Thursday, May 3, 2012

Torqued Ellipses


The last words of Annne Carson's poem about Jezebel kept coming back to my mind this morning but I was never a prize-winning catcher of allusions so they had to drift back into my mind several times before I realized that Torqued Ellipses was Richard Serra's title for a whole series of his recent & famous monumental sculptures. I wonder if Carson expected everybody to recognize the reference instantly. Or not recognize it at all. I wonder if Serra's title has already entered the language detached from its source.