“THE GLASS ESSAY” BY ANNE CARSON
REVIEW:
Just last week, I sat down in a workshop with eight or nine other students, awaiting the arrival of C.K. Williams, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. After a few quick introductions, he began to pass around a series of hefty packets which contained various poems and excerpts from larger works. He then asked us if we had gotten around to buying the necessary books for the course, one of which was Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony, and God. He said, “I’m going to do something I’ve never done before with a creative writing class, which is group the curriculum by theme. These first two weeks are going to be devoted entirely to metaphor. Metaphor, metaphor, metaphor forever!” He pounded the table with the palm of his hands to emphasize the importance of what he was saying. “You’re going to write a poem this week using metaphor, and you’re also going to read ‘The Glass Essay’ by Anne Carson.” He paused, lifting one hand and placing it against his forehead. “And you will see where it takes you.”
I was naturally skeptical of how life-changing metaphors could be. It was a tool that practically every poet and writer used. How could Anne Carson use metaphors any differently? That evening, having nothing better to do, I slipped Glass, Irony, and God off the bookshelf and began reading “The Glass Essay”. At first, I did what any impatient college student does, which is flip through the book to see exactly how long this poem was. Thirty-eight pages! I remember shaking my head and wanting to give up already, but I forced myself to read at least the first stanza, then the second, and then the third…
If a poem could grow out of a seed of metaphors, the result would be Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay”, a harrowing tale of love, loss, and isolation. First published in 1995, the poem tells the story of a woman who leaves her home to visit her aging mother on the moors. The narrator, who has just ended a relationship with her long-time boyfriend, is undergoing therapy for what the reader can only assume is a combination of depression and psychosis. During her stay, she takes frequent walks outside, rereads Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, and visits her ailing father who is suffering from advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Like Carson’s other works, “The Glass Essay” is a mesmerizing fusion of prose and poetry, with lines that shift effortlessly between the two literary forms, though never losing the crystalline transparency that pervades the whole piece like a refreshing breeze.
Bleak and unforgiving, the poem moves along at a crawling pace, itching to reach that definitive conclusion which will cause something to happen in a world of mundane nothings and dreary characters. First, there is the narrator who is haunted by memories of her failed romance, and now has begun to associate her life with that of Emily Bronte’s, devoid of love and meaning. Then, there is the narrator’s mother, an old-fashioned woman who cannot understand her daughter’s lifestyle, and who is trapped in much the same way as the narrator in a house that is bereft of life, laughter, and hope. She, too, is bound by some invisible chain to the third character in the poem, the narrator’s father, who is no longer himself, a victim of the degenerative illness that has taken over both his mind and body. These characters, though primarily the narrator, live in the graceful and poignant shadow of Emily Bronte whose presence infuses “The Glass Essay” like a rich fragrance, lending what would otherwise be a weak narrative its originality and gritty poetic language.
Metaphors are at the heart of Carson’s poem, and they build one on top of the other in stanzas that shift aimlessly between action (“I close the fridge door”) and fantastic imagery (“Bluish dusk fills the room like a sea slid back”). The narrative line which courses ruggedly through “The Glass Essay” is vaguer than those found in Carson’s later works, such as the verse novel Autobiography of Red (1998) and The Beauty of the Husband (2001), where she begins each poem with a quote by John Keats. If it were not for the frequent allusions to Emily Bronte and her life – some facts of which are extracted directly from research papers, others are simply the product of a hyperactive imagination – “The Glass Essay” would be a lost and insubstantial poem that would be forced to build its language and meaning on the rocky foundations of three half-formed, though certainly tragic, characters.
It is Emily Bronte and her legacy that make “The Glass Essay” the raw and emotion-driven product we are forced to remember and revisit over and over again. By piquing the curiosity of her readers, Carson forces us to think hard about the woman behind the tormented characters of Wuthering Heights and to see, in the three-dimensional quasi-reality of the vacant moors, the modern day anguish of the isolated narrator and her parents.
EXCERPT FROM THE POEM:
SHE
She lives on a moor in the north.
She lives alone.
Spring opens like a blade there.
I travel all day on trains and bring a lot of books –
some for my mother, some for me
including The Collected Works of Emily Bronte.
This is my favorite author.
Also my main fear, which I mean to confront.
Whenever I visit my mother
I feel I am turning into Emily Bronte,
my lonely life around me like a moor,
my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation
that dies when I come in the kitchen door.
What meat is it, Emily, we need?