from Paris Review interview with Anne Carson

INTERVIEWER

I end up putting you and Alice Munro together. In each of you there’s an attachment to the physical world and the details of life—almost like you are reveling in them—whether they’re bad, good, painful, or whatever else. Does that seem right to you?

CARSON

I recognize that. Reveling is good. A good word for it. But she and I are very different. What we have in common is perhaps an attitude that however bad life is, the important thing is to make something interesting out of it. And that has a lot to do with the physical world, with looking at stuff, snow and light and the smell of your screen door and whatever constitutes your phenomenal existence from moment to moment. How consoling—that this stuff goes on and that you can keep thinking about it and making that into something on a page.