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. Her most recent book is Wrong Norma.
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...
In fact Odysseus would have been here long before now but it seemed to his mind more profitable to go to many lands acquiring stuff. For Odysseus knows profit over and above mortal men nor could anyone else alive rival him at this.
(Odyssey, 19.282-6)
It’s a panel on something improbable (Godard and Homer?) in a fluorescent salon of some city’s Palais des Congrès. After your...
for RC
1. Huron RiverWe walked by the river its arms all gold in winter sun like tin. Workshops of afternoon hummed along elsewhere. We noted ice at the shore and ice on plants and ice from the light fixtures under the railway bridge exploding –Squid, you said. Time toppled past us. There were no trains, no sunset. Geese lapped at an edge, eyes inward on their sunk city.
2. The Pool in...
I hear in me the funeral voices call out transcendentally, when in German style the bands go beating by.
At a mad shiver of my vertebrae if I sob like a lost man, it’s that I hear the funeral voices call out transcendentally.
As a ghostly gallop of zebras my dream goes strangely prowling and I am so haunted that in me always, inside my darknesses
I hear the funeral...
[ZEUS PAUSES AMID WRITING HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY] How everyone thinks him a happy-go-lucky guy. True and not true, don’t give the ending away. Rhyme angst with spanks? Bit of a buzz on the old loins yet.
[ZEUS DECIDES TO DO HIS OWN TAXES THIS YEAR] Deduct the corpse of Helen from the corpse of war (net). ‘Victory’ (adjusted gross). ‘Virtue’ (attach schedule E).Under...
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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