This next series is part reading group, part discussion, part guided encounter with one of the most singular bodies of writing of the last forty years.

Wednesdays. 6.30pm to 8pm. October 14th, October 21st, October 28th. 

Anne Carson is poet, classicist, essayist, translator, novelist and critic, though none of those categories really contain what she does. Across works like Eros the Bittersweet, Autobiography of Red, Nox and Decreation, scholarship contaminates poetry, translation bleeds into autobiography, myth enters contemporary life, criticism becomes erotic, and grief becomes an argument about language.

Across three sessions — eros, myth and ruin — we’ll read across Carson’s poetry, essays, translations, verse novels and visual work, following the questions that recur throughout: desire, distance, myth, translation, loss, and what language can do when ordinary forms stop being enough.

We’ll read poetry, essays, translations, novels-in-verse, fragments and visual work, looking not simply at what Carson writes about but at the forms she invents in order to think. What happens when criticism becomes poetry? When translation becomes autobiography? When scholarship begins behaving like desire? When an ancient story enters the present and refuses to stay ancient?

Each session will centre on selected passages from across Carson’s work, with optional wider reading for those who want to go deeper. No previous knowledge of Carson, classics, poetry or literary theory is required. You can attend in person, or via Zoom. 

Session One | Eros

Desire, distance, Sappho, edges, triangulation, lack, reading, knowledge.

For Carson, desire is structured by distance. We want what we do not possess; the interval between self and object is not an unfortunate obstacle to eros but the thing that produces it. The lover reaches toward something that remains elsewhere.

Starting with Sappho and ancient Greek lyric, we’ll look at Carson’s fusion of classical scholarship, philosophy, criticism and almost-poetic argument — and at the idea of eros not simply as romantic desire, but as a way of knowing.

From there we’ll follow desire outward through her later writing: lovers, readers, writers, translators and characters continually approaching something they cannot quite touch.

Session Two | Myth

Geryon, Herakles, monsters, queerness, photography, adaptation, ancient stories in modern worlds

What does it mean to adapt a myth without merely retelling it?

In Autobiography of Red, Carson takes Geryon — a red-winged monster killed by Herakles in an ancient fragment by Stesichorus — and gives him an autobiography, a camera, a mother, an erotic life and a disastrous relationship with Herakles. Years later, she returns to them in Red Doc>. The myth has aged. So have the characters.

This session looks at Carson’s treatment of classical material void of inheritance, and instead as unstable matter: something capable of being translated, rearranged, contradicted, sexualised, modernised and made intimate.

We’ll think about monsters and heroes, queer desire, photography, autobiography and the peculiar freedom Carson finds in texts whose original forms have already been broken by history.

Session Three | Ruin

Translation, grief, Catullus, fragments, archives, elegy, the page as object, what cannot be recovered.

The final session turns toward Carson’s writing on grief, absence and the limits of understanding. At its centre will be Nox, Carson’s extraordinary elegy for her brother Michael, built around an attempt to translate Catullus 101 — itself an elegy written for a dead brother. Here translation becomes something much larger than moving language from one tongue into another. It becomes the attempt to reach another person across an impossible distance.

We’ll look at Carson’s use of fragments, documents, visual space and unfinished translation, and at one of the central tensions running through her work: the desire to understand set against the knowledge that some things cannot be recovered intact.

Format

Each session runs for approximately 1.5–2 hours and includes a short introduction, guided close reading, group discussion and optional reflective or writing exercises. All sessions are recorded; transcripts, recordings and deep dives  provided for all attendees. 

A reader will be provided before each session containing selected passages, images and contextual material. Full-book reading is absolutely welcome, but not required. You can arrive having read Carson for twenty years, having encountered one stray quotation online, or knowing nothing about her whatsoever.

We’ll also move outside Carson where useful: into Sappho, Stesichorus, Catullus, Greek myth, translation, photography, visual art and other writers and thinkers orbiting the same problems.

This is not a formal lecture course. It is an opportunity to spend sustained time inside a body of work that rewards getting lost in it.

Who Is This For?

Readers, writers, artists, poets, classicists and people who have successfully avoided becoming classicists; Carson obsessives, Carson beginners, people interested in desire, translation, myth, queerness, grief, fragments, photography, archives, ancient literature, experimental writing, and books that seem mildly contemptuous of the idea that books should belong to a single genre.

You can attend individual sessions as standalone events, or come to all three for the complete series.