Nox

Nox, by Anne Carson is a unique collection of a various artistic mediums collected in a large book. The creative scrapbook like format was first published in 2010.  It is a new kind of poetry that breaks away from norms and has a style all its own. The is a highly personal art form, and the author even chose to use personal letters and belongings to express his feelings and various events in his life. One thing that was able to get though all of the art and color and complexity is that theme of family connection. The author’s relationship to his brother and his mother are extremely important throughout the book.

The role of images has a large part to do with how the story line progress and how his poetry is presented to the reader. In my personal opinion, while the imagery was lovely and especially the parts that were taken from his own life, at times perhaps it took away from the meaning of his words. The style of writing is a lot to taken in, however if one takes the time to absorb the material it is truly beautiful. One page that really stuck with me was the quote “If you are elegy begin with the blush” it was below a scanned image of various red crumpled up paper or maybe wax or leaves. This really struck me as a great use of imagery and text. Beautiful words coupled with an interesting imagery.

The non-traditional book format took some getting used to and I perhaps would have liked to be able to compare this text in the way it was presented to us, and in a more traditional book sense. When looking at this book for the fist time, I was not really sure what to do with it. Its an odd format for sure however interesting and unique. This scrapbook of words and images reads like a diary, an intimate inside look into the deepest thoughts of the author. The story is one of loss and emotional honesty. The incorporation of texts by Catallus felt as though a commentary on the life of Anne Carson. It felt as though the quotes were places extremely carefully and thoughtfully, leading to a more comprehensive understanding of the book as a whole. Greek definitions really made me think about the English language, it made me really think about word usage and I think that is something I would like to play with in my own work. How we use words and couple meanings can be incredible important and powerful in poetry and I would like to further explore that as a way to emphasis points in my own work. Carson also did a great job of intertwining two seemingly unrelated topics and making them work as a whole book. While the format at ties took away from the meaning I think I learned a lot about poetry and format, as well as how to incorporate multiple authors into a text. This was one of my favorite readings we have done this year.

Nox: A Question

I loved Anne Carson's Nox. A cliche often used in eulogies is that the deceased lives on through the memories and thoughts of the living. Such thinking to me is dishonest. It is selfish. It is human nature. However, Carson created a version of that cliche in a way that is so refreshing, and honest. It is unpretending. She is not trying to glorify her brother Michael's life in anyway. She is simply mourning.

Carson mourns by tying her feelings with that of another poet, albeit much older than she. Catullus' poem 101 was an elegy for his brother who also died on a foreign shore. It is really amazing that Carson links her own experience to another through history, literature, and in such a way, writes about the human experience as much as her own experience. By linking Nox to a celebrated Roman poet, she creates something much bigger, and meaningful that just a scrapbook for her own moping.

The book as a whole works to create this effect. The cover looks like a stone tablet, or a headstone. The  pieces of her brother's letters, pictures, paintings. But, with these reminders of Michael as a person is a question. How do you mourn the passing of a brother who has disappeared from your life a long time ago? Carson asks this implicitly as she gradually, with many mysteries that we do not necessarily need to know, reveals the life of Michael: why he left, where he is, what he is doing. They have only heard from him a couple of times in twenty two years.

I think each page is a poem, if only because everything relates to a word in Catullus' poem 101. Although she writes in prose, there is a clear purpose in each word that she writes. The book is carefully crafted, and a true analysis of mourning. A perennial question in Nox is: How should we deal with death? What is the right approach? After all, mourning is an act that only helps the living; the dead could care less. But, when you cannot communicate with someone anymore, how do you move on?

The thing I appreciate most about Carson's Nox is that she doesn't assume. People who are attacked, or hurt by death are often defensive. But, Carson simply gives the reader things to process, as she must have done when she got the news. Each word in Catullus' poem is defined. Carson creates a new form of poetry that incorporates story-telling, prose, all kinds of visuals. The pictures, paintings, all of the visuals add to the story.Even the form of the book is unique in that it opens up like an accordion. Carson does not pretend to answer the question of "What should I do?" Nox is the asking of that question.

