Thursday, May 3, 2012

Jezebel

No One Could Relax around Jezebel, Anne Carson's new poem above, appeared last week in the London Review of Books.

Carson organized lines into "Stacks" rather than stanzas, each with its own subtitle:

Shame Stack
Stack of What Made Jezebel Jezebel
Cheapjack Stack
Thunderstorm Stack

Of course this piece did not originally print white on black. That is my own (possibly impertinent) way of making the form more apparent in this miniature online environment. And anyway, those concrete spatial choices are, I think, sufficiently beautiful in themselves just to look at as shapes. But (in addition) once the image has been clicked up or zoomed, then this rewarding text (derived from one of the more vicious & misogynistic stories of the Old Testament) can be savored not only as form but as quasi-narrative wedded to form.