The collection consists of 18 short poems, none of them written in verse, but mainly subdivided into stanzas of 3 lines each. There are only 5 exceptions to this rule, more precisely in "The God Fit" (p. 40), "The God Coup" (p. 41), "God's Beloveds Remain True" (p. 47), "God's Mother" (p. 48) and "God's List of Liquids" (p. 52). Both in "God's Mother" and "God's List of Liquids", the formal differences seem to hint on the idea of structure and order. Both poems contain a list, which could be interpreted as an allusion to God's habit to organise, to set up a framework or even a divine master plan. "The God Fit" ends in one single line, "The God Coup" is a four line poem and "God's Beloveds Remain True" is not subdivided into stanzas at all. The underlying connection between these three poems is the desperation that lies in feeling abandoned by God. People try "to escape God who is burning" (p. 40, l. 6) while they feel "untended" (p. 40, l. 7). He is described as "a grand heart cut" (p. 41, l. 1) and while "man surges" (p.41, l. 2), he does nothing more than "tarry" (p. 41, l. 4). In contrast to the descriptive address of "The God Fit" and "The God Coup", the voice of mankind expresses itself in "God's Beloveds Remain True", bewailing the status quo. The irony of feeling helpless and forsaken while "Chaos overshadows" (p. 47, l. 1) and not having the option to leave God behind because they "have been instructed to call this His love" (p. 47, l. 29) clarifies the forlorn position of God's beloveds. The term "beloveds" itself bears a sarcastic undertone when the speaker tells about them being "strangled by bitter light" (p. 47, l. 3), even "slit and drained out" (p. 47, l. 20). "The God Fit", "The God Coup" and "God's Beloveds Remain True" form a trilogy of misery, leading from God's infernal terror over God's indifference regarding mankind to God's tyrannical leave-no-options policy.

Another aspect of God is discussed in "God's Woman" (p. 46) and "God Stiff" (p. 46). These two poems ostensibly deal with the role of women in the process of creation. God asks "His woman" (p. 46, l. 1) whether she is "angry at nature" (p. 46, l. 1) without making clear what exactly he means by the term "nature".

The woman replies that she does "not want nature stuck / up between" (p. 46, l. 2f) her "legs on" (p. 46, l. 3) his "pink baton" (p. 46, l. 3). Furthermore, she does not want it "ladled out like geography whenever" (p. 46, l. 4) his "buckle needs a lick" (p. 46, l. 5). The image of God suddenly undergoes a change from supernatural fiend without a cause to a sexist male creator, who formed man after his image but forgot about the humiliating position of women in creation altogether. The idea of devising a reproduction process in which one (the male) has to penetrate the other (the female) in order to soil the female body with the actual semen and, thus, secure the species' population is portrayed as unnecessary and degrading. His possibly uttered excuse does not convince the woman of the necessity of the human spawning procedure and God is cornered with the question "what do you mean Creation" (p. 46, l. 6). This negative image is underlined in "God Stiff" by the fact that for the woman, "His zipper going down" (p. 46, l. 6) sounds like the word "Treachery" (p. 46, l. 6). If God really created man after his image, all negative and sexist behavior patterns of men must originate from God himself. He is part and root of all sexist male behavior.

The portrayal of God is completed in "God's Justice" (p. 49) when the reader is told that "in the beginning there were days set aside for various tasks" (p. 49, l. 1). One of those days was reserved for God to create justice, but instead "God got involved in making a dragonfly" (p. 49, l. 3). Watching his new creation, he "lost track of time" (p. 49, l. 4) and completely forgot about his actual plan to bring justice to the world. In deep fascination, God beholds the dragonfly, every little detail catches his eye and his attention. He is described as the stereotype human male who just found a new toy, be it some sort of electronic entertainment device or some other trivial matter. All his effort and all his devotion rests with something that can, objective, be seen as far less important than e.g. the concept of justice, yet there is no Sign of God being about to take notice of this antagonism. He is characterized as being rather unreliable, and assuming that there are at least 2 million[3] different species of animals on this planet to fascinate him, expectations for justice to be created are sure to be disappointed.

One intriguing fact is the textual connection between "God's Woman" and "God's List Of Liquids". In the latter, the list of liquids ends with the substantive "Time" (p. 52, l. 16). The context of this list is that "God had the book of life open at pleasure" (p. 52, l. 3) and was arranging terms under the headline "For I made their flesh as a sieve" (p. 52, l. 6). However, the noun "Time" also appears in "God's Woman" when God urges his woman to choose between "Fire. Time. Fire"

(p. 46, l. 8) Taking into account the contents of "God's Woman" and "God's List Of Liquids", it seems probable that God lets his woman choose between pleasure (the term "Time" appears on the page "PLEASURE" of God's book of life) and desolation (the desolation of fire when God "is burning" as on page 40, line 6 of the poem "The God Fit"). It remains uncertain what his woman chose, but the idea of both concepts having the potential to negatively alter the "flesh" (p. 52, l. 6) of man, one by burning, one by aging, leaves the conclusion that even the items considered as pleasure by God carry a foul side effect for his creation.

