Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the MacArthur “Genius” Award.

What are the negotiations made when blending poetry and prose together?

The “negotiations” are different for each sentence. I can’t see how to generalize this. A sentence has a thought in it, and the thought requires a certain morphology whether poetic, prosaic or something else: I just follow the thought.

What role does subversion through imagery, language, etc. play in your writing process and the works you produce?

Subversion isn’t an end in itself for me, but finding an accurate way to express a thought may often entail refreshing or recreating its method.

As a writer, how much intentionality is there in what you put on the page and what you leave out? Do you consider any of your writing to involve an aesthetic blindness?

Proust has a much better answer to this than me. He observes the momentarily impaired surface of the eye of a person who has just had a thought she will not tell you, which traces a fissure in the pupil and disappears back down its own involuntary depths.

What is your understanding of tomfoolery? Who is one writer or one literary character you find particularly playful? Why?

Odd word, originally derived from “tom”, a term for a common man and so representing behavior that looks foolish because it is so ordinary. Proust’s Albertine is 100 percent playful, or maybe not, for she is always lying. However, she is far from ordinary. So much for etymology.

Would you describe Albertine as more mischievous than playful, since she’s always lying?

No, I felt no compulsion to continue Geryon, but I was bored one day and Currie said, “Why not go on with that red-winged guy?” So I did.

What is exciting for you right now in Letters?

Letters themselves are interesting, I like the alphabet, as a concept and a.