The Poetry of Government Information

Abstract

Anne Carson’s Autobiograpy of Red is one of those beloved poetry books that everyone kept telling me to read, but somehow I never got around to it until recently. Imagine my surprise to find government documents librarianship at the crux of the story! In Carson’s poetic novel, our hero Geryon is so full of artistic and erotic passion that he appears as a winged red monster. After he is dumped by a lover, “Geryon’s life entered a numb time, caught between the tongue and the taste,” a poetic dark-night-of-the-soul rendered metaphorically as a job shelving government documents in a joyless library basement. The forlorn, distinctly unpoetic texts are stored on shelves labeled in all caps, “EXTINGUISH LIGHT WHEN NOT IN USE.” This accuracy of detail suggests that back in 1998 when the poem was written Carson had most likely encountered an actual Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) collection. Nonetheless, she is kind to the librarians who occupy their dusty world willingly and consider Geryon “a talented boy with a shadow side.” Now that so much government information is online, this gloomy subterranean library may someday come to seem like pure imagination, a poet’s fanciful invention of an impossibly drab occupation.