Notes from Source: The power of a poem so depends on its expressive performativity. “[Dave]’s, Lake Michigan, Early June” (published in the London Review of Books, October 2015) performs a flowing scene of non-identity through the mouthpiece of its speaker. (We w ill call this speaker “[Anne Carson]” for the sake of convenience, acknowledging our ignorance of her connection to the Anne w ho authors her.) How 1 mean non-identity: the poem per-forms a specific textual self, but it cannot exhaust the self that is its object, the self that the poem creates in its composition. Something of the self shimmers beyond the poem as a mystical lining. Some evoked feeling remains unspoken. What poetic language creates is greater than itself. Thinking, which at the trip’s outset was Anne’s goal, turns out to have been the evaded kernel that the poem circles around. The lake overwhelms the thinking self w ith its wealth of possible experiences, its crickets, its overhead lightning, its bone-chilling depth. It becomes for Anne the perfect place to arrest the question of thinking. (Of course, this excerpt investigates its own performative selfcontradiction: doesn’t one need to think in order to write? Doesn’t the composition of the poem demand thought to put it int») place?) Another question that reaches straight to the reader: Is there something traumatic or disturbing in thinking itself that she was avoiding by avoiding thinking? No answer. Only more avoidance when Anne invokes “some monk advice / to prevent / lofty thoughts on departure.” Leave them both behind, the thought and the thought of failing to think. Between two shores: Here, nature is the trigger for an unusual movement whose distinctions areunclear. What’s the difference between thinking and rethinking? Anne suggests that rethinking is not a matter of generation or creation, but a shift of perspective. After reading about uleac (leek or garlic)” and “luxus (excess, of’plants / grow ing obliquely or too much.’),” she begins “Rethinking garlic and bent plants.” We’re hardly able to find an instance of think- ing that is not rethinking: where did the original, unrepeated idea go? Poetic lan- guage turns the world over for us again and again after the world is realized as devoid of a first thought.

Further Notes: Place: Toronto Publisher: C the Visual Arts Foundation