Nox- A New Kind of Art

Nox, by Anne Carson, is an artistic display combining different visual and literary art to create a new kind of poetic experience for her readers. The format of the book in and of itself is a large factor that contributes to the unique experience of reading her book. It is not a book bound to a straight spine, it is a box, which one has to open and go inside of in order to get to the actual book, which is one large, accordion shaped stream of paper with different pictures and words written in different ways on each fold. There are pictures of torn pieces of letters from her deceased brother, whom she was estranged from, and, on some pages, there are words highlighted from the letters and used in her own accounts of his life.

One of the things about this book that I found to be so impressive, was that the story of the relationship between the brother, who had run away and never come back, and the author and her mother, and between the authors brother and his deceased love, then between the author and her brother’s widow, was conveyed to the reader through actual pictures and clippings from letters and reiterations of specific thoughts and feelings that had larger impact than others. The placement of these letters, thoughts, words, pictures, and drawings, allowed the reader to be surprised and filled with a small kind of suspense with the turning of each page. There was something new and meaningful, conveyed in different manners, on every page. This book did not simply hand the story, poetry, and art to the reader, it placed emotional triggers in places the reader had to pay attention to and look for.

            Carson turned her pain and confusion into a kind of scrapbook, which she shared with the world by having it published. While reading it, it feels as though you are peaking into someone’s deepest thoughts and desires. To me, it almost felt as if I was reading her diary. Nox was so personalized in everyway, it felt as though I was being intrusive in reading through it. There were staple marks where there had been no staples, family photos (with or without descriptions of their significance), drawings, and excerpts of text following the chronological story of Carson’s experience, or lack there of, with her brother.

            This is a story about loss, but not the way that we usually think of loss. Usually we think of the loss of a sibling in a similar way as losing a best friend, but that is not always the case. This is a story about the loss of someone who was connected to the author by blood, whom she saw grow up and lived with for many years, and whom, culturally and societally, she was expected to have a relationship with; but she had no real relationship with him. She had no great connection with him, and yet she felt this loss strongly and painfully enough to make a beautiful work of art as a tribute to him and their lives and relationships together as she understood them.

Learning to Unlayer

Nox is not a book. It is an experience. Anne Carson's box, published accordion style, is the result of her attempt to translate an Ancient Greek work by Castullus and it's collision with the discovery of her own brother's death. The box itself, and notice I won't ever quite call it a book, is a essentially a color scan of a notebook containing collaged elements of her brother's life, the process of poem translation, her own reflections, and other artifacts. Here, Carson attempts not only to create a work commenting on the mourning process, but seeks to recreate the mourning process for her audience.

At first encounter with the box of emotions that is Nox, I wasn't quite sure how to go about looking at it. I opened the box, set it on the floor, grabbed the first page and stood up. The pages fell away from me in a zigzag, and I stood simply looking at the unfolded pieces head at a 90 degree angle, creating a cramp in my neck that still hasn't quite gone away. Then I refolded the whole thing carefully, swept and mopped my floors, and spread it out. I unfolded a series of pages, and then recreased at specific points to bring certain sections closer together. I found myself drawn to the short, one line poem-like-things that punctuated the book, so I tried to pair them with images, definitions, or reflections that gave them more meaning to me.

In short, the box was a process of connecting and creating meaning, not a reading. As I explored Carson's mourning period, I began to recognize my own mourning process through the way I dealt with the box: First I try to look at the whole damn thing at an awkward angle, then I do a little bit of cleaning, then I move laterally while pulling certain things together. This is interesting, but not necessarily definitive. I decided that I wanted to make it definitive. So I began to give the box to my friends, one by one, without explanation, and watch the way they encountered it.

Some of them took one look at the box and began to clean, realizing that this was sure to be a messy endeavor. Some of them skipped the cleaning and opened it straight away, draping the length of the box across piles of clothes, furniture, text books, realizing that the mess would come whether they were prepared or not. Some chose to simply not unfold, reading it much like a chapbook by flipping folded pages. Half of them read and asked me questions about the text, the other half simply glanced and exclaimed over the staples, folds, crumples, and erasure marks.

This is, of course, a giant metaphor for the unique way in which we all experience loss. There isn't one way to mourn, isn't a definitive answer to the steps we should take to reach a conclusion for that loss. Carson recognized the limitations of the classical chapbook form: it virtually requires the audience to start at a beginning and end at an end. That isn't life, that isn't death, and that certainly isn't mourning.

