For me, Anne Carson is both muse and ingenious (infuriating) befuddler. I began a lit thesis on Autobiography of Red and Red Doc> driven by wild admiration only to realize mid-way that nothing was as I had predicted or hoped, including the artist herself, the art, her source material, rabbit holes, savant misdirection et. al.
Anne Carson in Red Doc>, page 20.
Carson refused capture, and though deep in my academic woe I grew angry, I now can think of no other poet whose creative output I hold more closely or think about more. No writer whose writing has impacted my own more deeply. And so it seemed fitting to honor Carson slant, in a way she might perhaps choose to honor a beloved source of her own: by making sections of my work on her work disappear. This erasure it taken from this thesis title, the first paragraph of the essay and the last, plus sub-headers. Black-outs include quotes from Carson, Calvin Bedient, Catroina Mortimer-Sandilands, and Judith Butler.
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Rachel Mindell lives in Tucson, Arizona. She is the author of two chapbooks: Like a Teardrop and a Bullet (Dancing Girl Press) and rib and instep: honey (above/ground). Individual poems have appeared (or will) in Frontier, DIAGRAM, Bombay Gin, BOAAT, Forklift, Ohio, Glass Poetry, The Journal, Sundog Lit, Tammy, and elsewhere. She works for Submittable.