Ann Carson's Disputed Laurels By Jeet Heer National Post (January 31, 2002) Winning the coveted T.S. Eliot Prize last week has confirmed Anne Carson's status as one of the most celebrated and controversial of contemporary poets. Soon after the prize was announced, Carson, who teaches classics at McGill University in Montreal, was denounced in Britain's Guardian newspaper by eminent poetry critic Robert Potts for writing "doggerel" that mixes "an occasional (and occasionally cliched) lyricism, some fashionable philosophizing and an almost artless grafting-on of academic materials." In the literary community, Potts's denunciation will come as no surprise. Unlike the vast majority of contemporary poets, Carson provokes strong reactions. While fans have showered her with praise and lucrative prizes, an equally vocal group of critics considers her to be, at the very least, overrated. Born in Toronto in 1950, Carson writes poetry that grows out of her professional career as a classics scholar. Following in the tradition of such Greek poets as Sappho, her work is lyrical, allusive and fragmentary. While the fragmentary nature of the early Greek poets is a product of time, since only portions of their work survives, Carson often deliberately gives her poems an incomplete feel in order to invoke parallels with her classical predecessors. In 1996, Richard Teleky, a professor in the humanities department of York University, complained that Carson was being ignored in Canada while being celebrated in the United States. Certainly her early recognition came from outside Canada. In 1997, she won the Lannan Literary Award (US$50,000) from the Lannan Literary Foundation of L.A. In 2000, she won another major U.S. prize, the MacArthur Foundation grant (US$500,000). However, Teleky acknowledges that Carson is no longer under-appreciated in her native land. "If anything, she has a cult following in Canada now," he says. Evidence of Carson's growing Canadian reputation came in 2001 when she was a co-winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, worth $40,000, for her book Men in the Off Hours. Not everyone believes Carson deserves the praise and honours she has received. "Carson is essentially not a poet, she is a prize-reaping machine," complains David Solway, a writer based in Hudson, Que. "She is at the head of what we might call a gigantic pyramid scheme. Her reputation has been built up in such a way that all the people who have invested in it can no longer blow the whistle because the whole thing will come tumbling down on their heads. Anne Carson is our poetic Enron." For Solway, Carson's primary limitation as a poet is the narrow range of her language. "I think she's incompetent as a poet," he argues. "Carson has two styles: She is either very plain spoken, that is to say she writes something between prose or speech, or she is very esoteric, so you don't understand what the hell she's saying. These are her two styles, and neither of them is especially compelling." Roger Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion, a New York-based literary journal, agrees with Solway's harsh judgment, saying Carson's reputation is "ludicrously over-inflated." The condemnation of Solway and Kimball goes against the grain of the wide praise Carson has received from such illustrious writers as Susan Sontag and Alice Munro. "I haven't discovered any writing in years that's so marvellously disturbing," Munro wrote about Carson's Autobiography of Red (1998). "Carson does arouse a lot of controversy: People either hate her or think she's the Second Coming," says Fraser Sutherland, a Toronto-based writer. He notes that envy might explain why she is sometimes attacked. "She's won many prizes and taught at a number of well-known U.S. universities. So she's quite a marvel. There could hardly fail to be some envy of her given that she's received so much sheer lucre." For Teleky, the fact that Carson is so often attacked is a testament to her being taken seriously. "Most poets today are not even read," he notes. "That she has a large audience is in and of itself amazing. "One of the interesting things about Carson is that she has penetrated the literary world outside of poetry circles. She's read by people who would otherwise not read contemporary poetry. I think she is one of the most important eclectic postmodern poets."