ANNE CARSON BIOGRAPHY

Anne Carson is a
professor
of
Classics as well
as
a
poet,
essayist
and
translator.
In
the small world
of people who
keep
up
with
contemporary
poetry,
wrote
Daphne
Merkin
in the New York
Times
Book
Review,
Anne
Carson,
a
Canadian
professor of classics, has been cutting a large swath, inciting both envy and
admiration.Carson has gained both critical accolades and a wide readership
over the course of her unclassifiable publishing career. In addition to her
many highly-regarded translations of classical writers such as Sappho and
Euripides, and her triptych rendering of An Oresteia (2009), Carson has
published poems, essays, libretti, prose criticism and verse novels that often
cross genres. Known for her supreme eruditionMerkin called her one of the
great pasticheursCarsons poetry can also be heart-breaking and she
regularly writes on love, desire, sexual longing and despair. Always an
ambitious poet whatever her topic or genre, Merkin wrote of Carsons The
Beauty of the Husband, I dont think there has been a book since Robert
Lowells Life Studiesthat has advanced the art of poetry quite as radically as
Anne Carson is in the process of doing.
Though Carson is notoriously reticent about her personal life, it is known that
she was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1950. A high-school encounter with a Latin
instructor, who agreed to teach her ancient Greek over the lunch hour, led to
her passionate embrace of classical and Hellenic literature, influences which
mark her work still. Carson attended the University of Toronto, though she
dropped out twice before receiving her BA, MA and PhD in Classics. Carson has
taught at many respected universities in both the US and Canada, including
McGill and the University of Michigan. Her publishing career began with Eros
the Bittersweet: An Essay (1986),which also established Carsons style of
patterning her writings after classical Greek literature. Such works as Glass,
Irony, and God (1992), Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (1995) and Men in the Of

Hours (2001) have helped seal the authors reputation as unique among
contemporary poets. But perhaps the most widely received examples of her
particular specialty are Carsons verse novels,Autobiography of Red: A Novel in
Verse (1998) and The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29
Tangos (2001).
Autobiography of Red takes its cue from the legend of HerculesHerakles in
the traditional spelling from the tale by Steischoroswhose tenth labor was to
slay the red-winged monster Geryon. Recasting the story in modern time,
Carson makes some significant choices. In Steischoros, Herakles kills Geryon
and steals his red cattle, explained Adam Kirsch in New Republic. In Carson,
Herakles breaks Geryons heart and steals his innocence. The two characters
are introduced as teenagers, Geryon (still red and sporting wings) a sheltered,
sensitive high-school boy and Herakles a sexy, rebellious roughneck. The two
begin an affair that ends as Herakles cannot match the soul-tearing totality of
Geryons adoration, as Chicago Review contributorMark Halliday described it.
Years later the two characters meet in Buenos Aires where Geryon falls into a
destructive mnage a trois with Herakles and his new boyfriend, Ankash. The
book drew strong reactions in several periodicals. Halliday felt that the book
was willfully whimsical and delightedly peculiar. The Nation critic Bruce
Hainley pronounced Carson a philosopher of heartbreak and said her epiclength poem made for a brilliant book about desire, the ancient Greek poet
Steischoros, volcanoes and the joyful brutalities of seeing and blindness
Echoing debates that continue to swirl around the Carsons prose-like poetics,
Kirsch wondered if Carson had indeed produced the verse promised in the
books subtitle. The writing is clearly prose, he maintained, laid out in
alternating long and short lines, with no strictness of measure or rhythm; the
division between a long line and a short one is typographical only, or at best
syntactic.
Carsons fable went on to earn nods from prize committees,
though Autobiography of Red did not start out a winner, according to Time
International reporter Katherine Govier. Published to scant notice . . . it was
mainly talked about by writers here and there. Talk became buzz when the
book won Quebecs QSPELL poetry award. From there the volume went on to
earn a National Book Critics Circle nomination, making the Canadian-born
Carson one of the first two non-Americans to appear on the Circles short list.
Such word-of-mouth echoes the reception of another Carson book, her early
volume Eros the Bittersweet (1986). According to John DAgata in the Boston
Review,the book first stunned the classics community as a work of Greek
scholarship; then it stunned the nonfiction community as an inspired return to
the lyrically based essays once produced by Seneca, Montaigne, and Emerson;
and then, and only then, deep into the 1990s, reissued as literatureand
redesigned for an entirely new audience, it finally stunned the poets. DAgata
sees Carsons earlier work as an essayist everywhere in her poetry, along with
her deep absorption in Classical languages. Carsons work, DAgata alleges,
asks one to consider how prosaic, rhetorical, or argumentative can a poem be

