Anne Carson’s essay “Short talks” explains many different topics. She is viewing the world through the eyes of a writer and a woman. Each topic symbolizes some form of how she views herself in the world. Also, she uses quick points of references including Aristotle, Gertrude Stein, and Sylvia Plath. Carson made the topics she wrote about obscure to make the readers really think and look beyond the headlines. When I read “Short Talks” for the first time I thought there were pages and words missing from the original piece. I literally thought the textbook book forgot the rest of the story. My mind was going crazy after reading the first few sentences. While reading “Short Talks” I couldn’t grab any knowledge about the reading or figure out what she was trying to get the readers to understand, or what she wanted us to think. Trying to read “Short Talks” was like “riding a bicycle backwards and using a rear view mirror to see what’s ahead.” Carson’s essay consisting of 17 short paragraphs about different topics didn’t make any sense to me until I re read them quite a few times. As I mentioned before many historical figures were referenced in …show more content…
What Carson mentions in the “Introduction” made me stop and think for a few seconds. For an example, “Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the blue-green shoots and the plant called “audacity” which poets mistake for violets”. First of all “they” in the introduction is referring to three old women working in the fields. This quote symbolizes the meaning of words through different people. “Audacity” is symbolized as experience and confidence, bold and beautiful. I think the three old ladies call a violet audacity to symbolize their hard work. We might see it as just a flower, but to them it means so much more than just a simple blue-green