, Michael, eds. (2007). Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present. New York: Touchstone – Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4165-3174-6 . Retrieved 17 July 2020. August 2015). "Each Day Unexpected Salvation (John Cage)". The New Yorker. p.32 . Retrieved 11 July 2020.

Summer 1984). "The Burners: A Reading of Bacchylides' Third Epinician Ode". Phoenix. Classical Association of Canada. 38 (2): 111–19. doi: 10.2307/1088895. JSTOR 1088895. Ziegler, Alan, ed. (2014). Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms. New York: Persea Books. ISBN 9780892554324. Writings [ edit ] List of scholarship, poetry, essays, novels, scripts, libretti, plays, and comic books Gilbert, Sandra M.; Gubar, Susan, eds. (2007). The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English (Volume 2: Early Twentieth-Century Through Contemporary) (Thirded.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company. pp.1346–1362 . Retrieved 7 September 2020. Spring 1990). "Now What?". Grand Street. Ben Sonnenberg. 9 (3): 43–5. doi: 10.2307/25007365. JSTOR 25007365.