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October 30, 2026
from “Candor”
in Bomb 116
by Anne Carson
“You could whisper down a well.”
—Anne Carson
Our Paragraph of the Week is by Anne Carson, poet, essayist, translator, and explorer of the hybrid space between these genres. “Could 1” is part of her prose-poem “Candor” about writing as a solitary, irrepressible act of self-expression for its own sake.
It originally appeared in Bomb magazine and was later printed in a series of multi-colored chapbooks in a plastic case under the title Float.
Carson is the 2026 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.
The Paragraph of the Week
Could 1
If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.
—Anne Carson
Commentary
“Could 1,” the opening section of Anne Carson’s poem “Candor,” describes literature as the expression of a personal truth that cannot be kept inside. She compares it to a “skein” in the belly that must be expelled or a whisper down a well. It offers solace to all who feel trapped. She finds it in the “faint underlinings and exclamation marks” made by a wife in a letter from her husband’s mistress, an act of “resistance,” of setting things straight, though no one sees it. She finds it in the silent weaving of a tapestry by Helen of Troy, the beloved prisoner, with the warriors dying for her “sprinkled” into the design. She finds it in an obscene “curse tablet on lead, measuring 8 × 3 cm, written on both sides, rolled and pierced by a nail” and buried in the ground thousands of years ago. These exclamations, curses, and verbal sorties need no reader: “the point is in the telling itself.” Such candor is trickery, craftiness, artifice, and guile. It is, she notes, quoting Emily Dickinson, “the only wile.”
—THE
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Announcements
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
