Anne Carson’s Nobel Caps a Lifetime of Reinventing Poetry
When the Swedish Academy called with news of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Anne Carson was in Iceland, listening to the wind. She had been sweeping her kitchen when the phone rang, and only called back at her husband’s insistence.
“Crazy, I think they’re all crazy,” the 76-year-old Canadian poet told Icelandic broadcaster RUV. “I’ll get a sticker on the front of my book.” Her plan to celebrate: leaving the phone behind for a walk in the woods with her husband, Robert Currie, to “hear the quiet.”
The Academy honored Carson “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” A trained classicist with three degrees from the University of Toronto, she spent her career dissolving the borders between poetry, prose, translation and essay.
“Genre is something for booksellers,” said Swedish novelist Steve Sem-Sandberg, a member of the awarding committee. “And on what shelf do you put Anne Carson’s books? It’s on a shelf of her own.”
Her best-known work, the 1998 verse novel “Autobiography of Red,” retells a Greek myth through a modern boy. Her other books include “Nox,” an accordion-folded elegy for her late brother; “Float,” 22 chapbooks that can be read in any order; and “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy,” which fuses Euripides’ Helen with Marilyn Monroe.
Her most recent book, the 2022 collection “Wrong Norma,” gathers 25 poetic prose pieces in a facsimile of the hand-designed edition she drew and annotated herself. Several pieces first appeared in the New Yorker and the Paris Review, and the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Carson describes it as “a collection of writings about different things” whose pieces are not linked — “That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong.’”
Carson describes her method in plain terms. Particular images start the work, she told the Paris Review — “The Glass Essay” began with a frozen ditch near her mother’s house. As for craft: “I don’t think about it. Just think about something and follow it down to where it gets true.”
In a Louisiana Channel interview, she defined the writer’s job as noticing small things rather than grasping grand subjects — resisting the assumption that you already know the people around you, and attending instead to how they act and the minute particulars of their days. Boxing taught her the same lesson outside writing: she arrived at the gym assuming she had little in common with the people there, and came to find each of them distinct and warm-hearted.
In her seventies, after a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis, she took up boxing on medical advice — the sport trains hand-eye coordination and the sequencing of actions. She has spoken openly about the disease’s toll on her handwriting: “I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame.”
She is the 19th woman among 123 literature laureates and the second Canadian woman to win, after Alice Munro. The prize carries 12 million Swedish kronor, about $1.2 million.
