On Acceptance

[matsunosuperfan]

I personally find the blank lines in the middle of ideas distracting. Can you explain their function here? Then perhaps I can comment further.

Luckie, thanks for reading, it is ostensibly a ghazal

---

On Acceptance

And nights I dream of violence, huge erect machetes
kissing down my neck. You know the poet Anne Carson

snores louder than Minerva? Eros and/or Eris sings
instructions to the dagger hung above Anne Carson’s

skull, she is stoic in the deathroom. When my marriage
atrophied, they removed the heart to show Anne Carson …. All echoes of her poetry

what decay can really do (Greeks are sluts for mulch). God
maintains a healthy distance from Anne Carson’s garden,

being such a modern girl. It’s all He can do to not
reach down and pluck cymbidiums. I read Anne Carson

in your voice, a rumble in my gut pronouncing
what the tongue can't handle: this morning, betrayal, Anne

Carson’s one poem set in Venice. Oh, you Bridge of Sighs—
it seems a man escaped at night, left one Anne Carson

holding Dido’s bag. In Carthage, a beautiful boy
kisses first, then asks my name. I tell him Anne Carson

and he giggles, holds up a wriggling fish. Do it like
we do it, Luke, he urges. Eat the sucker whole.

I read Anne Carson’s “Clive” poem and found her to be a typically insufferable leftist who inhabits a typical liberal arts bubble and has never sold paint in Mauritania.
I’d initially confused her with Anne Sexton, who’s admirable.

The poem itself - number of interesting images. But too many, and unconnected except by the Anne Carson motif. Not having read her to bits, thank god, I don’t follow much of it

Anne Carson is among the 4 or 5 greatest living poets writing in English. 

I don't get the shimmer of juxtaposition either, though. Hard to say where it's failing. Which bits did you find compelling?