An Interview with Anne Carson

West 10th: What made you start writing?

Anne Carson: I don’t perceive any “start” of it. There must have been a time before it but I don’t remember that.

West 10th: Is writing a poem an emotional or an intellectual act? Or is it something else entirely?

Anne Carson: Certainly it must be both. Also physical.

West 10th: What one piece of advice do you wish someone had given you early on?

Anne Carson: I don’t, never did, like advice. But I wish I’d known John Cage, I wish I’d been brave like him: “What we have already done conspires against what we have now to do.”

West 10th: Do you think that creative arts can be taught, or are creative writing classes more about polishing innately-possessed skills?

Anne Carson: I have often wondered what creative writing classes are about. Mostly I think they allow people to engage in (that most pleasurable of human activities) thinking together. As for what gets taught, joy. Working at the hardest place in yourself is a joy.

West 10th: Do you ever look back on pieces that you wrote as a student? If so, how do you feel they relate to your more current compositions?

Anne Carson: I was never a student of writing. You mean my old Classics essays? Not much relation at all except I am still addressing the same texts in my research and translation projects.

West 10th: How does your work as a visual artist enhance or intersect with your poetry?

Anne Carson: I prefer drawing to writing but am not very good at the former. A book I wrote once called Short Talks was originally a series of drawings with captions but no one wanted to publish the drawings so I took them out and enlarged the captions. After that I didn’t try to sell my drawings. Nowadays the activities proceed side by side but they are two different streams of energy and two different ways of analyzing reality.

West 10th: Your collected works seem to span a variety of forms, some of them uniquely yours—such as Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998), The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2002) and Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2005). What compels you to move from one form to another?

Anne Carson: Boredom I guess. There is a restlessness. There are a lot of forms to try.

West 10th: How do you see the genre of “poetry” evolving in the 21st century?

Anne Carson: You know I haven’t any idea. I suppose we will keep on reaching around for the thing that is inside our hand. What do pirates want anyway.

Anne Carson is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her books include Nox (2010); Decreation (2005); The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Economy of the Unlost (1999); Autobiography of Red (1998), shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize; Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (1996); Glass, Irony and God (1995), shortlisted for the Forward Prize; and Goddesses And Wise Women (1992). Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of An Oresteia (2010) and If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), and the author of Eros the Bittersweet (1998). Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She is Distinguished Poet-in-Residence in the Creative Writing Program at New York University, where she also offers courses in the Department of Classics.