SOURCE: Jennings, Chris. “The Erotic Poetics of Anne Carson.” University of Toronto Quarterly 70, no. 4 (fall 2001): 923-36.

In the following essay, Jennings examines the theme of desire in Carson's poetry, noting that Carson's “unchanging desire … for her immediate subject” infuses her work with a palpable sense of eroticism.

To explain what I do is simple enough. A scholar is someone who takes a position. From which position, certain lines become visible. You will at first think I am painting the lines myself; it's not so. I merely know where to stand to see the lines that are there. And the mysterious thing, it is a very mysterious thing, is how these lines do paint themselves.

Anne Carson, ‘The Life of Towns,’ Plainwater

Discussing Sappho's fragment 31 near the beginning of Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson provides a figure for eros that illuminates a recurring pattern in her own poetics. In...