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.
CASSANDRA: My lips rush the night, skull empty- ing, wide, cold, yolks gone, was it for this?
is like the moment when is like the when is like the
CHORUS: you amaze me
CASSANDRA: Apollo!
CHORUS: lust?
CASSANDRA: shame!
CHORUS: come on
CASSANDRA: we wrestled!
CHORUS: conceived?
CASSANDRA: spat him out!
CHORUS: but still he?
CASSANDRA: ah my gift!
CHORUS: bad?
CASSANDRA: (never) believed!
...
‘… metals talking among themselves, metals that first meet above the earth …’Adam Zagajewski, Another Beauty
I thought about it walking home.
One of those relentlessly clear midwest midnights frozen all the way up to a halfmoon loose in her steam in blueblack vastness. Silent silent. A gnostic night.No blackbirds.Share a birthday! –
were we
negatives lying side by...
Hegel on sacrifice. The animal dies. The man becomes alert. What do we learn we learn to notice everything now. We learn to say he is a hero let him do it. O is shown moving to the window. What a rustling what an evening. Oh little actor
(living moving mourning lamenting and howling incessantly) time to fly back to where they keep your skin. Frail was it....
It was hidden in her and it gave Kant pleasure. L’Eclisse begins with a wind blowing Monica Vitti’s hair. She is inside a room.
Kant’s was a partly negative pleasure.Where is that wind from?
Kant took pleasure in what he called Thing In Itself.She is prowling the room with her eyes down, observed deeply by a man in an armchair.
Thing In Itself was unattainable,...
I don’t understand your faces, I don’t understand them. At night I stand at the back of the theatre. I watch you suck in sex, death, devastation, hour after hour in a weird kind of unresisting infant heat, then for no reason you cool, flicker out. I guess for no reason is an arrogant thing to say. For no reason I can name is what I mean. It was a few years ago now I gave you a...
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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