“Watch this spillage”: allusion and intertext in the poetry of Anne Carson

Allusion and intertext are integral to Anne Carson’s poetry and manifest the erotics of “coming to know”. As such, they demand a level of critical attention that has conventionally been afforded more usually to the narrative aspects of her work. Carson's imagination necessarily works in dialogue with her theoretical and scholarly compulsions to create a unique dynamic, an ever-building connective framework of “triangulation-as-process”. Triangulation in cartography provides a paradigm to illustrate this dynamic. Triangulation-as-process provides an orthographic reading of the cultural space Carson opens for readers. Writers from disparate times and genres usually form the nexus of every particular allusive triangulation. I frame the instances of quotation and citation within the poetry as speech act, referencing the interest in theories regarding speech and writing evident in Carson’s work. I identify post-structural influences in the relational dynamics within the process of triangulation, and suggest that her abiding concerns regarding gender, hybridity, fluidity, movement and spatiality are fostered by this process. The mesh of allusions that Carson weaves within and between texts may activate further intertextual connections in the reader’s mind, moving beyond the promptings of authorial intent. Allusion and intertext facilitate the complicated cross-talk of contemporary and traditional narratives, evoking both a sense of flux and of history within her work. The homoerotic triangulations of “Sappho 31” and the Phaedrus are central to this process, allowing power lines to shift, and enacting Carson’s disruption of the narrative of normative heterosexuality. The dynamics of allusion and intertext require a significant shift in readers’ perspectives, and my readings of Carson seek to exemplify that necessary mobility.