Dear friends,

Anne Carson was awarded the Nobel Prize last Thursday, a relatively uncontroversial decision. Carson’s work has touched many of our lives, many starting with Autobiography of Red, others with Grief Lessons, her collection of Euripides plays, and certainly some have encountered her picking up the uniquely packaged Float, a striking blue box of poems collected in themed pamphlets. Carson’s style is brief, but dense. Layered. A professor of mine, borrowing from her own mentor, instructs that one should have three reasons for every detail in a short story—no, four, no, five. Carson’s words often take the form of a few lines, and each word has three, no, four, no, five reasons to be there. It is an affirmation of what we all wished to deny in high school English class, that the writer had any reason in mind at all when putting the coffee cup on the coffee table, that there was any kind of “symbol” imbued in the object. Another professor recently told me that he believes Shakespeare outmatched his contemporaries mostly in worldplay, his tendency to imbue a single word with many meanings. Perhaps Carson will, too, persist in the canon.

Carson’s lecture last year was a synthesis of materials—classical, contemporary, literary, visual, from others, work of her own, demonstrative, collaborative. The picture it erected was one of human complexity. The lecture was in part the sheer variety of ways it would be interpreted, concluding with a collective, joyful scream. She makes me understand that literary excellence is not a pursuit of complexity, nor is it one of ambiguity. It is a pursuit of the writer’s own puzzledness, the posing of a curious question to infinite readers, the magic of literature existing in the possibility of infinite answers.

With love,

Sasha Rotko, EIC