Carson describes God as not being compatible to the human nature. What God considers a pleasure is considered a curse by man. God is differently minded than we are, and due to this fact, he lost interest in us a long time ago. "Our blind gestures / parodied / what God really wanted" ("My Religion", p. 40, l. 27ff) and God reacted by retiring from his business of taking care and pursued his ambitions and hobbies such as creating more simple, but also more beautiful things such as dragonflies. What for us feels like God's anger or the impression that we were abandoned could just be the frustration and resignation of a God who created a being that is unable to conceive him. Carson appears to pity God and she intends to hold up her faith to support God until "all the people in the world" ("My Religion", p. 39, l. 8) find out just "how simple it would have been" ("My Religion", p. 39, l. 5) to give God "this simple thing" ("My Religion", p. 40, l. 32) that he really wanted. God is not there to help us, he needs our help until we have learned to see and listen, or as Carson says it "my religion makes no sense / and does not help me / therefore I pursue it" ("My Religion", p. 39, l. 1ff).

[1] Carson, Anne. Glass, Irony and God. Introduction by Guy Davenport. 1995. New York: New Directions. New Directions Paperbook, Fifth Printing. "The Truth about God", 39-53

[2] Carson, Anne. Glass, Irony and God. Introduction by Guy Davenport. 1995. New York: New Directions. New Directions Paperbook, Fifth Printing.

[3] Nisimov, Felix. The Physics Factbook. Edited by Glenn Elert. 2003. "Number of Species"

The first striking fact about the 31 poems contained in "Short Talks"[1] as it appears in Plainwater[2] is their length, they vary from one line (p. 31: "On Gertrude Stein About 9:30") to 20 lines (p. 42: "On The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deyman") while the majority consists roughly of about 10 lines. The poems further lack rime which could be intended to put stress on the content of the poems rather than the language. The very brief appearance of the poems in question underlines and supports the image of the author walking through an exhibition of paintings, works of art, or, more abstract, feelings and thoughts, while cogitating one piece at a time, paying full attention to the thoughts and feelings, connotations and associativities that this particular item provokes, but in the end leaving the scenery to proceed to the next item in line. Another supportive argument for the theory of the poems being intended as captions is the choice of the title scheme, all titles begin with the preposition “On”, followed either by the title of a painting (p. 37: "On the Mona Lisa") or by an expression or topic the author might have associated with a particular piece of art (p. 31: "On Trout"). In this case, the phrase “piece of art” also implies the artistic work of thought and idea.

Carson's language is unique, her style of expressing emotions (p. 41, "On the Youth at Night": “Terrific lava shone on his soul.”) and her metaphors (p. 43, "On Orchids": “We live by tunneling for we are people buried alive.”) underline the sensual and deep sensations that can be evoked when losing yourself in devotion to paintings, music or comparable works of the human intellect. Therefore, the caption theory seems probable.

The reader is witness to the inner monologue of an imaginary character (p. 39, "On Rain": “It was blacker than olives the night I left.”), sometimes possibly of the author (p. 37, "On Walking Backwards": “My mother forbid us to walk backwards.”) and sometimes it stays completely out of focus where the origin of the thoughts lies (p. 31: "On Disappointments in Music"). This stylistic device enables the reader to take part in the imaginative and creative process that lies behind the poems, to identify with the individual who took the chance to express ideas regarding the variety of paintings, to think, rethink and maybe even think on where the author stopped.

Furthermore, the occasional mentioning of philosophers' or artists' names (p. 30, "On Chromoluminism": “Seurat - the old dazzler - has painted that place.”; p. 31: "On Gertrude Stein About 9:30"; p. 31, "On Disappointments in Music": “Prokofiev was ill ...”; p. 32: "On Ovid"; p. 32: "On Parmenides"; p. 34, "On the Rules of Perspective": “These are the views of Braque.”; p. 35, "On Rectification": “Kafka liked to have his watch an hour and a half fast.”; p. 36, "On Sleep Stones": “Camille Claudel lived the last thirty years of her life in an asylum ...”; p. 37, "On Waterproofing": “Franz Kafka was Jewish.”; p. 38, "On the End": “Rembrandt wakens you ...”; p. 38: "On Sylvia Plath"; p. 40, "On Charlotte": “Miss Bronte & Miss Emily & Miss Anne used to put away their sewing ...”; p. 42, "On The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deyman": “One wonders if Elsje ever saw Rembrandt's painting, ...”; p. 43, "On Orchids": “... , writes Emily Dickinson in a letter ...”; p. 43, "On Penal Servitude": “Dostoevski went in ...”; p. 43: "On Hölderlin"s World Night Wound') stresses the image of diverse individual artistic pieces, but it also depicts one of the central possible arguments against the caption theory. When taking a closer look at the range of the names on record, we can count four distinct painters, but 12 artists of a different creative section (11 philosophers and writers, one composer). This leads to the conclusion that either the author has intentionally or subconsciously made a large associative link between a painting and other artistic fields or the caption theory is no longer valid for the loosely connected context of painting and caption.

