SOURCE: Carson, Anne, and Stephen Burt. “Anne Carson: Poetry without Borders.” Publishers Weekly 247, no. 14 (3 April 2000): 56-7.

In the following interview, Carson discusses her background and education, her body of work, and the complexities of the publication process.

At poet Anne Carson's house in the Berkeley hills, hard by the university campus, a mint-green fence defends the high, pale greenery of a raw Bay Area spring. The plants hide the glass front door from the street, so Carson can work at her front window unseen. On her diminutive, sunlit writing desk is Edmund Burke's Philosophical Inquiry into the Sources of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful. Sinuous '50s jazz fills the kitchen. It's a neat, bright space for a scholar and poet, but Carson is quick to explain that it's not really hers: after spending the fall at the University of Michigan writing an opera, Carson is...