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 arrestinglyunconventional – 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.
I feel perfectly at home underwater
Related: Anne Carson on translating Antigone for Ivo van Hove's Brooklyn Academy of Music production – audio
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