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.
[Ibykos fr. 286, Poetae Melici Graeci]
In spring, on the one hand, the Kydonian apple trees, being watered by streams of rivers where the uncut garden of the maidens [is] and vine blossoms swelling beneath shady vine branches bloom. On the other hand, for me Eros lies quiet at no season. Nay rather, like a Thracian north wind ablaze with lightning, rushing from Aphrodite accompanied by...
Shame requires the eyes of others unlike guilt. Eyes of Elijah the Tishbite saw in Jezebel a person with much to be ashamed of. There is a link between shame and mercy people who lack the one lack the other. Psychoanalysts say shame ruins your capacity for reverie by making cracks in the mind where it is dangerous for thought to wander. In the end Jezebel’s own eunuchs throw...
What did he want from me. I visit old Europe. I fail at purity.
I do not find Marietta. I didn’t really look for Marietta. I wouldn’t know how to recognise the woman.
Atrocity tourism offers the poet many an opportunity to get pure.
Before leaving for Krakow I got a call to visit Lezek.
Now you have seen her perhaps you will be inspired. Turning to the camera.
A tree with split...
Narrative some dance is. Other not. Two opposite places to start Telling stories: Graham, Martha. Take a name. Play a part....
‘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...
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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