Anne Carson Is Perfectly at Home Underwater

In the Guardian's "Meet the Author" section, Kate Kellaway interviews poet, essayist, and classicist Anne Carson. Although she initially preferred drawing, she has become a revered voice in contemporary literature.

Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband, published in 2001, made her name; she became a poetic guru, revered as an original. Her writing is a hybrid – a wayward mix of ancient and modern. She is an essayist, translator and dramatist. Born in Ontario in 1950, she has worked most of her life as a classics professor. She appears in the newly launched Penguin Modern Poets Series and has just published a new collection, Float.

Your new collection is arrestingly unconventional – can you say something about its form?

Float is a transparent slipcase containing 22 chapbooks to be read on “shuffle”. They were mostly originally performance pieces – composed and performed individually and often with other people – so the collection is just that, a collection, not an organic whole, not intended to be read in any particular order, not designed to flow from beginning to end visually and conceptually (as previous books were). I like some part of all of the pieces and all of some of them.

Your work extends our idea of poetry. Do you have a personal definition of what poetry is?

If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.

Do you think poets choose to become poets – or does poetry choose them?

I preferred drawing, but wasn’t very good at it. It was putting titles on drawings that eventually extended itself into writing. But on the whole, drawing doesn’t relate much to writing; they refresh one another, are alternate ways of using the mind.

Read more at the Guardian.