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Carson may be our newest pedestalized inamorata but the fact is-and I say this unabashedly-she is a phony, all sleight-of-hand, both as a scholar and a poet. (Solway, "Trouble" 25)
David Solway unequivocally rejects Anne Carson's poetry in his article, "The Trouble with Annie: David Solway Unmakes Anne Carson," published in the July 2001 edition of Books in Canada (BiC). The "identical platitudes" heaped upon Carson by the media compel Solway to wonder "if there is not some sort of professional scam going on" (25), which he suspects is "fostered by a sort of critic-and-peer collusion, a veritable conspiracy of literary dunces" (26). Of course, Solway is somewhat of an expert on scams, because in 1999 he duped the editors of BiC and published "The Pelagic Bard of Kalypso's Isle," an essay in which he describes the arduous translation of an "influential" but utterly imaginary Greek poet named Andreas Karavis. The essay was accompanied by an interview between Karavis and the fictitious poetry editor Anna Zoumi, as well as by sample translations of Karavis. To give the ensemble an air of authenticity, Solway included a blurry photograph of Karavis (actually a bearded Solway in a fisherman's cap) that also graces the frontispiece of Solway's Saracen Island: The Poetry of Andreas Karavis (2000) and An Andreas Karavis Companion (2001). In "The Trouble with Annie," Solway makes the opposite claim: he argues that a real and genuinely influential Canadian poet is a phony. The arguments that Solway marshals in his attack on Carson are troubling, however, for reasons he does not acknowledge. Either Solway is perpetrating another literary hoax, or the arguments and terms of reference that he establishes in this article effectively unmake his own poetic output.
The opening paragraph of "The Trouble with Annie" outlines Solway's apocalyptic view of Canadian poetry and criticism. Making a point that he reiterates in "Double Exile and Montreal English-Language Poetry," Solway asserts that the Canadian literary community suffers from rampant nepotism:
I have long suspected that the genus of drab writing which the great majority of our acclaimed poets generate so effortlessly these days is the reflex not only of the ambition to write abundantly whatever the consequences but, generally speaking, of the desire to acquire status in...