CASSANDRA
Everywhere Cassandra ran Cassandra found she could float. How did she float? With her float can. Does that sound like a tautology?
—Anne Carson, from ‘Opening Cut’ of Cassandra Float Can
for me cassandra is more myth / more fable / than memory. for me she lives on in the bright
golden sand dunes of a beach / the way a beach is for agnes varda in the film the
garage-sale memorabilia the bricolage of a life / the way her son taught me how to tunnel
into its wet substrate / where i recall her toying with the heart of a spy while prophesying
an exit at the wheel of a car. cassandra cassie sandra harris nee gleeson / ‘son of’ not
‘daughter of’ glee (‘delight’ / ‘joy’) / floats in my mind as countess lisl von schlaf in
for your eyes only (1981) & are the eyes the seat of memory as if to see was to
recall or be believed but this is not the case / photographs that were taken & paintings
that the mind / the eye / over exposes in the act of receiving its stories. the memory i
don’t see is of cassandra cassie diving into her pool in los angeles the city of angels all
dressed up ready to go out & / who is cassandra? for a dime she will tell you / that the
swimming pool is full of blood1 / she saw red she dived there to save me /
my life / from drowning so that i didn’t drown i floated i survived but the memory the
memory is repressed it lives deep down under an inverse realm as the eye or a coin flips it
or / i’m stuck on the flipping coin2 / it’s in this scene & others that
cassandra cassie float can & she floats & she does & / it is the indeterminacy of the
flip3 / real or filmed somewhere between fiction & reality between her &
an earthquake a driveway & a television screen / issos beach corfu los angeles a line a
fault an odyssey / & cassandra’s utterance lives in limbo somewhere between heard & not
understood: otototoi poi poi da.4
when cassie died i’d just completed my first year of primary school. we lived two streets over in a unit block on prince street where the emergency housing was recently built after the floods in the paddock where we used to feed the horses where the trains would rip past twice a day & / what is the future doing underneath the past?5 / when cassie died i remember feeling self-conscious about how i moved my body in space in a paddock by the river at the end of the street, i believed she was hovering (‘soaring’ / ‘swimming’) in the sky above me in heaven watching my every move judging me if i did a thing & a bad thing & everything was a sin to a seven year old who didn’t yet recognise her love of the self-same of the feminine / her veil her light / otototoi / alas. amazing & amazing grace that despite having a written exemption from mum to skip scripture in the mornings at school / two streets over from the street where the future is buried beneath the past / the judgement of an aunty i hardly knew would rain & reign down on me & it was only later that she would be exonerated in the mind of her niece & with it her right to freefall back to earth. instead of scripture on those mornings i would watch sesame street after singing the national anthem / all national anthems are requiems6 / & it may as well have been amazing grace. no wonder i look up to big bird & snuffy the way i did they were my gods my towering gods. big bird can float & he floats & he does & what with that flamboyant clutch of the most camp feathers on the street / otototoi / alas / & the food it is flying & it is floating away.
cassandra (‘metaphor’ / ‘syndrome’ / ‘phenomenon’ / ‘predicament’ / ‘dilemma’ / ‘curse’) used to describe situations where valid warnings or concerns are dismissed or disbelieved, named after the myth of cassandra the trojan princess daughter of priam king of troy. also ‘complex’ as coined by the philosopher gaston bachelard (1949) applied by the jungian analyst laurie layton schapira (1988) a set of moral questions asked by the psychologist melanie klein (1963). in 1982 the swedish band abba released their song cassandra it was a protracted apology / sorry cassandra, i misunderstood / now the last day is dawning / the song’s outro / i’m sorry cassandra / a line repeated five times just to drill the point home & how the lingering melody floats & how it can & how it does. but it’s not just the melody that floats it’s the message / now the last day is dawning / or it’s the weight of it / condensation sensation down here in the cloud / it sinks & it syncs to the beat of the 21 c. as we confront the prophesies of hysterical women & others all of them of earth & of earthly proportions we have made hysterical / otototoi gods earth apollon apollon!7 / alas.
cassandra’s beauty compelled the god apollo to endow her with the gift of prophecy a gift she retained after dismissing apollo’s ‘romantic advances’ / otototoi / ahem & / the girl in the story often / doesn’t even want a man / but they don’t teach you that do they8 / cassandra who lived with the gift of prophecy / she wants a devil / an animal9 / & the curse that no one would believe her. to escape like daphne / to escape / the raping god10 / & oh & ohyes / to be a tree11 /otototoi / to be a frog floating faking death to avoid mating an unattractive man frog & to be of earth & to fall to it / alas.
