Carson's Coded Poetry: A Review of Ciarán Carson's Recent Visit to Georgetown

Ciarán Carson was a firecracker! My impression of his work after reading First Language was positive, but hearing him speak about his method and science of writing left me wildly enthusiastic about him and his work. In my original reading of his work I voiced the following review: “His poems are playful; he uses words in new contexts, unexpected placements that add depth and reflection to his poems”. After hearing him speak about his work, I found confirmation in my casual observation. Carson raved about his affinity for dictionaries and thesauruses—resources very obviously used to code his poetry in a language of specificity and originality.

This tactic seems one of many that make his poetry an adventure. He aims for both the author and the reader to constantly interrogate the meaning of each word and how they operate together. His caricature of casting rhyming pairs left his audience in stitches, but also demonstrated the care he pours into each selection. Rhyming “spoon” with “moon” would be too easy and expected; but rhyme pairs like “Velcro” and “dayglo” take creativity. He concedes language is much larger than any individual and admits rhyme is an arbitrary device, but embraces it as a tool to constantly explore our own ignorance.

Free verse lyric poems overwhelm contemporary poetry, so I am encouraged by how he embraces form. I have recently enjoyed using poetic forms as skeletal rules to push my poems in innovative new directions and felt he really echoed the utility of form poems to push language to its limits. In my own work I have played primarily with established forms like pantoums and sestinas, but he encouraged me to rely less on established rules and make my own. In For All We Know he decided every line would be fourteen syllables and contain a certain number of lines, rules all his own, but useful insofar as they forced him to carefully choose his means of expression.

When I went to visit with Ciarán Carson in his office hours about my own work, his advice that came up again and again was to bury and understate my language. He dissuaded me from the obvious syntax and turns of phrase, encouraging instead syntactical choices a reader would stumble over. He also insisted upon cryptic, unexpected word choice. He encouraged a style that forces the reader to not just read but process every part of each poem. He seems less concerned with his reader’s ability to access a poem than the poem’s ability to operate independently as a self-contained commentary on verbal possibility. His love poem in Irish that he has never translated is an example of a coded poem that derives its meaning from sound rather than specifically defined interpretation. As a charge for my own writing, I have a lot to learning and experimenting left to do: there is a delicate balance between making your reader work for it and alienating him or her.

Carson has mastered this balance in a way that remarkably enhances the meaning of his poems. Lines like “she put her mouth to mine and sucked the broken English from a Gaelic tongue” surprise the reader. Hearing “she put her mouth to mine” endings of romance come to mind, but he makes it about nationalism and language of belonging. Carson’s reading has been my favorite of this semester because of his engagement with his work and his audience. The greatest lesson I take away from my interactions with Carson and the examples in his work is the warning to never idly trust your language because it has the ability to constantly surprise and evolve.