Anne Carson's "1 = 1" a Delightful Prose Poem

A WRITER'S WIT
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
Born January 11, 1842

New Yorker Fiction 2016

January 11, 2015, Anne Carson, “1 = 1”:  This work rather resembles a prose poem in which a female persona speaks of swimming, refugees, chalk, and foxes. ¶ The poet, yet using also the tools of fiction, weaves together a morning in which the persona swims in a lake:

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“She peels a swim cap onto her head, goggles, enters the water, which is cold but not shocking. Swims” (61).

reads of European refugees:

“Back at home, the newspapers, front-page photos of a train car in Europe jammed floor to door with escaped victims of a war zone farther south . . . [f]ilthy families and souls in despair pressed flat against one another in the grip to survive, uncountable arms and legs, torn-open eyes . . . .” (61).

tells of her mushroom-loving neighbor, Comrade Chandler:

“ . . . . he had been able to see a patch of mushrooms, boletus, from his window and he used to go hunting for those in the woods with his mother when he was a kid and it made him sad . . . John Cage was out mushrooming with his mother, after an hour or so she turns to him and says, We can always go to the store and buy some real ones” (62).

and the fox Chandler draws on the pavement with colored chalk:

“The finished fox drawing is under a streetlamp. It glows. He has used some sort of phosphorescent chalk, and the fox, swimming in a lucent blue-green jelly, has a look on its face of escaping all possible explanations” (62).

Carson’s collection of performance pieces and other works, Float, will be published later in 2016.
Illustration, Jon Gray/Gray 318.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
 
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"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
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