before it becomes something else altogether, before it reverts to prose, to

essay?
Men in the Of Hours, a book of shorter poems which incorporate epitaphs,
love poems, verse-essays, commemorative prose, shooting scripts for
purported TV dramas and poems addressed to paintings, noted Publishers
Weekly writer Stephen Burt, was met with great acclaim. Reviewing the
collection for Salon, Kate Moses described it as a meditation on time, noting too
that it encompasses all of that picnic that time spreads behind itself: life and
sex and love and death. It was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize and was a
finalist for the Governor Generals Literary Award and that National Book Critics
Circle Award. In 2001 Carson also published The Beauty of the Husband: A
Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, a verse novel whose subject is the waywardness
of lust and the disaffection of the heart as seen through a marital breakup, as
Daphne Merkin wrote. It also received high praise and was awarded the T.S.
Eliot Prize. In 2000, Carson was awarded a MacArthur Foundation genius
grant
Since her incredible success of 2001, Carson has gone on to publish a volume
of poetry, essays and opera, Decreation (2005). Comprised of short lyrics, a
screenplay, oratorio, and long prose sections that combine literary criticism
with philosophical investigation, the book takes as its title and impetus an idea
of the philosopher Simone Weil. As Carson explains, Weils notion of
decreation is an undoing of the creature in usthat creature enclosed in self
and defined by self. As Deryn Rees-Jones noted in the Independent, in
decreating we would, in our extinction of the self, find a metaphysical fullness,
in tune with the universe.Decreation received high praise from all quarters
and Fiona Sampson, reviewing the book for the Guardian alleged that it
outlines one of the most idiosyncratic intelligences at work in contemporary
literature, and despite its genre-bending contents is most of allinimitable
poetry.
Carson continues to be an important and exciting translator of classical
writers. Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (2006) and An Oresteia (2009)
both sparked critical debate. A shocking playwright in his time, Euripides
reached his highest fame during the Peloponnesian War. Grief Lessons presents
four of his lesser-known tragedies and offers a kind of primer on the intrinsic
dangers of blind devotion to ideology, wrote Hilton Als in the New
Yorker. A Publishers Weekly reviewer found that Carson is nothing less than
brilliantunfalteringly sharp in diction, audacious and judicious in taking
liberties. Carsons next translation, An Oresteia, is a composite of plays
dealing with the fate of the house of Atreus and includesAgamemnon by
Aeshcylus, Electra by Sophocles and Orestes by Euripides. The volume received
somewhat mixed reviews for just those liberties; Brad Leithauser in the New
York Times Book Review found Carsons choice of diction irregular and often
jarringly contemporary and failed to findin Carsons translations a feeling of
a composite whole. There are moments when her diction stoops so low I had
trouble remembering I was dealing with men godlike in their splendor. Emily

Wilson, in theNation, found that though Carson as a scholar is acutely aware of

the differences between the three tragedians, she does not entirely succeed in
making them sound properly distinct from one another, though Wilson
described Carsons translation as a movementaway from the clear ideology
of Aeschylus Oresteia toward the much more complex, ambiguous world of
Euripides Orestes, which makes the work all the more important and
pertinent to the current political climate.
Speaking to poet-critic Stephen Burt, Carson admitted that at heart she
considers herself a visual, not verbal, artist: I didnt 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! Even after several acclaimed volumes, I dont
know that I do yet. I know that I have to make things. And its a convenient
form we have in our culture, the book, in which you can make stuff, but its
becoming less and less satisfying. And Ive never felt that it exhausts any idea
Ive had.

