Six Short Talks : Reading in, Around, & on (on) Anne Carson's "Possessive Used As Drink (Me) : a Lecture in the Form of Fifteen Minutes" (Critical Essay‪)‬

SHORT TALK on Drinking Since May 2009, six excerpts ("Recipe," "Sonnet of Addressing Oscar Wilder' "Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony Pt 3," "Reticent Sonnet;" "Sonnet Isolate," and "Drop't Sonnet") from Anne Carson's "Possessive Used As Drink (Me)" have been installed as a curated series on the University of Michigan's Play Gallery website. According to Carson, when she was commissioned by Harvard University to write a lecture on pronouns, she penned the sonnet sequence that serves as the backbone of this performance event. Although Carson's use of the term "sonnet" privileges the literary, the event that unfurls in the virtual gallery space celebrates the operatic potential of interdisciplinary collaboration. The process of creative interventions involved in the creation of "Possessive Used As Drink (Me)" certainly embodies the kind of interdisciplinarity Linda Hutcheon has identified as inherently operatic: the performance is the product of the "collaborative work of a librettist [Carson], who writes the dramatic or poetic text, and a composer [Stephanie Rowden], who sets that text to music, and a host of other artists [three dancers from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company], whose task is to bring the dramatic texts (the libretto and the score) to life on the stage" (1366). As embodied, time-based events in word, sound, and movement, Carson's sonnets, moreover, represent opera as a performative text through which writing and reading, listening and looking, doing and un-doing, meaning and mis-understanding decline to the same verb: drink.