LESLIE JAMISON
A PRIMAL PART of me feels spoken to by the poet Anne Carson. It’s the part of me that loved Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco, and then Jeanette Winterson, when I was younger—the hungry open mouth inside of me that wants to hear desire and heartbreak spoken about in certain ways. I came to need more nuanced, self-aware voices on these subjects, but the impulse is the same: a longing to hear somebody utter extreme expressions of painful feeling. I stand behind wanting to find company in that, and somehow Carson validates those prior versions of myself, the attraction to the old heroes of my youth.
Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” one of her strange, nongenre prose poem masterpieces, confronts a huge and terrible heartbreak. In snapshots, you see the poem’s speaker visiting her mother in this desolate, moorish locale. (The piece is very much in conversation with Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights.) She’s trying to make sense of a love affair that’s fallen apart, spending time with her mother inside this state of loss.
I’ve taught this piece so many times that now I can hear student voices layered over my experience of it. I remember being in a classroom in France, looking at a section where the narrator is remembering her love affair:
I can feel that other day running underneath this one
like an old videotape—here we go fast around the last corner
up the hill to his house, shadows
of limes and roses blowing in the car window
and music spraying from the radio and him
singing and touching my left hand to his lips.
I felt like I was up there trying to make a case for how the things we might think are sappy and sentimental can actually become part of a totally nuanced vision. But one of my students didn’t think Carson gets away with this nostalgic depiction of love. “I think it’s just sappy and sentimental,” she said. That ambivalence is at work inside the poem, too. “The Glass Essay” resonates with passionate feeling, but also resonates with an awareness that’s ashamed of having or courting too much feeling. At one point, the mother acts as the voice of that awareness:
You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
Why hold onto all that? There’s a shame around staying too long in a feeling of pain. But I love the speaker’s response—“Where can I put it down?”—which feels like a good one to keep in your back pocket if you’re ever accused of being melodramatic. “It pains me to record this, / I am not a melodramatic person,” she writes, later, which is another articulation of the same idea: I want to tell you how much it hurts, but I’m also going to tell you that there is a voice inside of me, dogging me at every moment about trying too hard to tell you how much it hurts. Experiencing intense feeling, and at the same time processing those voices shaming you for having too much feeling—both are part of the experience of the poem, and they don’t necessarily detract from each other.
Carson’s mode of self-awareness doesn’t apologize for its emotion. She simply acknowledges that, whenever we feel, we do so in a way that anticipates the gaze of others—as well as anticipates the empathy or lack of empathy we’ll encounter there. I feel some version of this happening when she writes:
When Law left I felt so bad I thought I would die.
This is not uncommon.
These lines feel willfully melodramatic. It’s almost like saying: I’m not going to dress up this emotion for you in original language, or in a cool metaphoric formulation. Carson’s language is so surprising—you already know she can take any feeling and give it to you in some crazy, stylized way. Instead, she says, “I thought I would die.” It’s so willfully plain. There’s something moving to me about saying it so embarrassingly straight.
The following line, “This is not uncommon,” can be read so many different ways. The tone might be clinical or dismissive, as in, this is not an uncommon symptom of the disease of heartbreak. But it’s also an acknowledgment that what she’s going through is in no way extraordinary. It’s something that’s been felt before, and it’ll be felt again. Yet she owns this commonness, without apologizing for it, relinquishing it, or dismissing it.
I really believe that there are extraordinary things to be said about deeply ordinary experiences. When I teach nonfiction, the biggest student conundrum around personal writing is: Why would anybody care about what happened to me? There’s a shame around just having lived an ordinary life. And it’s not like they’re wrong—it is going to be harder for them to get a book deal, say, for their memoir of living in the suburbs. But the paralyzing anxiety I hear students articulate, and also feel in myself, is what “this is not uncommon” speaks to: the experience of trying to find words for an emotion that mattered so much, even while recognizing it’s the most common thing in the world.
I think I have an obsession with recuperating commonness. The fact that something is frequently articulated or frequently felt is not a reason to back away from trying to articulate it, or express it, or own how intense it is.
Of course, if “I felt so bad I thought I would die” was a piece of deeply familiar, ordinary language in a sea of ordinary, melodramatic language, it wouldn’t have the same impact. But we’re in the hands of a writer who uses figurations like “blue and green lozenges of April heat” or “the videotape jerks to a halt / like a glass slide under a drop of blood.” Disrupting that lyric, super-cerebral voice to say something so bluntly—that’s part of how she pulls this off. The collision of the lyric voice with the plainspoken “I thought I would die” is part of the electricity for me.
