HAUS FÜR POESIE

Anne Carson (born 1950 in Toronto) is perhaps the most renowned living writer. Each year, bookmakers rank her among the leading contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature. As a poet, essayist, translator, and classicist, she moves virtuously across different forms and genres—indeed, she has even invented some of them herself for her own use.

She achieved her first major success in 1986 with a text that moves freely between essay and scholarly study: Eros the Bittersweet. In it, she engages, among others, with Sappho and Plato, and advances the thesis that Eros arises from a sense of lack. Her international breakthrough came twelve years later with the verse novel Autobiography of Red, a book that exists in two German translations: one by Karen Lauer (2001) and another—expanded to include the sequel Red Doc >—by Anja Utler (2019). In these texts, Carson employs the method for which she became famous: radically retelling an obscure ancient myth—in this case the Geryon myth of the poet Stesichorus—and relocating it to the present as a story about abuse and desire.

Numerous books followed, in which Carson continuously expanded the range of her expressive possibilities, including groundbreaking works such as Decreation (2005), Nox (2010), and Antigonick (2012). In 2020, Carson also delivered the fifth Berlin Poetry Lecture titled Dreizehn Blickwinkel auf Einige Worte / Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Short Talk (Wallstein Verlag, 2020). Most recently, several books in German translation by Marie Luise Knott have appeared with Matthes & Seitz, including Norma Jeane Baker von Troja (2025), an artful superimposition of two iconic female figures: the mythical Helen and the no less mythical Marilyn Monroe.

On the evening of Pentecost Sunday, Anne Carson, together with her partner, the British artist Robert Currie, will present a performance of her text Lecture on the History of Skywriting, translated especially for the event. Carson describes this lecture as a “short history of her life as a writer,” told as an alternative origin myth in which science and the biblical creation narrative intertwine.

The poet expands alongside the universe over the seven days of creation—from redshift to redshift—on an infinite and infinitely brief journey during which Heracles is conceived, Christopher Hitchens comments on fatherhood, and clouds take the shape of Werner Herzog. Interspersed are quotations from John Cage, Virginia Woolf, Immanuel Kant, and Marcel Proust (translated by Lydia Davis), as well as an interview with Beckett’s character Godot, who seeks advice from Yoko Ono on how to pass the time while everyone else is waiting for him. And hidden in the middle of the text is an insight framed as a question—one that applies to everything Anne Carson has ever written: “Who would be bothered doing science if it weren't erotic?”

Lecture & Performance Anne Carson & Robert Currie
A conversation will follow, moderated by Marie Luise Knott

The event will be interpreted English-German.
Kindly supported by ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen

An event jointly hosted with the Cluster of Excellence 2020 "Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective" at Freie Universität Berlin 

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