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. Highlights of Colonialism is due in 2027.
‘I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.’
Marcel Duchamp
A sonnet is a rectangle upon the page. Your eye enjoys it in a ratio of eight to five. Let’s say you’re an urgent man in an urgent language construing the millions of shadows that keep you alive. If only it were water or innocent or a hawk from a handsaw, if only you...
Here is a pronoun to address Gertrude Stein with : dog you’ve never had before has died.
Drop’t SonnetWhen a language drops a distinction (as e.g. English has modified the 2nd person singular so that I can no longer express the wish, Tell me spirit! whither wander’st thou? or split a king in two saying, If thou beest not immortal, look...
I was waiting for you to get to work ‘A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island’ Frank O’Hara
1 You know the second person in the history of the world the Sun chose to speak to personally was Frank O’Hara, the first was Orpheus [me]. You are my Sweetheart said the Sun. He was sitting on the hood of his truck. Somehow it was menacing. I hardly knew what to...
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...
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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