Men in the Off Hours

Men in the Off Hours (2000) is a book of poems and prose pieces by Anne Carson. It won her the inaugural Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001.

Men in the Off Hours
AuthorAnne Carson
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genre
  • Poetry
  • essay
  • translation
PublisherAlfred A. Knopf
Publication date
2000
AwardsGriffin Poetry Prize
ISBN9780375408045

Summary

Men in the Off Hours is a hybrid collection of short poems, verse essays, epitaphs, commemorative prose, interviews, scripts, and translations from ancient Greek and Latin (of Alcaeus, Alcman, Catullus, Hesiod, Sappho and others).[1] The book broke with Carson's established pattern of writing long poems.[2]

The pieces include diverse references to writers, thinkers, and artists, as well as to historical, biblical, and mythological figures, including: Anna Akhmatova, Antigone, Aristotle, Antonin Artaud, John James Audubon, Augustine, Samuel Beckett, Beethoven, Bertolt Brecht, Brahms, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Bei Dao, Catherine Deneuve, Jacques Derrida, René Descartes, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, George Eliot, Sigmund Freud, Giotto, Jean-Luc Godard, Maxim Gorky, Tamiki Hara, Heraclitus, Thomas Higginson, Hokusai, Homer, Edward Hopper, Karl Klaus, Lazarus, Longinus (both biblical and literary), Osip Mandelstam, Oedipus, Dorothy Parker, Ilya Repin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Satan, Socrates, Thucydides, Leo Tolstoy, and Virginia Woolf.

The title of the book is taken from a line in its opening essay, "Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War".[3]

Carson's interest in technical aspects of television – apparent in the collection's "TV Men" sequence – is said to have been stimulated by her work as a humanities commentator on the 1995 PBS series about Nobel laureates called The Nobel Legacy.[4]

Men in the Off Hours includes two personal pieces about the author's parents. Carson's father Robert had Alzheimer's disease, and the poem "Father's Old Blue Cardigan" deals with his mental decline. Carson closes the collection with the prose piece "Appendix to Ordinary Time", using crossed-out phrases from the diaries and manuscripts of Virginia Woolf to craft an epitaph for her mother Margaret (1913–1997), who died during the writing of the book.[2]

Reception

Men in the Off Hours won the inaugural Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001, with the judges calling it an "ambitious collection" in which Carson "continues to redefine what a book of poetry can be".[5]

The book also made the shortlist for the 2000 T. S. Eliot Prize (Carson's second consecutive nomination),[6] and was a poetry finalist for both the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award[7] and the 2001 Governor General's Literary Award.[8]

Adaptations

The choreographer William Forsythe drew on two pieces from the collection – "Essay on What I Think About Most" and "Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve" – to create his 2000 work Kammer/Kammer, with the latter piece recited during the performance.[9] First staged in Frankfurt (Bockenheimer Depot),[10] the work went on to be presented in London (Sadler's Wells) in 2003,[11] and New York (BAM) in 2006.[12]

The Interview, a 2002 short film directed by Bruce McDonald with music by Broken Social Scene, includes dialogue adapted from Carson's "Interview with Hara Tamiki (1950)".[13]

Contents
  1. "Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War"
  2. "Epitaph: Zion"
  3. "First Chaldaic Oracle"
  4. "New Rule"
  5. "Sumptuous Destitution"
  6. "Epitaph: Annunciation"
  7. "Hokusai"
  8. "Audubon"
  9. "Epitaph: Europe"
  10. "Freud (1st draft)"
  11. "Lazarus (1st draft)"
  12. "Flatman (1st draft)"
  13. "A Station"
  14. "Epitaph: Donne Clown"
  15. "Flat Man (2nd draft)"
  16. "Epitaph: Oedipus' Nap"
  17. "Shadowboxer"
  18. "Lazarus (2nd draft)"
  19. "Epitaph: Evil"
  20. "Essay on What I Think About Most"
  21. "Essay on Error (2nd draft)"
  22. "Catullus: Carmina"
  23. "Interview with Hara Tamiki (1950)"
  24. "Father's Old Blue Cardigan"
  25. ""Why Did I Awake (Flatman 3rd draft)" [sic]
  26. "Hopper: Confessions"
  27. "TV Men"
    • "Sappho"
    • "Artaud"
    • "Artaud"
    • "Tolstoy"
    • "Lazarus"
    • "Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2)"
    • "Akhmatova (Treatment for a Script)"
    • "Thucydides in Conversation With Virginia Woolf on the Set of The Peloponnesian War"
    • "Sappho"
  28. "Irony Is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve (2nd draft)"
  29. "Epitaph: Thaw"
  30. "Freud (2nd draft)"
  31. "Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity"
  32. "No Epitaph"
  33. "Appendix to Ordinary Time"

References
  1. "Anne Carson". The Poetry Foundation. Archived from the original on 26 July 2020. Retrieved 14 September 2020.
  2. Rae, Ian (27 December 2001). "Anne Carson". The Literary Encyclopedia. Archived from the original on 16 September 2020. Retrieved 16 September 2020.
  3. Carson, Anne (2001). "Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War". Men in the Off Hours. New York: Vintage. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-375-70756-8. Even in the off hours, men know marks.
  4. Rae, Ian (Autumn 2010). "Runaway Classicists: Anne Carson and Alice Munro's 'Juliet' Stories". Journal of the Short Story in English. Presses universities d'Angers (55 – Special Issue: The Short Stories of Alice Munro): 5. ISSN 1969-6108. Archived from the original on 7 June 2020. Retrieved 18 September 2020.
  5. "Anne Carson: Griffin Poetry Prize 2001". The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. Archived from the original on 5 April 2020. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  6. Gibbons, Fiachra (23 January 2001). "Sun shines again on poet Longley". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 22 October 2015. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  7. "The National Book Critics Circle Award: 2000 Winners & Finalists". National Book Critics Circle. Archived from the original on 25 June 2020. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  8. "Governor General's Literary Awards: Past Winners and Finalists". Governor General’s Literary Awards. Canada Council for the Arts. Archived from the original on 17 June 2020. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  9. Forsythe, William; Groves, Rebecca (April 2006). "Kammer/Kammer: Q&A with choreographer William Forsythe". BAMbill. Brooklyn Academy of Music – Encore: The Performing Arts Magazine. 2006 Spring Season: 28–29. Retrieved 28 September 2020.
  10. Bußmann, Philip. "Kammer/Kammer: Ein Stück von William Forsythe". PhilipBussmann.com (in German). Archived from the original on 5 April 2017. Retrieved 28 September 2020.
  11. Anderson, Zoe (23 October 2003). "Kammer/Kammer, Sadler's Wells: Love is an artificial saga in the hands of Forsythe". The Independent. Archived from the original on 2022-05-12. Retrieved 28 September 2020.
  12. "PRODUCTION: Kammer/Kammer, May 2–6, 2006". BAM Archives. Brooklyn Academy of Music. Archived from the original on 2 October 2020. Retrieved 28 September 2020.
  13. "The Interview (2002)". IMDb. Internet Movie Database. Archived from the original on 2 October 2020. Retrieved 28 September 2020.
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