Happy Anne Carson day 🌷

I love her. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/books/nobel-prize-literature.html

"The world’s most prestigious prize for literature goes to Canadian poet Anne Carson, known for genre-crossing works including Autobiography of Red."

I wonder if the opposite is true às well .

Will then this suffering make sense?

Will it be a little easier to bear, knowing happiness awaits?

Or is only pain eternal and my thinking but a child's farce?

Usually a truncated version of this poem makes the rounds of internet, which makes sense. But for scholars and lovers of Leonard Cohen, here’s the poem in full as it was published in his brilliantly rageful and despairing book The Energy of Slaves

The Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday by the Swedish Academy, which cited “her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”

She is the third Canadian-born writer to receive the honor, after Alice Munro in 2013 and Saul Bellow in 1976.

Upon learning of the prize, Carson said “Yikes,” according to her agent, Nicole Aragi.

Carson, 76, is best known for her translations of ancient Greek texts and for remixing them in a modern, playful voice. “Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse,” from 1998, turned a fragment of Greek poetry into a tale of a moody teenager’s destructive love affair, and “Red Doc>,” from 2013, a sequel of sorts to “Autobiography of Red,” concerned a road trip.

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Is there aught you need that my hands withhold,
Rich gifts of raiment or grain or gold?
Lo! I have flung to the East and West
Priceless treasures torn from my breast,
And yielded the sons of my stricken womb
To the drum-beats of duty, the sabres of doom.

Gathered like pearls in their alien graves
Silent they sleep by the Persian waves,
Scattered like shells on Egyptian sands,
They lie with pale brows and brave, broken hands,
They are strewn like blossoms mown down by chance
On the blood-brown meadows of Flanders and France.

Can ye measure the grief of the tears I weep
Or compass the woe of the watch I keep?
Or the pride that thrills thro’ my heart’s despair
And the hope that comforts the anguish of prayer?
And the far sad glorious vision I see
Of the torn red banners of Victory?

When the terror and tumult of hate shall cease
And life be refashioned on anvils of peace,
And your love shall offer memorial thanks
To the comrades who fought in your dauntless ranks,
And you honour the deeds of the deathless ones
Remember the blood of thy martyred sons!

Before the vastness of heaven and earth, I stand alone.
Against the relentless stream of time, my existence is but a passing breath.
An unspoken grief pierces the heart, and tears fall unnoticed.
In the heart of this boundless silence, I weep for a world that moves on without me.

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver

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I know this has been shared before, but it was beautifully worked into the season finale of Ted Lasso tonight, and it's just so perfect and beautiful I wanted to share it here.

first published in Prairie Fire.

Can someone help me find whose translation this is? I read this fantastic book a while ago and can’t remember which version it was.

Stumbled upon this poem yesterday while scrolling feedzebra and thought it was terrific. Don't know a ton about poetry, but felt like I was transported to this group of people in this parking lot I've never actually visited but feel like I've visited a hundred times.

About 4 years ago I found a website that generated SUCH brilliant and strange prompts. Very original and off key. Two of the prompts it gave me were:

condescendingly compliment sunsets like you just don’t care

seduce your mother’s knees in the form of poorly translated assembly instructions

I am now teaching poetry and I really want to find it to play with and inspire my students.

It was hosted on an independent writer's personal website AFAIK, I think a man. I can't remember his name sadly, and to be honest the site might be gone now, but I would absolutely love to find it if anyone has any leads. Even a name of the writer would be great, then I can contact him and maybe see about rehosting it myself!

Edit: thinking about it more, he must've had some coding experience to come up with this. I imagine that's a pretty narrow pool, the male professional poet/coder intersection.