Anne Carson

Anne Carson’s collections of poetry include Autobiography of Red, Men in the Off Hours, Nox and The Beauty of the Husband, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her many translations of classical works include An Oresteia, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, Antigone and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy. Her H of H Playbook, inspired by Euripides’ Herakles, is being made into an opera.

Gloves on!

Anne Carson, 15 August 2024

So,your life. There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up...

JulioJulio likes to ask a good question in a bad way. Do most of your students fall in love with you? He is a recovering addict but he does not see himself as a statistic, here I am quoting. He describes his novel, which is about the 65th Infantry of Puerto Rico. I watch the clothesline out back, bouncing on the wind with its four frozen shirts.

LongLong talks about waking beside a man bleeding...

Poem: ‘Ásta’s Song’

Anne Carson, 27 July 2023

‘Mengi’ event, Brooklyn, 12 May 2023 

she does a performance that involves screaming

more formally you might say vocal improv I would say screaming

what I think of it I’m not yet loosened up enough to say

they are quite pale the musicians mostly Icelanders mostly improv

who has trouble with improv, well, who does not

I don’t know if it’s good I don’t know...

I think I should go in and see her. Can I stand it. She is shaking. No doubt. I should go in. She’ll be pouring another glass. It stops the shaking. No doubt. She’ll be sitting in front of that stupid painting she likes, she’ll talk about going out to shovel the steps before it freezes, maybe she will go out, slip on the steps and kill herself, that will stop the shaking, no...

From The Blog
27 January 2023

To Stykkishólmur to report on the weather you go.

Have to borrow a big car, special tyres, four-wheel drive. You know how weather in Stykkishólmur can be complex. You lived there once in 2009.

Eked-out sunrise. You write this down in your notebook, wondering if eked is a word. Pink as a rinsed dishrag, you add, then cross it out.

The pieces in Wrong Norma are not formally linked but interesting connections among them can be found in the idea of wrongness, which appears not as a fact or a verdict but as a feeling.

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Professor or Pinhead: Anne Carson

Stephanie Burt, 14 July 2011

Some writers discover their powers gradually. Others – Anne Carson, for example – spring from the head of Zeus. With three books in four years during the mid-1990s, the Canadian poet,...

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Some time ago the scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant reminded us that Greek gods are not persons but forces; and in Anne Carson’s Oresteia, her sharp, sceptical, often laconic version of three...

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Tongue breaks: Sappho

Emily Wilson, 8 January 2004

Some time around the ninth century, Sappho’s nine books were irrecoverably lost. We have some tantalising scraps, single lines and short quotations, but only one complete poem – the...

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I am going to end up talking about love, but let me start by talking about money. Money, as Marx tells us, is the enemy of mankind and social bonds. ‘If you suppose man to be man and his...

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