The most hindering factor in finding a final solution and, thus, a final answer to the question whether the caption theory is probable or not is simply the absence of the original paintings. The objective of liberating the poems from their visual counterparts is intelligible, yet it leaves the reader not the option to take a look at the paintings as well or decide to blank them out when necessary; one could argue that the reader's freedom is restricted for the sake of the purity of literature.

For interpreting Carson's feelings, thoughts, connotations and viewpoints, for following her train of thought, for sympathizing with the ideas that obviously struck her while viewing certain paintings and for finding a deeper appreciation by seeking Carson's link between canvas, mind and word the display of the corresponding paintings would certainly be helpful, but for enjoying 'Short Talks' it is rather irrelevant. Assuming Carson's ability to build bridges across all boundaries of genre, style or variety, in the end it remains quite certain that the caption theory still finds support even in the present text format which lacks the original paintings. The overall feel and look (in a broader sense) of her collected poems tells us so.

References

[1] Carson, Anne. Plainwater. 1995. New York: Vintage Books. First Vintage Contemporary Edition, March 2000. "Short Talks“, 27-46

[2] Carson, Anne. Plainwater. 1995. New York: Vintage Books. First Vintage Contemporary Edition, March 2000

A: In "The Glass Essay"[1], which is part of her 1995 work "Glass, Irony and God"[2], Anne Carson confronts the reader with the situation and the thoughts of a possibly imaginary speaker and with the aftermath of being abandoned by a lover. Throughout "The Glass Essay", Carson makes very frequent use of painterly and very visual images, she makes the reader feel her writing and live through the flashbacks, memories, feelings of emptiness and desolation that her speaker experiences.

The text at hand forms a combination of autobiographical allusions to Carson's personal background, quotes from works of Emily Brontë and detailed descriptions of the mental processes of and reality around the speaker who is never clearly revealed as being female, but who generally appears to be a woman by stating "she liked the idea of me having a man" (p. 3) or "it was not my body, not a woman's body" (p. 38). Though being written in prose, the text is widely arranged in short stanzas of three lines each. This concept occasionally breaks up, however, when external quotes are inserted or in the first stanza of the text's last chapter "thou" (p. 31-38).

The essay is subdivided by 9 short headlines, each consisting of only a single word, in detail "I" (p. 1), "she" (p. 1), "three" (p. 2), "whacher" (p. 4), "kitchen" (p. 13), "liberty" (p. 16), "hero" (p. 21), "hot" (p. 27) and finally "thou" (p. 31). The subordinate textual parts each start with the corresponding headline word, with only two exceptions, the first being "I can tell by the way my mother chews her toast ..." (p. 21) under the headline "hero" and the second "The question I am left with is the question of her loneliness." (p. 31) under the headline "thou". When taking a closer look at the context and at possible ways of interpretation, a connection seems plausible. The term "hero" links the idea "of Emily Brontë's little merlin hawk Hero / that she fed bits of bacon at the kitchen table" (p. 23) and the speaker's father, a veteran and "former World War II navigator" (p.24) who now "suffers from a kind of dementia / ... / first recorded in 1907 by Alois Alzheimer" (p. 23). Both the bird and the father are reliant on the care of others, both depend on being fed instead of symbolizing the freedom the act of flying and, therefore, their nature once included. Their former pride is displaced with the pity of others. Furthermore, a second link can be made between the father and the superior being referred to as "Thou". The desire "to have a

friend to tell things to at night, / without the terrible sex price to pay" (p. 32) , just as Emily Brontë had her "Thou", the contrast of the father who was once so admirable and who now only causes compassion, using "a language known only to himself, / made of snarls and syllables and sudden wild appeals" (p. 26) instead of talking to her, these unfulfilled needs are an enormous strain on the speaker. The fact that "hero" and "thou" are not mentioned as the first words of the subsequent textual passages could hint at the problems that the speaker has relating to her father as a former hero on one hand and his decline on the other and to the superior being that was there to talk to Brontë in the night but does not come to talk to the speaker when she needs someone to talk to.