in a mother’s day interview from 1986 cassandra cassie is asked how it feels to play her husband’s ex-girlfriend as my cousin then two years old plays with a ball off screen / i swear i saw this12 / i watched this with my kid on youtube the other night along with the issos beach scene they wanted it again & again for the sheer drama of it, it was a tuesday night the day they have their weekly drama lesson & when i tell them about all their ancestors who were in the theatre the movies things turn red as we turn to the question of blood / & language. in 2025 youtube & wikipedia are the official repositories of the family tree i go there to learn about my ancestors now & who knows if what i find there is true or not the internet is just a bigger mode of re membering, it has a greater giant membership than the biological tree unless you take in all of creaturely humanity like i do whose memories are also fallible. i cut expose my losses i lean on the tree taste the sap it tastes like salt.
my kid’s latest affection is swearing either replacing with fudge or unabashedly saying the f word out loud in my ear at his sissy. we can swear we can swear we saw this but the kids they can’t swear / is it to swear as in oath or to swear as in curse? cassandra was cursed so was richard altmann he swore he found the elementary organism in humans, granules within cells he called ‘bioblasts’ using staining techniques / long sausage shaped things made of blood & language13 / he became depressed he suicided because nobody believed him & they were later named ‘mitochondria’. the poet simon armitage speaks of prophesy as a kind of reverse dementia14 / where the ability to prophesise the future is reduced the closer that future comes to the present / long term vision intact but short-term oracular powers virtually non-existent. dementia as a progressive condition caused by damage & death of brain cells (‘neurons’) cutting off connections (‘tagli’ for fontana / ‘cuts’ for anne carson) now she has parkinson’s disease she boxes to improve her hand eye coordination to remedy the cut so she might continue her writing by hand as the future creeps / shakier the closer the closer / meanwhile michael j fox is still alive & he takes us back to the future. carson’s performance piece cassandra float can is composed of three ‘cuts’ that move between the anarchitectures of gordon matta-clark the phenomenological writings of edmund husserl & discussions of cassandra in aeschylus’s play agamemnon / otototoi poi poi da / an utterance that is both ‘gash’ and knife / a gash that is / the crack in the surface of things.15
before dad & i visited the cotton castles of pamukkale we visited çanakkale ili (‘provence’) hisarlık a hill a midden a moundwort otherwise believed to be the ancient cities of troy, a plateau a craggy expanse of nine ancient cities built one on top of the other i recall the tour guide telling us & eventually troy ix fell to earthquake. i recall inside the eye of a twelve-year-old me seeing the replica horse the horse that cassandra prophesised was a curse not a gift & my eye recalls the tall wood panelling feels its texture its faded grey slats like a / pure gash of trojan emotion16 / only a fake replicated one. i recall having my photo taken inside the horse but wonder if it’s the memory of being inside with dad taking the photo outside or seeing the photo from the outside of me on the inside i think the former / most of our photos from that trip were over exposed & never left the film lab.
i learn the story of heinrich schliemann the merchant turned archaeologist who unearthed the cities believed to be troy whose story is an example of a name giving away more clues than can be denied / he was a rich man who lied / himself a kind of trojan deceiving his way into the city of indianapolis buying property & paying off a witness, faking five years’ residence to take advantage of the state’s progressive divorce laws. along with his second wife sophia schliemann nee engastromenou rich hein the mann who lied was responsible for paying hellenic labourers six days a week / muslim labourers on sundays / it was the labourers who found the treasures of troy not king priam’s treasures.
years earlier during our trip to los angeles i entered the city its namesake / its angels / by plane with a passport what paul b. preciado calls a / political prosthesis17 / they held me i floated i survived an earthquake a drowning a ride on disneyland’s matterhorn the full body onslaught of jaw’s robotic head ripping into robotic human flesh michael jackson’s thrusting pelvis on a gyrating platform performing thriller through red & blue 3d glasses / i was only four. this poem a little retablos or ex-votos paintings & small sculptures / of body parts like arms or eyes or breasts made in latin america that testify to a miracle like surviving an earthquake18 / & the arm or limb of a tree & an eponymous tree is called a branch / a line / a lineage an etymology, the knot a point of severance for the limb now an entry point for prophesying which we could call the eye. & this offering this painting this poem this paper what thich nhat hanh says / if you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper19 / is for all eyes that want to see it not for some only & you who rewrite the poem the cloud over & over you who prophesise the world anew it is you & it is they / & i think we’ll scream for joy & the possible futures.20
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Abbra Kotlarczyk is a poet and visual artist of Polish and Irish descent living on Wurundjeri Country. Recent poems have appeared in The Long Poem (Sick Leave), the spoken word compilation Words are a way to wait (se Dessaisir Publishing), Cordite Poetry Review and Plumwood Mountain Journal. A poem of hers won the 2022 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize.
