Anne Carson

Anne Carson
Born	(1950-06-21) June 21, 1950 Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	Canadian
Genre	poetry, essay, opera libretto, new genres ('short talks', 'shot lists')
Notable works	Autobiography of Red

Anne Carson (born June 21, 1950) 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 1980-1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow. and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won a Lannan Literary Award.

Life and work

Though distinguished, Carson's academic training did not run a straight path. The fascination with classical literature which dominates her work began to take root in high school. There, a Latin instructor introduced her to the world and language of Ancient Greece and tutored the future poet privately. Enrolling at St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto, she left twice—at the end of her first and second years. Carson, disconcerted by curricular constraints (particularly by a required course on Milton), retired to the world of graphic arts for a short time. She did eventually return to the University of Toronto where she completed her B.A. in 1974, her M.A. in 1975 and her Ph.D. in 1981. She also spent a year studying Greek metrics and Greek textual criticism at the University of St Andrews.

A professor of the classics, with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art, Carson 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.

Carson was an Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, for Fall 2007. The Classic Stage Company, a New York–based theatre company, produced three of Carson's translations: Aeschylus' Agamemnon; Sophocles' Electra; and Euripides' Orestes (as An Oresteia), in repertory, in the 2008/2009 season. She is Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at New York University. and was a judge for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize.

She also participated in the Bush Theatre's project Sixty Six (October 2011), for which she had written a piece entitled Jude: The Goat at Midnight based upon the Epistle of Jude from the King James Bible. Once every year, Carson and her husband, Robert Currie, teach a class called Egocircus about the art of collaboration at New York University. On November 16, 2012, Carson received an honorary degree from the University of Toronto. Carson delivered a series of "short talks", or short-format poems on various subjects, as the address to the Ph.D. graduating class of 2012.

Anne Carson's 2013 book Red Doc> was reviewed by Kathryn Schulz as, "a sequel of sorts to Autobiography of Red, which was a sequel of sorts to a poem by Stesichoros... In Greek myth, a monster named Geryon lived on a red island and tended a herd of coveted red cattle; slaying the monster and stealing the cattle was the tenth of the twelve labors of Herakles... The tale was set down by Hesiod and others almost 3,000 years ago... What Red Doc> is greater than is the sum of its parts. This is Carson's obsession, and her gift: to make meaning from the fragments we get, which are also all we get -- of time, of the past, of each other. It doesn't last, of course; the arrow of gravity, like the arrow of time, points only in one direction. Still, for a moment, she gets it all to hang together up there, the joy made keener by the coming fall. Sad but great: In the end it seemed to me that Carson had found the proper name for everything -- her character, this book, this life."

Selected works

• Odi et Amo Ergo Sum (1986) PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto
• Eros the Bittersweet (1986) Princeton University Press
• Glass, Irony, and God (1992) New Directions Publishing Company
• Short Talks (1992) Brick Books
• Plainwater (1995) Knopf
• Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998) Knopf
• Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Ceos with Paul Celan (1999) Princeton University Press
• Men in the Off Hours (2001) Knopf
• Electra (translation) (2001) Oxford
• The Beauty of the Husband (2001) Knopf
• If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002) Knopf
• Wonderwater (Alice Offshore) (volume two, Answer Scars, a collaboration with Roni Horn) (2004) Steidl
• Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2005) Knopf
• Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (translation) (2006) New York Review Books Classics
• An Oresteia (Translation of Agamemnon, Elektra, Orestes. (2009) Faber and Faber
• NOX (2010) New Directions, incorporating Catullus 101 of Catullus
• Antigonick (2012) New Directions
• Red doc> (2013) Knopf, a direct sequel to her first poetic novel Autobiography of Red.

Selected awards and honors

• Lannan Literary Award (1996)
• Pushcart Prize (1997)
• Guggenheim Fellowship (1998)
• MacArthur Fellowship (2000)
• Griffin Poetry Prize (2001) for Men in the Off Hours
• T. S. Eliot Prize (2001) for The Beauty of the Husband
• PEN Award for Poetry in Translation (2010)
• Honorary degree from the University of Toronto (2012)

External links

• Poems by Anne Carson at PoetryFoundation.org
• Griffin Poetry Prize biography
• Anne Carson's entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia
• Griffin Poetry Prize reading, including video clip
• Hermetic Hotties/What is Anne Carson doing on The L Word? by Meghan O'Rourke, Slate
• Criticism of Carson's poetry in "Subduing the reader" by Laurie Smith in Magma, No. 23, Summer 2002
• Anne Carson Biography by Ian Rae.
• Classic Carson by Val Ross in U of T Magazine, Spring 2001.
• Will Aitken (Fall 2004). "Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry No. 88". Paris Review.
• Anne Carson interview on KCRW's "Bookworm," August 7, 1997, discussing the roots of her writing, particularly in "Plainwater" and "Glass, Irony and God"
• - Video of Anne Carson's reading at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood, CA, 02/25/08
• "Anne Carson, with Brighde Mullins", Lannan Readings & Conversations, March 21, 2001
• Anne Carson performing Antigonick Recorded at the Louisiana Literature festival, August 2012, Denmark. Video by Louisiana Channel.
• Anne Carson reading from Nox Recorded at the Louisiana Literature festival, August 2012, Denmark. Video by Louisiana Channel.
• New York Times assessment of Carson's career and review of Red doc>