Anne Carson
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won a Lannan Literary Award.
Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published eighteen books as of 2013, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction. She is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her books include Antigonick, Nox, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Economy of the Unlost; Autobiography of Red, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, and Glass, Irony and God, shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet. 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. Her latest book, Red Doc>, was shortlisted for the 2013 T.S. Elliot Prize.
“Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.”
“He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.”
“He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.”
“All myth is an enriched pattern,a two-faced proposition,allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life.Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars.And from the true lies of poetrytrickled out a question.What really connects words and things?”
“Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.”
“Repression speaks about sex better than any other form of discourse / or so the modern experts maintain. How do people / get power over one another? is an algebraic question”
“That night we made love "the real way" which we had not yet attemptedalthough married six months.Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not surewe got it right.He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully.Early next dayI wrote a short talk ("On Defloration") which he stole and had publishedin a small quarterly magazine.Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.Or should I say ideal.Neither of us had ever seen Venice.”
“No one will ever make necessity not happen.”
“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.”
“let's do something cheerfulall your designs are about captivity, it depresses me.Geryon watched the top of Herakles' headand felt his limits returning. Nothing to say. He looked at this factin mild surprise. Once in childhoodhis ice cream had been eaten by a dog. Just an empty conin a small dramatic red fist.Herakles stood up. No? Let's go then. On the way home they tried "Joy To The World"but were too tired. It seemed a long drive.”
“When I desire you a part of me is gone...”
“Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.”
“THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM[all snap flags]Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem.”
“What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone's orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.”
“I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape and when I started to study Greek and I found the word morphe it was for me just the right word for that, unlike the word shape in English which falls a bit short morphe in greek means the sort of plastic contours that an idea has inside your all your senses when you grasp it the first moment and it always seemed to me that a work should play out that same contour in its form. So I can’t start writing something down til I get a sense of that, that morphe. And then it unfolds, I wouldn’t say naturally, but it unfolds gropingly by keeping only to the contours of that form whatever it is.”
“Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.”
“Small, red, and upright he waited,gripping his new bookbag tightin one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other,while the first snows of winterfloated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silencedall trace of the world.”
“You used to say. "Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness."Madness doubled is marriageI addedwhen the caustic was cool, not intending to producea golden rule.”
“Caught between the tongue and the taste.”
“A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.”
“Desire is no light thing.”
“Lava bread makes you passionate.”
“When they made loveGeryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' backas it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way downfrom the base of the neckto the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.”
“A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.”
“Under the seams runs the pain.”
“You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.”
“Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.”
“Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches.Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt.He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds.I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.”