Anne Carson: I think the only thing I know about writing is: start in the middle. Wherever you're doing, start in the middle. Starting at the beginning is just ridiculously frightening. And of course, the end, you know, will be there when you arrive.

Robert Currie: You know, I was going to say, and this is inside information, I don't think you have ritual, but you have the luxury of having space, where you always have the writing available. You have a studio, not here [in Iceland], but in America, which has a desk for each of those practices: you have your drawing desk, your writing desk, and your translating desk.

AC: That’s the topography.

RC: Yeah, you've made a topography in which the ideas can happen instead of —

AC: I think it's important to have a topography, where you have a desk or a table or something where you can leave the work out. If you work on the dining room table, and you have to put it away every time the family wants to have supper, you’ll just go mad. You’ll lose your orientation. You have to be able to leave it out somewhere.

AC: Oh, Short Talks is a book I wrote that exists as a bunch of little essays. When I made it first, it was a bunch of drawings with titles, and I thought the titles were interesting, yes, but the drawings were more interesting to me. When I showed them to other people, they thought that the drawings were kind of irrelevant, and the titles were kind of neat. So, I began to expand the titles and the titles became talks, and the talks became a book of talks. The drawings were lost, which always made me sad, but I mean, they weren't that good, I had to agree. It would have been a kind of a dopey book. Anyway, that was the direction of my thinking.

Notes on method

There is too much self in my writing.

So writing involves some dashing back and forth between that darkening landscape where facticity is strewn and a windowless room cleared of everything I do not know. It is the clearing that takes time. It is the clearing that is a mystery. Once cleared the room writes itself. I copy down the names of everything left in it and note their activity.

How does the clearing occur? Lukács says it begins with my intent to excise everything that is not accesible to the immediate experience (Erlebbarkeit) of the self as self. Were this possible, it would seal the room on its own boundaries like a cosmos. Lukács is prescribing a room for aesthetic work; it would be a gesture of false consciousness to say academic writing can take place there. And yet, you know as well as I, thought finds itself in this room in its best moments—locked inside its own pressures, fishing up facts of the landscape from notes or memory as well as it may— vibrating (as Mallarmé would say) with their disappearance.

I guess the important thing is to copy down whatever vibration you see while your attention is strong.

To keep attention strong means to keep it from settling.

Sometimes you can see a celestial object better by looking at something else, with it, in the sky.

CARSON
But I don’t think that’s right; I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. And so his mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.

INTERVIEWER
So it’s an act.

CARSON
It’s an action. It’s a practice.

Anne Carson: I think the only thing I know about writing is: start in the middle. Wherever you're doing, start in the middle. Starting at the beginning is just ridiculously frightening. And of course, the end, you know, will be there when you arrive.

Robert Currie: You know, I was going to say, and this is inside information, I don't think you have ritual, but you have the luxury of having space, where you always have the writing available. You have a studio, not here [in Iceland], but in America, which has a desk for each of those practices: you have your drawing desk, your writing desk, and your translating desk.

AC: That’s the topography.

RC: Yeah, you've made a topography in which the ideas can happen instead of —

AC: I think it's important to have a topography, where you have a desk or a table or something where you can leave the work out. If you work on the dining room table, and you have to put it away every time the family wants to have supper, you’ll just go mad. You’ll lose your orientation. You have to be able to leave it out somewhere.

AC: Oh, Short Talks is a book I wrote that exists as a bunch of little essays. When I made it first, it was a bunch of drawings with titles, and I thought the titles were interesting, yes, but the drawings were more interesting to me. When I showed them to other people, they thought that the drawings were kind of irrelevant, and the titles were kind of neat. So, I began to expand the titles and the titles became talks, and the talks became a book of talks. The drawings were lost, which always made me sad, but I mean, they weren't that good, I had to agree. It would have been a kind of a dopey book. Anyway, that was the direction of my thinking.