So this is what I got out of reading this box: a message doesn't have to be written in text. As a writer, I should make sure that the text helps to create the message, as Carson did with her rumination on history and mourning and not knowing how to loose someone you had already lost. But I should also make sure that the experience is just as representative of the message, if not moreso. I have begun, already, to play with the structure of my recent pieces and hand them to people without comment, allowing me to watch and understand the way they experience the text as something that impacts what they get out of it. Rejecting form does not necessarily mean confusion or chaos (but it can, if that's what you want) but rather the freedom to individualize the response which is a message in and of itself.

Translation and History in Nox.

Nox is a collaborative piece of poetry intertwining multiple texts by Catallus and multiple antiquity accounts, or at least in reference to them by Anne Carson. The piece follows the thoughts and recollections of both her brother after his death and the aftermath of his death and its effect on her and his widow. As an entity, the entire piece is understandably a difficult beast to digest as far as literary and expressive acumen goes, but ultimately a poignant endeavor that contains many interesting facets to how it works.

Primarily, the use of the greek definitions on initial glance don't seem very illuminating if not scrutinized carefully, but then when one notices how the definitions feel less and less akin to the actual structure of a translating dictionary reference, they become highly revelatory. Each excerpt correlates to the tone or overarching impact of the letter or poem sharing the page with it. For example, in the translation of "Sunt" are the variations of phrases containing that word, going along the traditional mode of concentrating on particular phrases using the word, of which include "hoc est, id est, nox est that is; (with numerals) to be equal to; make up" and the general translation of "among the living; (of things) to be in existence" ( Carson 137). On the opposite page, where lies the poem, is a small anecdote retracing the author's brother back to his childhood when "he mistook the rules [and] came home with a bloody nose" and the particular episode where he is alienated and intentionally left behind by the "older boys gazing down" on him (Carson 138). Momentary definitions such as this give impact to the anecdote given because they give a sense of clarity to the retrospective event in construing events that have led up to the current moment.

However, it becomes necessary to identify the reasoning behind the use of the Greek definitions in the first place rather than outright describing in laymen terms the emotional tension in each of these pieces offered. Carson actually outright explained through her poetry the emotional and literary reasoning for the scraps of language translation, which may or may not be contrived rather than genuine, when she claims how she "studies his sentences the ones [she] remembers as if [she'd] been asked to translate them" because how few they were( Carson 127). This effect is to literally to show this effort by ensconcing the meaning of their relationship and his actions in another language, and the reason Greek is chosen perhaps correlates with the excerpts of the historian Herodutus and how he proclaims that history's invective is so that "deeds done by men not go extinct nor great astonishing works produced by Greeks and barbarians vanish [...] of what cause they went to war with one another" (Carson 35). Carson wants to read her brother's life like one would a greek historical antique or document, using different languages to translate the actions and causes so that the reader can process better what they mean and how they impact their subjects.

Nox is a book that does many things correct, and there are slight nuances, acts of writing and cohesion that are very demure in revealing their meaning without asking the reader to first understand the purpose of all these larger components that define the aesthetic of the text. The language aspect acts not only as our guide, but as hers as well to communicate with someone she lost contact with long ago, lost to the world in antiquity, and has left so little behind, like a civilization.

Void

Anne Carson’s Nox is truly a work of artistic genius. Published as a response to her brother’s death more than a translation of Catullus’ poems, Carson manages to bring together two elements—an academic/artistic piece and a personal/emotional influence—to create something entirely different from what both individual sections mean by themselves.

What I found most interesting about Nox was that it’s not explicitly writing. It is the piecing together of a number of elements, incorporating visual artistry just as much as actual words on a page, and in that craft, creating what I believe is not necessarily a poem, but poetry. In a case like this, a distinction must be made—a poem, I think, can be clearly classified as such. It has a structure (even if that structure is freeform and exploratory) and it is intentionally created as a poem. While Nox incorporates poetry, I feel as though as a cohesive work, it is neither a collection of poems nor is it a poem in and of itself. However, its essence is poetic.

What separates this book from feeling like a scrapbook or something without emotional value to the world at large is that it has been crafted very deliberately: Carson could have written a straight poem about her brother, or she could have collected everything about her brother and published it as something without direct artistic merit, but she chose to make a project out of it—though little actual writing went into this in that we can’t see Carson’s words trying the entire story together, it is her effort and direction that makes this such a profoundly moving piece.

