This year’s Nobelist in literature parallels ancient and contemporary life and thought in her best poetry; but she also publishes lesser work, thin slices of consciousness which offer whimsicality and absurdism in an effort to bring to the table what, in her case, turn out to be warmed over bits about the futility of existence.
Because the ‘why bother haha’ theme has been served up with great flair and substance by precursor Nobelists like Samuel Beckett and Joseph Brodsky, contemporary poets who want to add to the fruitlessness mix really need to bring something new. But a poem like Clive Song, despite its sweet urban aroma, falls flat.
The short autobiographical piece narrates a shared breakfast at a NYC cafe. Carson’s friend Clive is there, and they are joined by her husband, Currier. The poem’s beginning, middle, and end reference “the limits of human wisdom,” limits that change not at all from ancient (“early”) times to today, and this thrice-sounded phrase in a brief poem rather ham-handedly tells us, rather than evokes, the poem’s theme.
Clive’s decades-long but pretty much go-nowhere work on behalf of human rights at Guantanamo makes him both an object of admiration and pity for the poet:
Clive smiles
and goes up the street
in his saggy-butt pants,
looking not much like a high-powered lawyer…
In a witless postmodern world, indefatigable justice warriors like Clive should be a source of wisdom, and Carson approaches him in this spirit; she designates Clive our time’s sacred grove of oaks, a holy ground of the beautiful and true.
Invited to inspire us with the persistence of righteousness against incredibly steep odds, however, Clive stresses instead the Kafkan nonsense of his quest. His preference for chatting about absurdist humor troupes (The Goons; Monty Python) tells us that he seems to have settled for milking our quandary for laughs rather than seriously discussing the situation with Carson.
The absurd futilty deepens when Currier suggests introducing square dancing to Pakistan
Because the square dance is a “greeting dance
and we need more greeting!
Carson’s poem points to desperate places like Pakistan and Gitmo largely to shrug or giggle; but the world of suffering isn’t so easily undercut or exploited as this poem would like it to be. The poem borrows a kind of seriousness with these mentions, rather than trying in some way to be adequate to them. It’s as if Kurt Vonnegut decided that repeated invocations of “Dresden” and “so it goes” could do the work of Slaughterhouse–Five.
To be sure, poetry condenses moral complexity/extremity through implication, repetition, linguistic richness, paradox, irony, etc. … I’m not saying Carson has to rewrite Yeats’s The Second Coming. We do live in different times. But the horrors of the world seem to me to put more pressure on the poet than we see reflected here.
October 12th, 2026 at 10:52AM
Thank you.
October 12th, 2026 at 11:06AM
My pleasure.