[Updated 2010]
CAREER
Poet and essayist. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, former instructor; Emory
University, Atlanta, GA, former instructor; McGill University, Montreal, Quebec,
Canada, John MacNaughton Professor of Classics, 2000.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
o

Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ),

1986.

Short Talks, Brick Books (London, Ontario, Canada), 1992.

Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, Knopf (New York, NY), 1995.

Glass, Irony, and God, New Directions (New York, NY), 1995.

Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, Knopf (New York, NY), 1998.

Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul

Celan, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1999.

Men in the Of Hours, Knopf (New York, NY), 2000.

The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in Twenty-nine

Tangoes (poetry), Knopf (New York, NY), 2001.

(As translator) Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, Knopf (New

York, NY), 2002.

(In collaboration, with Roni Horn), Wonderwater (Alice Ofshore), Steidl

(London), 2004.

Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera, Knopf (New York, NY), 2005.

(As translator) Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, New York Review
Books Classics (New York, NY), 2006.

(As translator) An Oresteia, Faber and Faber (London), 2009.

Contributor to anthologies, including The Best of Grand Street, edited by Ben

Sonnenberg, Random House (New York, NY), 1989; The Best American Poetry
of 1990, edited by Jorie Graham, Ticknor & Fields (Boston, MA), 1990; and The
Journey Prize Anthology, edited by Douglas Glover, McClelland & Stewart
(Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1994. Contributor of poetry to periodicals,
including New Muses, Chicago Review, and Threepenny Review.
FURTHER READING
BOOKS
o

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 193: American Poets since

World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998, pp. 46-53.

Foster, Nelson, and Jack Shoemaker, The Roaring Stream: A New Zen
Reader, Ecco Press (Hopewell, NJ), 1996.

PERIODICALS
o

American Journal of Philology, fall, 1990, Barbara Gold, review of Eros

the Bittersweet: An Essay, p. 400.

American Poetry Review, March-April, 1995, Carole Maso, "An Essay," pp.
26-31.

Antioch Review, spring, 1997, Gail Wronsky, review of Glass, Irony, and
God, p. 247.

Booklist, July, 1995, Janet St. John, review of Plainwater: Essays and
Poetry, p. 1853; November, 1, 1995, St. John, review of Glass, Irony, and
God, p. 450; April, 1998, Ray Olson, review of Autobiography of Red: A
Novel in Verse, p. 1294; November 1, 1995, p. 450; January, 1, 1999,
review of Autobiography of Red, p. 781; March 1, 2000, Donna Seaman,
review of Men in the Of Hours, p. 190; February 1, 2001, Seaman,
review of The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in Twenty-nine
Tangoes, p. 1035.

Boston Phoenix, December 23, 1995.

Canadian Forum, September, 1999, Daphne Marlatt, "A Poignant Critique

in a Playful Mixing in of Genres," p. 41.

Canadian Literature, spring, 1995, Alexander Forbes, review of Short

Talks, p. 177; summer-autumn, 1999, Jed Rascula, review
of Autobiography of Red, p. 187; autumn, 2000, Ian Rae, "Dazzling
Hybrids," p. 17; summer, 2001, Rae, "Flights of Verse," p. 185.

Chicago Review, spring, 1999, Mark Halliday, review of Autobiography of

Red, p. 121; winter, 2000, Danielle Allen, review of Economy of the
Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan, p. 162.

Classical and Modern Literature, winter, 2000, Robert Lamberton, review

of Economy of the Unlost, p. 81.

