Found Poetry, Or A Chance Encounter With Anne Carson

A follow up to Madeleine Wattenberg On Mythology.

(source)

Live in New York City long enough and you’ll start to feel a little bit mad. You start opening up to the staff at your local bodega and you call all the subway rats by name and, well, you just have to get out.

So on a rain-drenched October evening I found myself, standing, wet as a country dog in summer, in Hudson Yards, waiting for a bus to take me away from the city. I was headed for the comparatively pastoral Washington DC to see the sights, peruse the museums, and catch up with friends, not the least of which was poet Madeleine Wattenberg.

I had met Wattenberg once previously, as one does, through a mutual friend at a party.

“What do you do?”

“Oh I write.”

“Oh me too!”

“Cool! What do you write?”

“You know, this and that…”

…was probably how our conversation went.

On the grounds of the conversation I deemed it worthwhile to drop in on her and furthermore that I ought to bring her a gift. Through that fog of my memory I could only think to myself “Bring her something Greek”, and I figured I'd remember to find her something perfect. Somehow, the perfect gift managed to find me. For it was aboard the bus, somewhere around Baltimore, once enough passengers had departed that I finally felt comfortable enough to wring out my socks, I noticed that somebody had left a book behind. Being the nosy person I am, I cracked it open and began reading Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson.

[Geryon fights Herakles]

Red tells the story of Geryon, a red, winged monster who lives on the red island of Erytheia with his two-headed red dog and his herd of red cattle. In myth, Geryon was usually but not always depicted with multiple bodies perched upon a single set of legs. In all versions of his story except for Carson’s, Herakles arrives on Erytheia on Helios’ chariot and, as part of his famous labors, kills Geryon’s dog, then Geryon, and takes his prized red cattle.

In Carson’s verse novel (which follows from the story by the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus) Geryon has a family – a chain-smoking, exhausted mother; a cruel, abusive brother. He goes to school. He enjoys photography. He feels driven to record his inner life in the form of an autobiography. And he is in love with Herakles, who arrives on Erytheia from Hades, not unlike me, by express bus service.

[Gustave Doré’s conception of Geryon]

It’s not odd to lose a book on public transportation (my former copy of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe disappeared aboard a transpacific flight years ago) so it makes sense to periodically find lost books. But what’s rare, rare enough indeed to seem like a deliberate quirk of the universe, is to find the very book your friend is writing on, drawing inspiration from. 

“I hope you enjoy this,” I handed Red to Wattenberg. She was momentarily speechless. 

“I’ve been meaning to buy a copy for so long…and you just found this on a bus?” Wattenberg said, turning the book in her hands and thumbing the pages, “Nobody will ever believe this.”

To have found, on an East Coast megabus, the very verse novel Wattenberg called “a complete queering of myth” in our eventual interview, by a poet she holds in the highest regard, doing the things with mythology that she does in her own poetry, seems far too coincidental to be believed. But it’s true. And I write this to remind myself that these lovely little quirks of reality do happen. And moreover to say, if you lost your copy of Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson on a New York to Washington DC bus along a rain-soaked road in early October, may you find peace of mind knowing that your book found a home.

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