Analysing the imagery and the virtually visual methods Carson applies in her narrative, the striking fact about the images she uses is their relevance to the speaker's current state of mind. They vary from quiet, almost idyllic images when she tells that "on the edge of the moor our pines / dip and coast in breezes / from somewhere else" while the speaker is losing herself in a daydream about her time with her lover Law to violent and grotesque images such as "woman on a blasted landscape / backlit in red like Hieronymus Bosch. // Covering her head and upper body is a hellish contraption / like the top half of a crab" while the speaker is telling about nightmarish visions, likely to be caused by grief and resentment.

The overall tone and the dominating mood of the images remains rather negative, corresponding to the speaker's momentary attitude. She is still "thinking // of the man who / left in September" (p. 1) and spends her nights alone, feeling as if "night drips its silver tap / down the back" (p. 1) , a very cold and uncomfortable thought, while she longs for her own "Thou". She is about to visit her mother "on a moor in the north" (p. 1), but this plain and neutral expression is altered when the speaker reveals that "Spring opens like a blade there" (p. 1), carrying across the allusion of both beauty and fright, of fascination and dangerous quickness. When she arrives at her mother's home, she feels "as if we have all been lowered into an atmosphere of glass" (p. 2), the location suits the setting, she "can see dead leaves ... / and dregs of snow scarred by pine filth" (p. 3), even "black open water comes // curdling up like anger" (p. 3). When she goes out to walk in the moor, she feels that "the bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April / carve into me with knives of light" (p. 7). This scenery, seen from a different viewpoint, could be calm and peaceful, soothing and quiet, but that is not what the speaker intends to feel, she does not want to be soothed, she appears to bathe in her suffering with strange delight, to enjoy pain as it is.

In those rare moments when she remembers life as it was when she was still together with Law, she suddenly seems to experience comfort and once again witness "shadows // of limes and roses blowing in the car window / and music spraying from the radio and him / singing and

touching my left hand to his lips" (p. 8), but as soon as she falls back into reality, she is exposed to an "air which is suddenly cold and heavy as water" (p. 8).

The "Nudes" (p. 9) present an even more unpleasant series of images that strike the speaker in the morning when she tries to meditate, a habit she also acquired to get over the immediate affliction after Law's departure. They portray "naked glimpses" (p. 9) of her soul, snapshots of women in anguish and ache, with bodies torn to pieces and with phallic symbols penetrating their very flesh. In a horrible but stunning manner the Nudes confront the reader with their sorrow and their almost apocalyptic appeal to be seen. They have the urge to play their roles, as the woman on the hill who is "calling mutely through lipless mouth" (p. 9) or the "woman with a single great thorn implanted in her forehead" (p. 17). They all suffer for a purpose, they all appear very still and calm while they let the pain of physical and mental torture wash over them. The loss of love leaves a silent, numb pain, a pain that Carson lets the Nudes put on display. The fact that Nude #2 is "caught in a cage of thorns" (p. 17) while Emily Brontë's "poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons, / vaults, cages, bars, ..." (p. 6) is a reminder that the speaker explained earlier "I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë" (p. 1) which leads back to the desire for her own "Thou".

For the speaker, another transcription of finding "Thou" is "walking into the light" (p. 31), but in the end she finds that "with Thou or without Thou I find no shelter" (p. 35). She realizes that maybe Brontë's way, how much she may associate with her in other situations, is not for herself when it comes to feeling protected and safe, when it comes to carrying on with life, when she declares "I am my own Nude" (p. 35). The essay concludes in a rather neutral but possibly optimistic manner, the speaker depicts her last vision, Nude #13 which "walked out of the light" (p. 38). Particular importance lies in the actualities that "there was no pain" (p. 38) and that "it came at night" (p. 38), the very time she always felt she needed someone to share her solicitudes, the time of day when Brontë conferred with "Thou". The speaker is her own "Thou".

The tremendous visual power of Carson's images keeps the reader fixed in her domain of making poetry sensible. Through the depiction of colors, shapes, surfaces and textures, Carson has the ability to appease or to unleash fury with the reader as a witness and herself as the main aim. Her images are most effective as narrative devices, "she knows how to hang puppies" (p. 4), that Anne.

References

[1] Carson, Anne. Glass, Irony and God. Introduction by Guy Davenport. 1995. New York: New Directions. New Directions Paper book, Fifth Printing. "The Glass Essay“, 1-38

[2] Carson, Anne. Glass, Irony and God. Introduction by Guy Davenport. 1995. New York: New Directions. New Directions Paper book, Fifth Printing.