Georgia Review, fall, 1993, Judith Kitchen, review of Short Talks, p. 578;
fall, 2000, Jeffrey Shotts, review of Men in the Of Hours, p. 583.

Iowa Review, summer, 1997, John D'Agata, p. 1; spring, 1999, Sharon

Wahl, "Erotic Suffering: Autobiography of Red and Other Anthologies," p.
180.

Journal of Modern Literature, summer, 2000, W. H. New, review

of Autobiography of Red, p. 565.

Library Journal, February 15, 1992, p. 156; November 15, 1986, Thomas
Robinson, review of Eros the Bittersweet, p. 97; July, 1995, Daniel
Guillory, review of Plainwater, p. 79; May 1 1998, Ann K. van Buren,
review of Autobiography of Red, p. 88; April 1, 1999, Barbara Hoffert,
review of Autobiography of Red, p. 95; September 1, 1999, David Kirby,
review of Economy of the Unlost, p. 190; February 15, 2000, van Buren,
review of Men in the Of Hours, p. 168; February 1, 2001, Fred Muratori,
review of The Beauty of the Husband, p. 99.

Maclean's, June 18, 2001, John Bemrose, "Poetry in Motion," p. 50.

Midwest Quarterly, winter, 1997, Richard Holinger, review

of Plainwater, p. 235.

Modernism/Modernity, April, 2000, Stanley Corngold, review of Economy

of the Unlost, p. 1190.

Nation, June 1, 1998, Bruce Hainley, review of Autobiography of Red, p.

32.

New Criterion, June, 1999, William Logan, "Vanity Fair," p. 60; June, 2000,
Logan, review of Autobiography of Red, p. 63.

New Republic, May 18, 1998, Adam Kirsch, review of Autobiography of

Red, p. 37.

New York Times Book Review, September 30, 2001, Daphne Merkin,
"Last Tango," p. 12; October 7, 2001, review of The Beauty of the
Husband; February 10, 2002, Scott Veale, review of The Beauty of the
Husband.

Poetry, August, 1996, Sandra Gilbert, reviews of Plainwater and Glass,

Irony, and God, p. 281; December, 1998, review of Autobiography of
Red, p. 181; December, 2000, "News Notes," p. 230.

Poets and Writers, March-April, 2001, Mary Cannon, "Anne Carson:

Beauty Prefers an Edge," p. 26.

Publishers Weekly, May 29, 1995, review of Plainwater, p. 77; September

25, 1995, review of Glass, Irony, and God, p. 49; March 30, 1998, review
of Autobiography of Red, p. 70; July 26, 1999, "Verbal Transactions," p.
87; February 7, 2000, review of Men in the Of Hours, p. 70; April 3,
2000, Stephen Burt, "Poetry without Borders," pp. 56-57; December 18,
2000, review of The Beauty of the Husband, p. 73; April 16, 2001,
"Poetry Notes," p. 62.

Raritan, fall, 1996, Adam Phillips, review of Plainwater and Glass, Irony,
and God, p. 112.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1995, Brian Evenson, review

of Plainwater, p. 253; fall, 1998, Nicole Cooley, review of Autobiography
of Red, p. 233; summer, 2001, Anne Foltz, review of The Beauty of the
Husband, p. 172.

Time International, February 22, 1999, Katherine Govier, "Not So Simply

Red," p. 57; April 10, 2000, Julie Bruck, "Timelines: Anne Carson Ponders
the Big Issues of Life, Death, and History," p. 98.

Times Literary Supplement, May 25, 2001, Josephine Palmer, review

of Men in the Of Hours, p. 26.

University of Toronto Quarterly, winter, 1999, Marnie Parsons, "Poetry,"

p. 42.

Women's Review of Books, November, 1996, Elisabeth Frost, review

of Glass, Irony, and God, p. 24; October, 2001, Priscilla Long, "Literate
Obsessions," p. 14.

Yale Review, December 18, 2000, review of The Beauty of the

Husband, p. 73.