Anne Carson is unique in the literary world. First of all, no one knows what to call her—she’s a poet, a verse-novelist, an essayist, a scholar, a translator, a professor, an experimenter, an inventor of forms. She is almost blindingly brilliant, both on the page and in interviews, but seems to think nothing of it. She harbors a longtime desire to be Oscar Wilde, but she is already much better. Her work, in whatever form, and whatever you want to call it, achieves that rarest of things: it is formally cutting-edge, experimental, and intellectually challenging—but also deeply moving. Obviously I want to learn how she does it. Perhaps you feel similarly. Carson rarely gives specific writing advice, and doesn’t even necessarily answer questions she was asked in ways that make sense to laypeople, but she does often speak beautifully about the process of writing and form-making. So today, on her 68th birthday, do yourself a favor and revel in some of her literary wisdom.
Make problems for yourself:
Set yourself a problem which, in addressing it, will lead you to problems you didn’t set and couldn’t have dreamed up.
–from a 2016 interview with awesome high school lit mag Deltona Howl
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