Anne Carson
Anne Carson
Anne Carsonis 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...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth21 June 1950
CountryCanada
pain dark sweat
Now every mortal has pain and sweat is constant, but if there is anything dearer than being alive, it's dark to me. We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life. We know no other. The underworld's a blank and all the rest just fantasy.
running pain
Under the seams runs the pain.
love pain moving
Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.
pain quality demand
One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.
people want assuming
Everything depends on liking the people and trusting the people. You have to assume that whatever they do will be as good as you want the thing to be and just go ahead with that.
existence
Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.
self poverty dare
Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.
light practice skins
It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.
dear binding
Life pulls softly inside your bindings. The pod glows - dear stench.
fashion asking realizing
It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself,
mind movement use
You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough,
light desire
Desire is no light thing.
communication men philosopher
Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.
thinking always-trying greek
There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English.