Poor Audrey, Though

A Conceited, Presumptuous, Failed Review of Anne Carson's Wrong Norma, part I

I joined Twitter about a year ago, shortly before it was reborn as X, and just when many others (writers especially, I’m told) were leaving. I was curious about the look and fate of the platform under new management, expecting that some sort of virtual apocalypse would play out before my eyes. Still waiting on that.

Despite my self-imposed restrictions of never hate-following or insult-commenting, and never relying on irony to make a point (that’s the tough one), I nonetheless became involved within the first few months in my first and so far only “viral moment.”

It was not in the angry thickets of gender politics or the war news—it was about an Anne Carson poem.

“Saturday Night as an Adult,” which first appeared in the New Yorker back in 2017, was posted as a screencap by Hannah Williams (another NYer contributor) last June under the brief comment: “Think a lot about this.” The most obvious sense of her comment is an abbreviated “I think a lot about this.” In retrospect it seems to have worked as an imperative as well—though the thinking was not always exemplary.

Early comments were friendly, most taking their cue from Williams’ own follow-up “Wish someone would write about restaurants more in this way (as a venue for detail on people, food, feeling etc.), but alas! most people are not Anne Carson lol..” Science writer Stephen Buranyi observed: “a great example of a piece that would likely be bad if the author were not Anne Carson.” But an hour later, the viral seed of negativity was planted. Όντρεϊ Χορν (which translates from Greek as “Audrey Horne,” the Twin Peaks character) dared to run the other way with that three-letter word:

Her comment received brusque dismissal (an eloquent “OK!” from the OP), mild shock from others, constructive disagreement, a request that she learn some manners, and one possibly sympathetic guess: “Was it the “ears inside our souls”?” Many replies spawned their own strings of amplifications and/or takedowns.

It should be said that not all the defenses of the poem were eloquent—“it’s truly sad how illiterate ppl are sometimes”—and that some of the most interesting replies did not fall into either camp:

Undaunted by the scolds, and possibly wanting to disentangle herself from the growing melee, Audrey started her own branch of the discussion by quote-tweeting Williams’ original and appending a longish thread about her “visceral” reaction to the Carson piece:

She found “something sterile and put on about this both in style and substance,” and it resonated, especially with those who were already non-fans of Carson. Her subjective phrasings ranged from “makes my skin CRAWL” to “not my cup of tea.” These did not amount to academic close reading, but they were convincingly sincere.

Under this post it was primarily Audrey’s followers commenting, so there were fewer defenders of the poem in the mix and more who agreed that it was “conceited presumptuous cold uninviting,” even if many mentioned other works by Carson that they did like. There were also more folks indulging in “I don’t care about the poem” trollery.

Rebecca Tamás (a writer, not a troll) captured the essence, I think, of why Audrey’s startling negative comment on Williams’ post and her doubling-down on that comment afterward were so provocative:

At time of writing Audrey’s post had a mere 309K views while Williams’ had 2.5M. But some of those 2.5M were people like myself, who didn’t follow Hannah Williams at the time, who came in late, and who needed to retrace the origins of the disturbance via Audrey’s thread.

If you count comments rather than views, the tallies are much closer—Audrey: 61, Williams: 82. And of those 82, only FUCCBOI HERMIT’s comment (later than Audrey’s and also negative) generated more sub-comments than Audrey’s “this is really bad.”

Both of the June 5 strings exponentialized, continuing into June 6. By duration alone this qualified (especially in a niche community like poetry) as viral.

A further sign of virality is when fresh posts with new comment strings can be generated simply by referring to the virality itself. American poet Daisy Fried announced the thundercloud to her followers (myself among them):

American poet (and current Oxford Professor of Poetry) A.E. Stallings expressed alarm, and Fried directed her to the prime suspect:

I entered the melee by deploying the classic Canadian stratagem of throwing shade while attempting to fence-sit:

I like Carson’s prose poem myself, and I like it even more having had time to “Think a lot about this.” So I was a bit surprised—I shouldn’t have been as I see now how much snark I included in my list—to be clapped back with an additional binary:

Daisy Fried is right, of course, at least to this extent: those who have not read a lot of poetry from the last half-century, or more precisely a lot of poems from the New Yorker, might expect all poems to be voiced by their author, to be lyric or confessional, or to have their persona clearly signaled as someone other than the author. “Saturday Night as an Adult,” is a prose poem told in the first person, and works more like a short story. If it makes you cringe, you are very likely supposed to cringe. But the energy and extent of our “viral moment” can’t be entirely explained by this one misreading.

Fried was generous enough to climb down from calling all the nay-sayers “ignoramuses” in her final response to the villainess of the affair:

Understandable sarcasm aside, this learning curve was very likely traversed by a number of both idle and interested X users.

By day two Hannah Williams sounded like she had seen enough already:

One indication that a post has gone viral is that some participants regret their first hot take and quickly qualify what they meant, knowing that more than the usual number of readers are visiting. An outright deletion on Audrey’s post stranded my comment toward the end of a longish string, as seen in the screencap at the top of this essay. Audrey lamented the departure: “too bad….i enjoyed his breakdown of why it was good as i was looking for someone to explain that to me anyway…”

Arguably a viral moment reaches its end state, becoming history rather than an ongoing event, when it leaves the platform it appeared on and becomes a topic in other media. But the blog-o-sphere is just as addicted to the present moment as social media, and often clamours to be the first to declare completion. On June 7, 2023, just 48 hours after Hannah Williams’ post, two independent reports appeared online, each employing the past tense already.

