a beautiful poetry/prose/theory style of writing that at times i guess you could equate to that maggie nelson style of autotheory in the sense that it breaks the fourth well of academic jargon with poetic metaphor, but not so much in the sense that it is autobiographical. it deals with the ancient Greek poet Simonides, one of the first poets to make money for his poetry, which mostly took the form of epitaphs on tombstones that he is commissioned to write, and the poetry of Paul Celan, a Romanian Jew whose parents were killed in the pogroms.

Carson takes a Marxist reading of the alchemical conversion of words, namely poetry, into a monetary value, in the same sense that labor time is converted into monetary value in systems of capitalism. the construction of Simonides' poetry, however, reveals a certain self-awareness of this aspect of his poetry. in other words, Simonides' poems are constructed economically, so as to maximize the space on a tombstone which an epitaph allows for.

Celan's work also involves alchemical conversions of language in the sense that he is writing in German, the language of his oppressor, in a political climate in which the very words he is using are also being used to enact real legislation and real death. Words fail in political climates such as these. this is expressed in Celan's poetry, the loss of faith in words, the violent discombobulation of these words in their construction into new uses, contexts, and formations (which the German language allows for in interesting ways by mash-ups of many words into one big one). Both Simonides and Celan work to create ruptures within the confines of their own strangely mutilated poetry, mutilated by its conversion into ulterior motives and foreign substances, coins in Simonides' case, death in Celan's.

Carson asks, what is lost (or unlost) in these alchemical, lyric conversions in the economy of poetry?