Literary Birthday – 21 June – Anne Carson

Happy Birthday, Anne Carson, born on 21 June 1950.

Anne Carson Quotes

1. I didn’t write very much at all until I guess my twenties, because I drew. I just drew pictures, and sometimes wrote on them when I was young, but mostly I was interested in drawing. I never did think of myself as a writer! (Poetry Foundation)
2. That’s the way it goes with philology: the closer you look at a word the more distantly it looks back at you. (Newman Centre)
3. I don’t believe I’ve been a poet in this [life]. I made things; some of them now and again inserted themselves into poetic form. Why, I don’t know. (Penn Review)
4. The wording is key. (Brick)
5. I feel it’s a kind of fervour of mine to get away from whatever body of information I rest on when I give opinions. And I think poetic activity is a method for doing that—you leap off the building when you think poetically; you don’t amass your data and then move from point to point, you have to just know what you know in that moment. (Brick)
6. I don’t think anybody ever knows what another person means when they speak, frankly. It’s more than translation; it’s just throwing yourself into the dark. Language is so very, very personal, private. Weird. (The Paris Review)
7. I think about [creating something] as something that arrives in the mind, and then gets dealt with if it’s interesting. It’s more like a following of something, like a fox runs across your backyard and you decide to follow it and see if you can get to where the fox lives. It’s just following a track. (The Paris Review)
8. [On non-writing skills that are part of her writing process] Drawing and painting. I’ll put swimming in. Tidying up, I’m a good tidier. (The Paris Review)
9. My only interest in dealing with time is to find ways to make it stop. Because when it doesn’t stop, you’re in boredom. …To be out of time, to be in that other state, is completely fun. So fun that you forget worrying about time. (The Paris Review)

Anne Carson is an award-winning Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor. Carson has taught classics, comparative literature, and creative writing at universities across the United States and Canada since 1979, including McGill, University of Michigan, New York University, and Princeton University. More than 20 of her books of writings and translations have been published. Many of them blend poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction. The National Book Critics Circle Award shortlisted Carson three times for Autobiography of Red in 1998, Men in the Off Hours in 2000, and Nox in 2010. Carson published Wrong Norma in 2024, and the collection was shortlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her awards and honours include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. She was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2005 for her contribution to Canadian letters.

Source for photograph: Poetry Foundation, Photo by Peter Smith

by Amanda Patterson
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