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.
Sky before dawn is blackish green. Perhaps a sign. I should learn more about signs.
Turning a corner to the harbour the wind hits me a punch in the face.
I always walk in the morning, I don’t know why anymore. Life is short.
My shadow goes before me. With its hood up it looks like a foghorn.
Ice on the road. Ice on the sidewalk. Nowhere to step.
It’s better to step where the...
Burners medieval dark mud on a road a dark morning, falling back through memories a faint pain, dark uphill way the usual alone and gravel picking my step out where nothing, out hoping, hope sinking, slope rising, that dark colour, almost rain, a thing impending, how to get home the perfect lamplight from which out where nothing though I can almost taste it oh yes today, if today is your...
Cast: Prometheus, god of Foresight Govt (formerly Zeus), mute part Flare and Stench, two henchman of Govt Ocean, god of oceans Io, woman turned into a cow by jealous wife of Govt Hermes, messenger of Govt Chorus, 50 daughters of Ocean
PROMETHEUS: How it begins. A rock wall. Enter Flare and Stench sent by Govt to writhe me (Flare does the work). Sounds of sawing, hammering, harvesting,...
SCENE: Sunday. England. Country road. CAST: deer Jimi Hendrix limo driver [Enter deer from woods on right. Stops, stands still on road] DEER: Heart is wild muscle Hum [Limo with JH in back approaches on road. JH on cell phone] JH: So. Dad. I’m in England. LD: Look we got a deer. JH: What? LD: There. JH: Just standing. LD: They do that. DEER: Thin to the leap goes exactly what tired you...
Do you think of your saliva as a personal possession or as something you can sell? What about tears? What about semen? Linguists tell us to use the terms alienable and inalienable to make this distinction intelligible. E.g. English speakers call both blood and faeces alienable on a normal day but saliva, sweat, tears and bowels they do not give away. Bananas and buttocks, in Papua New...
Anne Carson reads her poem, ‘A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways’.
In a rare UK performance Canadian poet Anne Carson read from her recent verse novel Red Doc>, a sequel to her 1998 Autobiography of Red.
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.
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,...
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...
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...
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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