Endlessly curious, irreverent, ingenious, easily bored. It’s hard not to think of Carson as a Laureate for our times, writes Ella Frears
The poets are ecstatic. Canadian writer, translator, essayist and beloved poet-of-poets Anne Carson has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. At the prize announcement on 8 October the secretary of the Swedish Academy, Ingrid Carlberg, said that she’d spoken to Carson on the phone to inform her of the award and that Carson ‘had time to tell me… that she is, for the moment, in Iceland, where she is listening to the wind’. If you think that’s pretentious, I’m here to explain why it’s not. Or at least why she’s earned the right to be.
One of the most impressive things about Anne Carson is the consistency and diversity of her output. Since Eros the Bittersweet in 1986, a reworking of her doctoral thesis, Carson has published over 20 books of poetry, essays, translations and other writings. Every book takes a different form than the last; each is startlingly good on its own terms – experimental, audacious books that blend modern language and ideas with intricate intertextuality. When asked what motivates her formal shifting in an interview, Carson said: ‘Boredom, I guess.’
Carson started as a translator and a teacher of classics, a lifelong passion that started when a high school Latin teacher offered her extra lessons in Ancient Greek during lunchbreaks. One of her most famous works is If Not, Winter (2002) – her translations of the Ancient Greek poet Sappho, a queer musical genius whose works on life, desire, exile and shame survive only in fragments. Carson chooses to represent what is missing, and therefore unsaid (or unheard), with square brackets. At times we get a good chunk of Sappho’s songs, others we must decide how we read them, what we can feel or intuit in the gaps. ‘Fragment 38’ just reads, ‘you burn me’ – three words that get both sexier and more profound with each reading.
Carson’s sustained interest has been in female figures, especially those who represent some element of high femininity, sexuality or beauty. Her works have explored Antigone, Emily Brontë, Brigitte Bardot and Helen of Troy, whom she conflates with Marilyn Monroe in her play Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019). She’s interested in their humour, what they chose to say, the push and pull of their femininity – how much of a mask it is, how much of a choice or burden. She is less concerned with ‘truth’ or linear time. In her translation of Antigone, Antigonick (2012), she has the two sisters discussing the German philosopher Hegel.
Then there’s Short Talks (1992), a book of small, blocky prose poems, each presenting itself as a micro lecture on something – hedonism, reading, trout, Ovid, rain, the sensation of airplane takeoff, and so on. In ‘Short Talk on Major and Minor’ she begins,
Major things are wind, evil, a good fighting
horse, prepositions, inexhaustible love, the
way people choose their king.
There is little more linguistically satisfying than a good list. It’s something Carson is particularly brilliant at. In ‘God’s List of Liquids’, from her 1995 book Glass, Irony & God, there’s another:
For I made their flesh as a sieve
wrote God at the top of the page
and then listed in order:
Alcohol
Blood
Gratitude
Memory
Semen
Song
Tears
Time.
Beyond structural or thematic transformation, Carson has also experimented with the physicality of the book itself. Nox (2010) is part fragmentary elegy or ‘epitaph’ for her brother, who was absent for most of her life, and part translation of a poem by the Roman poet Catullus. It takes the form of one long concertina booklet in a box containing photographs, collages, text works and ephemera to devastating effect. Float (2016) gathers 22 separate chapbooks that can be rearranged and read in any order. Indeed, there is a lot of overlap in Carson’s work between visual art and poetry – and she has proved influential to contemporary artists Roni Horn, Tacita Dean, Johanna Hedva and more; in many ways, poetry, in its consideration of space, shape and image, is closer to art than it is to prose. Of course, poems by artists, and art by poets, is often bad. Both parties seem to fail to understand what makes the other work and lack the dedication to learn it. Which makes Carson’s successful cross into visual art all the more impressive: she knows when to take things seriously; when not to. It’s also because she’s, well, cool. Carson is seventy-six, has a bob, glasses, often dressed in baggy suit and tie – think chic disgruntled geography teacher.
While somewhat allergic to being a public figure onstage, there have been many iconic moments discussed and shared. In 2025 she delivered one of the annual LRB lectures wearing boxing gloves – a reference to the boxing class she’s been taking since and because of her Parkinson’s diagnosis. She is a deadpanning master and infinitely quotable. Red Doc>,the 2013 sequel to her much-lauded Autobiography of Red (1998), is so titled because that’s what it automatically saved as on her computer. ‘If prose is a house,’ she said in an interview, ‘poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.’ She can be withering in an audience Q&A, or with those chairing her in conversations – which, depending on how you are with schadenfreude, is either excruciating or thrilling (in fact, her command of the camera, and inadvertently of the many adoring online, marks her out as one of the rare laureates for these times in particular). Her texts are irony-soaked and frequently silly, but always with a scholarly intensity. Whatever she is writing about, be it Hegel, Keats, volcanoes or Rosalía, she turns her intelligence towards it like a searchlight, full-beam.
In 2013 I sat at the back of a packed London bookshop to see her read from Red Doc>. While marvelling at the genius of the writing, it also occurred to me that I’d never heard anyone say the word ‘dick’ better than she did. Thirteen years and one Nobel Prize later, this is still part of the magic of her writing. There is no such thing as highbrow or lowbrow in Carson’s oeuvre – there is only interest and language; boredom and brilliance.
Read next Anne Carson’s The Gender of Sound