when cassie died i’d just completed my first year of primary school. we lived two streets over in a unit block on prince street where the emergency housing was recently built after the floods in the paddock where we used to feed the horses where the trains would rip past twice a day & / what is the future doing underneath the past?5 / when cassie died i remember feeling self-conscious about how i moved my body in space in a paddock by the river at the end of the street, i believed she was hovering (‘soaring’ / ‘swimming’) in the sky above me in heaven watching my every move judging me if i did a thing & a bad thing & everything was a sin to a seven year old who didn’t yet recognise her love of the self-same of the feminine / her veil her light / otototoi / alas. amazing & amazing grace that despite having a written exemption from mum to skip scripture in the mornings at school / two streets over from the street where the future is buried beneath the past / the judgement of an aunty i hardly knew would rain & reign down on me & it was only later that she would be exonerated in the mind of her niece & with it her right to freefall back to earth. instead of scripture on those mornings i would watch sesame street after singing the national anthem / all national anthems are requiems6 / & it may as well have been amazing grace. no wonder i look up to big bird & snuffy the way i did they were my gods my towering gods. big bird can float & he floats & he does & what with that flamboyant clutch of the most camp feathers on the street / otototoi / alas / & the food it is flying & it is floating away.
cassandra (‘metaphor’ / ‘syndrome’ / ‘phenomenon’ / ‘predicament’ / ‘dilemma’ / ‘curse’) used to describe situations where valid warnings or concerns are dismissed or disbelieved, named after the myth of cassandra the trojan princess daughter of priam king of troy. also ‘complex’ as coined by the philosopher gaston bachelard (1949) applied by the jungian analyst laurie layton schapira (1988) a set of moral questions asked by the psychologist melanie klein (1963). in 1982 the swedish band abba released their song cassandra it was a protracted apology / sorry cassandra, i misunderstood / now the last day is dawning / the song’s outro / i’m sorry cassandra / a line repeated five times just to drill the point home & how the lingering melody floats & how it can & how it does. but it’s not just the melody that floats it’s the message / now the last day is dawning / or it’s the weight of it / condensation sensation down here in the cloud / it sinks & it syncs to the beat of the 21 c. as we confront the prophesies of hysterical women & others all of them of earth & of earthly proportions we have made hysterical / otototoi gods earth apollon apollon!7 / alas.
cassandra’s beauty compelled the god apollo to endow her with the gift of prophecy a gift she retained after dismissing apollo’s ‘romantic advances’ / otototoi / ahem & / the girl in the story often / doesn’t even want a man / but they don’t teach you that do they8 / cassandra who lived with the gift of prophecy / she wants a devil / an animal9 / & the curse that no one would believe her. to escape like daphne / to escape / the raping god10 / & oh & ohyes / to be a tree11 /otototoi / to be a frog floating faking death to avoid mating an unattractive man frog & to be of earth & to fall to it / alas.
in a mother’s day interview from 1986 cassandra cassie is asked how it feels to play her husband’s ex-girlfriend as my cousin then two years old plays with a ball off screen / i swear i saw this12 / i watched this with my kid on youtube the other night along with the issos beach scene they wanted it again & again for the sheer drama of it, it was a tuesday night the day they have their weekly drama lesson & when i tell them about all their ancestors who were in the theatre the movies things turn red as we turn to the question of blood / & language. in 2025 youtube & wikipedia are the official repositories of the family tree i go there to learn about my ancestors now & who knows if what i find there is true or not the internet is just a bigger mode of re membering, it has a greater giant membership than the biological tree unless you take in all of creaturely humanity like i do whose memories are also fallible. i cut expose my losses i lean on the tree taste the sap it tastes like salt.
my kid’s latest affection is swearing either replacing with fudge or unabashedly saying the f word out loud in my ear at his sissy. we can swear we can swear we saw this but the kids they can’t swear / is it to swear as in oath or to swear as in curse? cassandra was cursed so was richard altmann he swore he found the elementary organism in humans, granules within cells he called ‘bioblasts’ using staining techniques / long sausage shaped things made of blood & language13 / he became depressed he suicided because nobody believed him & they were later named ‘mitochondria’. the poet simon armitage speaks of prophesy as a kind of reverse dementia14 / where the ability to prophesise the future is reduced the closer that future comes to the present / long term vision intact but short-term oracular powers virtually non-existent. dementia as a progressive condition caused by damage & death of brain cells (‘neurons’) cutting off connections (‘tagli’ for fontana / ‘cuts’ for anne carson) now she has parkinson’s disease she boxes to improve her hand eye coordination to remedy the cut so she might continue her writing by hand as the future creeps / shakier the closer the closer / meanwhile michael j fox is still alive & he takes us back to the future. carson’s performance piece cassandra float can is composed of three ‘cuts’ that move between the anarchitectures of gordon matta-clark the phenomenological writings of edmund husserl & discussions of cassandra in aeschylus’s play agamemnon / otototoi poi poi da / an utterance that is both ‘gash’ and knife / a gash that is / the crack in the surface of things.15
before dad & i visited the cotton castles of pamukkale we visited çanakkale ili (‘provence’) hisarlık a hill a midden a moundwort otherwise believed to be the ancient cities of troy, a plateau a craggy expanse of nine ancient cities built one on top of the other i recall the tour guide telling us & eventually troy ix fell to earthquake. i recall inside the eye of a twelve-year-old me seeing the replica horse the horse that cassandra prophesised was a curse not a gift & my eye recalls the tall wood panelling feels its texture its faded grey slats like a / pure gash of trojan emotion16 / only a fake replicated one. i recall having my photo taken inside the horse but wonder if it’s the memory of being inside with dad taking the photo outside or seeing the photo from the outside of me on the inside i think the former / most of our photos from that trip were over exposed & never left the film lab.