Thespiai observed that an “internet kerfuffle earlier this week offered some intriguing insights into generational gaps and the current book scene.” Hyperbole ramps up the tone as Carson is referred to as “Canadian-poet-in-exile,” and her poem is said to have “promptly set the digital literati ablaze.” After a sampling of replies taking various angles, the article concludes mildly: “…it’s nice to see people talking about poetry. More of that, please, just less hot takes.”

I would protest that it was the “hot take” that got this kerfuffle off the ground in the first place. Without that breach of manners the original tweet would have swirled into the drain of oblivion with all the other poems we post because we’ve been thinking about them.

Literary Hub author Janet Manley began her piece sarcastically: “an assessment took place yesterday on the internet of our collective worth, a kind of Internet Speed Test for our souls.” (If only, right?) Retweets are described as “people finding an outsized resonance in the original” and quote tweets are “instances of people hoping to correct the discourse.” The discourse nonetheless “ran quickly off the rails into a series of what Carson might term “yell factions.”” Manley cleverly quotes from the poem itself. Though the yelling there was due to restaurant noise, not passionate debate, there is a similar failure of communication.

Again, the conversation going “off the rails” is characterized as the problem, when it was really the catalyst. Another sampling of under-informed or eccentric X comments follows, balanced by an acknowledgment that “[c]ritiques of the critiques argued for the salvaging of context amid anthropogenic context-decline.”

That last phrase is a very apt formula for the current media-sphere, but as a symptom I would argue “anthropogenic context-decline” predates Twitter and X by many decades. Does a New Yorker poem, floating as a block among the columns of an essay or short story—between ads that need to be labelled “advertisement” for clarity—bring with it any more context than a poem posted on social media?

Manley, cultivating mild disdain for the whole event, points out that Anne Carson “appears not to be on Twitter at all.” She closes with a channeling of the poet’s aloofness, which allows her to have her disdain both ways re social media: “With prescient timing, Carson obtained Icelandic citizenship last year, all the better to escape the encroaching QT-storm.”

By the end of the year, LitHub ranked the Anne Carson online commotion among its “Biggest Literary Stories of the Year.” It placed, however, 49th out of 50, ahead of only the use of Edgar Allan Poe references in a Eurovision song.

The “QT-storm” around “Saturday Night as an Adult” received a more recent mention—and in a small way an institutional embedding—in a poetry prompt from Poets & Writers published in March of this year. Introduced as having had “a viral moment on X last summer,” the poem serves as the example for P&W’s suggestion to “Write a poem that builds upon your observations of a mundane social encounter in order to capture larger concerns on your mind....” Easier, I suppose, than “Write a poem in a voice not quite your own that explores an emotional over-reaction to a social disappointment, and that you hope might trigger a wide-ranging online debate over tone, technique and relevance.”

When I first read Audrey Horne’s negative criticism of Anne Carson’s prose poem I did not sympathize with the complaint, and would never have used such blunt language as “this is really bad” (a Canadian thing, plus I studied lit in grad school, so I’ve got academic decorum drilled in). Nonetheless, I had to admire her boldness, and her determined defense of her offense. I also admired her willingness to listen to constructive replies.

While preparing to write this essay I realized that of all the persons that would be mentioned, I should consult with her. So I DM’d Audrey Horne (still no idea if that’s their real name) to ask if she was OK with being highlighted in a treatment of the viral moment she was instrumental in creating. We don’t follow each other, so X required me to complete a 20-step “not-a-bot” test.

She answered “of course! no need to ask permission :).” I sent her links to the literary website reports on the X event, pointing out that in each one there was a glaring omission of her role. She joked “hahaha how dare they not reference me” and suggested a cause: “not clouted enough i don’t have any bylines” but agreed:

Now that “Saturday Night as an Adult” has appeared in Anne Carson’s new book Wrong Norma (seven years after its New Yorker debut) there is a fresh occasion to recall the 49^th most important literary event of 2023. Brian Dillon in 4Columns prefaces his review of the new book with a recap of the old kerfuffle, which has given the poem “an odd, dispiriting celebrity.” He has no time for the disrupters. Hannah Williams’ tweet “seemingly broke certain brains…. angry Twitter innocents got her all wrong by reading “Saturday Night as an Adult” as direct personal gripe.” Again, no reference to poor (as if!) Audrey Horne.

Dillon considers the poem “a small masterpiece of observation and phrasing.” In this and in his high esteem for Carson’s work, I agree. But there’s something peculiar about his discussion of “Saturday Night as an Adult” in his Wrong Norma review. When he quotes from the poem—as he does at some length in the first paragraph—he doesn’t use the version that appears in the book he is reviewing. He uses the 2017 New Yorker version. In Wrong Norma we find that the text has been subtly, but significantly, revised.

Seems the “odd, dispiriting celebrity” of the original is hard to shake.

More about that in Part II.

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