“Wildly Constant”: Anne Carson’s Poetics of Encounter

Abstract

© 2022 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System he title of Anne Carson’s 2009 poem “Wildly Constant” poses a question: how to reconcile constancy―fidelity, continuity―with wildness―freedom, openness to the unexpected, to chance and change. The question pertains to marriage: the poem tells the story of a honeymoon that is also a writer’s retreat, and its narrative recounts the speaker’s leaving and returning to her husband’s bed. Seen differently, the paradox of wild constancy inheres in such practices as ekphrasis, translation, and literary criticism, where fidelity to a work of art both invites and constrains creative response. Encounters with persons and texts arrest, enliven, and inspire. Being true to these encounters entails openness to being changed by them, and willingness to be true to them by transforming them in turn. Creativity inheres in this wild constancy. “Anne Carson is not an uncreative writer,” Oran McKenzie notes, “but” her work is “highly derivative, blending poetry, essay, criticism and translation in multilayered and complex juxtapositions of quotes, allusions, echoes and ekphrastic descriptions” (227).1 “Genre hybridity,” remarks John James, “has long been a hallmark