The whole poem feels like a self in conversation—not just with other, external voices, but with different parts of itself. There’s the section where a part of the speaker that wants to linger inside nostalgia bucks against the part that wants to let go:
I can feel that beauty’s
heart beating inside mine as she presses into his arms in the high blue room—
No, I say aloud. I force my arms down
through air which is suddenly cold and heavy as water
That dash, and then the no, is so emotionally charged for me. It rings so true to that experience of getting lost in nostalgia for something that was, and then telling yourself to stop. You reexperience the grief in that moment of the dash—no, it’s not there anymore. These lines illuminate the actual psychological conflict of wanting to remember, but at the same time calling upon yourself to stop indulging in that remembrance.
When I write, I sometimes feel a kind of self-awareness that draws me out of an emotion, or a moment, that can start to feel like apologizing for what’s just been said, or ironically scare-quoting it. That can have a detrimental effect, especially on first drafting. I’ve learned the first draft in my process has to be the part where I don’t say no to anything, where I let myself write deeply into a feeling, spend as long as I want on a scene or emotion, follow as many associations as I want—even if some part of me knows my editing self, three drafts from now, will think it’s facile or self-indulgent. The “no” self definitely has a role to play, but for me it comes in afterward, in later drafts, where I’m asking harder questions about what really needs to be there.
I’ve found it’s important to risk saying too much. In my students’ work, I can see the moments when they offer an extremely condensed version of something out of an anxiety that it’s not compelling, or that it’s trite. But what I often find is that, in condensing it, they have made it precisely the trite thing they feared it would be. “I had broken up with a guy and it was hard to get over”: Often giving just one sentence stems from a reluctance to go on and on about ordinary heartbreak, but the sentiment is made totally uninteresting by being stated in an extremely general way. “The Glass Essay” is a refusal to stop at vague summation. By going so deep, the poem allows a familiar emotion to become something you haven’t ever seen before, not quite like this.
My teacher Charlie D’Ambrosio once told me something I’ve thought about many times, something it always feels like he’s re-saying to me again because the advice comes alive in a different way in relation to each particular situation: The problem with an essay can become its subject. It’s the idea that if you hear a critical voice in you saying “no,” it doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t go there. It just means that you should also make the piece about the resistance itself. “The Glass Essay” does that in powerful ways, bringing the resistance into the body of the text rather than just capitulating to its harsh editor critiques. You see it in the “no” moment, in “I am not a melodramatic person,” in the moment where the mother says, “Why hold onto all that?” It can be telling to leave the process of overcoming shame as something legible on the page, rather than dissolving the shame completely—as if it had never been. Especially when shame stems from a fear of being marked as a bad or damaged person, of looking weak or self-indulgent. Those constricting forces can be worth punching through, even if they leave a trace on the page—to see what kind of expression is possible on the other side.
I usually revise personal pieces of writing over a much, much longer period than reported or critical pieces because time permits a more nuanced gaze, more usefully complex. The more time you have away from something, the easier it is to let go of stuff that seems unnecessary. When you’re in the immediate aftermath of reporting or writing something, so much still seems luminous or precious. I think there’s an additional layer of use when it comes to personal experience: You just see the events of your own life so differently after more years have passed. That doesn’t mean that the truest version of an event is going to be the version you write when you’re eighty. But your perspective keeps changing. I would be so interested in a book that worked like a series of tree rings: Take an incident and write about it a year afterward, five years afterward, ten years afterward, fifteen years afterward, and the book becomes all those narratives accumulated.
The summer that I spent the most concerted time with “The Glass Essay” was the summer of 2012, when I was writing an essay called “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain.” It was mammoth and unruly and chaotic. In my heart, I knew I was after something urgent—something deeply connected to these questions of pain and its articulation, deeply connected to feeling shame at that articulation—and I had all these pieces I wanted to arrange, but no idea about how to arrange them. I was eventually saved by an idea that Carson keeps coming back to in her poem: the Nudes.
Each morning a vision came to me.
Gradually I understood that these were naked glimpses of my soul.
I called them Nudes.
Nude #1. Woman alone on a hill.
She stands into the wind.
There are thirteen Nudes in the poem, female self-portraits posed in various attitudes of pain, and they became an organizing principle for me—helping me to experience the essay not just as a beautiful object in its own right, but as a beautiful tool that arranges its chaotic material in a series of snapshots of woundedness. Part of what I love about the Nudes in this poem is how they break down the binary between pain and beauty. They’re raw soul, but also totally crafted and made. The self in the center is completely exposed, but it’s also the product of artifice. That’s the heart of what I love in Carson: Her stuff feels so emotional and artistically rendered at once. The craft and the feeling don’t come at the expense of one another—they fuel each other. That’s what I want to do when I write.