![]() ![]() Carson’s strategy of pushing at the seams of poetry-in a work chock-full of narrative information and yet bounding forward in a lyric frenzy-challenges traditional genre distinctions. In attempting to delight (and surprise) her reader, Carson juggles these two different poetic plots or spheres, keeping them both in the air. Although she must sequence the endings, Carson suggests their simultaneity, their inclusivity, just as she has invited her reader to be a co-creator in composing the literary text, beginning with a Emily Dickinson poem which asks, ‘Can human nature not survive / Without a listener?’ In this tale, it is the listener who propels the speaker to speak. ![]() Carson explores this multiplicity in her dual endings: one more lyrical-the hero flying into the mouth of a volcano-and the other more narrative- driven-three friends strolling along a palisade. The form of the work is not easy to unpack because it is neither a poem nor a novel, but a hybrid. Canadian poet Anne Carson’s novel in verse, Autobiography of Red (1998), traces the development, in Bildungsroman fashion, of the mythical figure of Geryon, a winged red monster. ![]()
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