In this rare interview, renowned poet and essayist Anne Carson, known for her unorthodox blending of genres and forms, reflects on her approach to writing and touches on themes of memory, autofiction, and her recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. Looking back at her work, Carson says:
“Your mind wants to move, and the best thing a work of art can do is take your mind with it, moving somewhere you never expected to move.”
Anne Carson is interviewed by Norwegian bestselling writer Linn Ullmann, who begins the conversation by saying that Anne Carson is the writer Ullmann loves the most. The conversation shifts across Carson’s eclectic range of topics, from the Syrian refugee crisis to the death of her mother, offering moments of both deep reflection and humor. Carson reflects on how we navigate what we read:
“It always seems to me when contemplating the news, as we call it, how you can read a story about tragedy and trauma and enter into the sorrow of that and then close the paper and go make toast. How do we do that? How do we just let non-existence be right beside existence.”
Carson also discusses the challenge of living with Parkinson’s disease, a condition that has profoundly affected her writing. For a couple of months, Carson has attended a boxing class, and boxing has become a form of therapy:
“One of the recommended therapies for this disease is boxing because it teaches you to pay attention to hand-eye coordination of movement and also to sequences of actions.”
“I’m basically an arrogant intellectual thinking I’m a little better than everybody else because I’ve read all these books. And these people in the boxing class are not mostly academics or intellectuals. In fact, they don’t read at all as far as I can see. They watch TV and they come to boxing class. And I could dismiss them, therefore, because they’re not like me. And I gradually learned not to do that. And when you don’t do that, then you begin to see that they’re each actually pretty unique, probably crazy, and willing to be nice to you. So, it just, you know, that kind of attention to details leads you somewhere truer than generalizing,” Carson states.
Carson also meditates on the passage of time and mortality, poignantly illustrated in her reflection on aging: “You wake up and you’re a 70. Looking ahead, you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not.”
Her views on life’s inherent unfairness are captured in a metaphor she develops from her admiration of John Keats’ beautiful handwriting, “Life is not fair,” she says, in a playful but weighted pun on both beauty and justice.
Anne Carson mentions French philosopher René Descartes, known for his famous sentence cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. “But if you look at the sentence,” Carson says to Linn Ullmann, “it says dubito ergo cogito, ergo sum. I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. […] You see cogito ergo sum on T -shirts all over the world, but dubito has a bad press. So that that’s very provocative. Everything starts in doubt, or it also could mean hesitation, but the same idea,” Carson concludes.
Anne Carson, born in Toronto, Canada, in 1950, is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is best known for her genre-defying works such as Autobiography of Red (1998), The Beauty of the Husband (2001), and Nox (2010). A classicist by training, Carson’s writing often incorporates elements of ancient Greek literature and philosophy. She has received numerous awards, including the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Lannan Literary Award. Carson has also taught at several prestigious institutions, including Princeton University. She is often mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Cameras: Simon Weyhe, Jakob Sobakken & Rasmus Quistgaard
Edited by Signe Boe Pedersen
Produced by Christian Lund
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2024
Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond, Ny Carlsbergfondet, C.L. Davids Fond og Samling, and Fritz Hansen.
#literature
0:00 On being uneasy at the center of the stage
5:17 On Merce Cunningham and John Cage
8:53 On ‘Wrong Norma’
11:44 On the resistance of reality to the representation of reality
17:35 On Decartes
18:35 On hesitation & doubt
20:20 On writing autobiographical
28:50 On paying attention to what people do
30:18 On fighting against Parkinson’s
44:10 On Sappho
48:02 On being in a translation
55:50 On writing about the mother
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