i learn the story of heinrich schliemann the merchant turned archaeologist who unearthed the cities believed to be troy whose story is an example of a name giving away more clues than can be denied / he was a rich man who lied / himself a kind of trojan deceiving his way into the city of indianapolis buying property & paying off a witness, faking five years’ residence to take advantage of the state’s progressive divorce laws. along with his second wife sophia schliemann nee engastromenou rich hein the mann who lied was responsible for paying hellenic labourers six days a week / muslim labourers on sundays / it was the labourers who found the treasures of troy not king priam’s treasures.
years earlier during our trip to los angeles i entered the city its namesake / its angels / by plane with a passport what paul b. preciado calls a / political prosthesis17 / they held me i floated i survived an earthquake a drowning a ride on disneyland’s matterhorn the full body onslaught of jaw’s robotic head ripping into robotic human flesh michael jackson’s thrusting pelvis on a gyrating platform performing thriller through red & blue 3d glasses / i was only four. this poem a little retablos or ex-votos paintings & small sculptures / of body parts like arms or eyes or breasts made in latin america that testify to a miracle like surviving an earthquake18 / & the arm or limb of a tree & an eponymous tree is called a branch / a line / a lineage an etymology, the knot a point of severance for the limb now an entry point for prophesying which we could call the eye. & this offering this painting this poem this paper what thich nhat hanh says / if you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper19 / is for all eyes that want to see it not for some only & you who rewrite the poem the cloud over & over you who prophesise the world anew it is you & it is they / & i think we’ll scream for joy & the possible futures.20
Abbra Kotlarczyk is a poet and visual artist of Polish and Irish descent living on Wurundjeri Country. Recent poems have appeared in The Long Poem (Sick Leave), the spoken word compilation Words are a way to wait (se Dessaisir Publishing), Cordite Poetry Review and Plumwood Mountain Journal. A poem of hers won the 2022 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize.
Sources:
Jérémie Wenger, Anne Carson: ‘Cassandra Float Can’ and sonnet sequence | 92Y Readings, YouTube, March 3, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZOd2nDVk84
Briony Galligan and Rosie Isaac, ‘A coin is a mistranslation: Tamsen Hopkinson’s The Wishing Well’, Overland, October 24, 2025, https://overland.org.au/2025/10/a-coin-is-a-mistranslation-tamsen-hopkinsons-the-wishing-well/
Ibid.
Anne Carson: ‘Cassandra Float Can’.
Ibid.
Paul D. Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi, 2025, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 380.
Yopie Prins, ‘OTOTOTOI: Virginia Woolf and ‘The Naked Cry’ of Cassandra’, in Fiona Macintosh, and others (eds), Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004 (Oxford, 2005; online edn, Oxford Academic, October 31, 2023), accessed October 20, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199263516.003.0009.
Ariana Reines, The Rose, 2025, Graywolf Press, 37.
Ibid, 38.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Michael Taussig, I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own, University of Chicago Press, 2011, ProQuest Ebook Central, accessed November 4, 2025, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unimelb/detail.action?docID=783331.
Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi, 190.
Simon Armitage, ‘Access All Areas: Poetry and the Underworld’, University of Oxford Lecture Series, November 11, 2016, https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/access-all-areas-poetry-and-underworld.
Annette Skade, ‘“And how does it alter you to see it there floating?” Anne Carson’s Nox, Float and the Reader’, Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media, No. 2 (2018), 163.
Ibid,165.
Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi.
Taussig, I Swear I Saw This.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Clouds In Each Paper, Awakin.org, accessed October 26, 2025, https://www.awakin.org/v2/read/view.php?tid=222.
Critical Theory, Anne Carson Performs: Poetry, Visual Art & Dance Collide on Stage, YouTube, June 23, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2Zc2oQ7m8U.