I think there’s a lot to take from this kind of style—I won’t go out of my way to completely remove my own words from my piece, but Carson has managed to tie two unrelated topics with her own sentiments and make it coherent and valuable, and that is incredibly impressive to me.

Filling a Void: Nox and Emptiness

Carson’s Nox is the first thing we’ve read for this class that was more than just literature—it is truly art. While it definitely wasn’t my favorite text of the semester (to be honest, it’s my least favorite), there were qualities that I both enjoyed and respected.

Despite Carson including such little, fragmented pieces of her communication with her brother, I was honestly moved by the piece regardless. What Carson does so effectively is let the artifacts speak for themselves, and rather than telling us how to feel, or showing us how to feel, she allows us to fill in the blanks ourselves. The effectiveness of this style was very surprising to me. I was at first really frustrated by the utter lack and the way this was more visually appealing than it was literarily appealing, but the few words provided by the letters, the fragmentedness of it, and all of the things I disliked about the beginning of it had me feeling empathetic and overwhelmed with grief for Carson concerning the death of her brother. It seemed like a book filled with so much contemplation and regret; I got a sense that Carson was showing us how little she communicated with her brother because she wished she had spoken to him more, or tried harder for him, or hadn’t been so angry with him, or hadn’t been so uncomfortable around him. The fact that she knows so little about her brother gives him this flighty, ghost-like feeling, which is so appropriate for this piece. I really did enjoy the way the emptiness and lack of memories spoke so strongly rather than left me disappointed by the end of the piece.  

However, I tend to look at things from strictly a literature-focused lens (I’m an English major, not an art major, after all), and I felt like withholding its qualities as a visual art piece, it wasn’t really a quality work. I understand that it was a scrapbook—its personal, enclosed aspects were very clear and as mentioned, emotionally moving—but contextually it wasn’t doing much for me. I would have loved to see more of Carson’s mind, maybe more poetry, intermingling with the bits of letters he reveals to us. Yes, there was a bit of that strewn throughout the work, but I guess I would have loved to see more of a literary presence in this book. For a book assigned to a creative writing class, this lacked creative writing.

I think that what I would take from Anne Carson’s Nox and apply to my own writing would be the skill of evoking strong emotion out of emptiness. I have the tendency of creating tension and feeling with an overabundance of information, words, etc., via complicated syntax and description. While of course that’s just my style and preference, I’d really like to explore the idea of omitting—of telling less rather than more—and allowing the void to speak for itself. Carson does this so well, that I think it would be an effective strategy for any writer wanting to evoke emotions from inside of the reader rather than clearly directing them in their work. 

Amy's Collaboration with Anne Sexton

I collaborated with Anne sexton and her poem "A story for rose and her midnight flight to Boston" 

In case you guys can't read the text ill post it here:
The Highlighted parts are what I kept from Anne Sexton's poem

A Story for Rose on the Midnight Flight to Boston

Until tonight they were separate specialties,

different stories, the best of their own worst. 


Riding my warm cabin home, I remember Betsy's

laughter; she laughed as you did, Rose, at the first

story. Someday, I promised her, I'll be someone

going somewhere and we plotted it in the humdrum

school for proper girls. The next April the plane

bucked me like a horse, my elevators turned

and fear blew down my throat, that last profane

gauge of a stomach coming up. And then returned

to land, as unlovely as any seasick sailor,

sincerely eighteen; my first story, my funny failure. 


Maybe Rose, there is always another story, 


better unsaid, grim or flat or predatory. 


Half a mile down the lights of the in-between cities


turn up their eyes at me. And I remember Betsy's


story, the April night of the civilian air crash 


and her sudden name misspelled in the evening paper, 


the interior of shock and the paper gone in the trash 


ten years now. She used the return ticket I gave her. 


This was the rude kill of her; two planes cracking 


in mid-air over Washington, like blind birds. 


And the picking up afterwards, the morticians tracking 


bodies in the Potomac and piecing them like boards 


to make a leg or a face. There is only her miniature 


photograph left, too long now for fear to remember. 


Special tonight because I made her into a story 


that I grew to know and savor. 


A reason to worry, 


Rose, when you fix an old death like that, 


and outliving the impact, to find you've pretended. 


We bank over Boston. I am safe. I put on my hat. 


I am almost someone going home.

 The story has ended.