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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.

Anne Carson

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Anne Carson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 21
Linguist
Literary Critic
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
City of Toronto
Carson
Anne
Trying
Poets
Something
Metaphor
Really
Greek
Way
Push
Always
English
Aeschylus
Think
Towards
Density
Thinking
Poet
Attracts
Use
Imitate

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If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.
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Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it's more scary to draw. It's more revealing. You can't disguise yourself in drawing.
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Consider incompleteness as a verb.
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We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life.
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My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.
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There is no person without a world.
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Small, red, and upright he waited, gripping his new bookbag tight in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other, while the first snows of winter floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced all trace of the world.
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To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
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Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.
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Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.
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I mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented... I feel I am blundering in concepts too fine for me.
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No one will ever make necessity not happen.
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All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things?
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THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM [all snap flags] Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem.
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Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.
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A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
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Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
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Poetry - poiesis means a thing made.
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There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.
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