On 'Making a Thing Out of Language': Anne Carson Visits NPR

Float is the title of Anne Carson's newest poetry collection: so-called because it is a group of chapbooks that "float" inside a clear plastic box. On Weekend Edition Saturday Anne Carson speaks with host Scott Simon about her love of poetry, form, and letters.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Anne Carson's book of poems come in a clear plastic box where they float, which is also the title of this collection - small chapbooks that hold poems, jottings, lists, reflections and excerpts of thoughts that can be shuffled, rearranged, set aside or read over and over as a reader chooses.

Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and MacArthur Fellow. Her books include "Antigonick," "Nox" and "The Beauty Of The Husband: A Fictional Essay In 29 Tangos." That won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. She's also a devoted, roving teacher of the classics and literature. She joins us now from Valencia, Calif. Thanks so much for being with us.

ANNE CARSON: Thank you for asking me.

SIMON: Why this form?

CARSON: Well, mainly because these various pieces of writing were originally performance pieces. So they were done on a stage with - often with other people helping and my collaborator Currie designing the whole thing.

So we wanted the book to retain that separateness of the pieces because it isn't a collection in the sense of an organic whole intended to be read in a certain order with a certain trajectory of thought or feeling. It is genuinely a collection. And then the floating is because they float.

SIMON: Let me read the beginning of "The Designated Mourner By Wally Shawn," which is by you.

CARSON: OK.

SIMON: (Reading) Go to the Wally Shawn play. It is hopeless. I mean, production - impeccable. Philosophy - hopeless. Yet it gives me hope. Figure this out. Next day - listening to Sam Cooke. What comes to me in a dawned cafe is, no need to fear death. There will be a tunnel and light.

Do poets find something to hope for in things that are hopeless?

CARSON: Sort of. Well, I don't know. I guess they do [...]

Discover more and liisten to their complete conversation at NPR.