Anne Carson: Lecture on the History of Skywriting

Enjoy this spellbinding performance by Anne Carson, heralded as one of the most important contemporary poets in the English-speaking world. Together with her collaborator, Robert Currie, Carson performs a staged reading of a text that tells creation stories while adopting the viewpoint of the sky.

“Tuesday I became clouds.” In her – often humorous – text, Carson assumes the perspective of the sky: “Do hawks and falcons look so fantastic, rising and falling because they have the sky as background? Or would they look equally good flying through mud or a piece of corduroy?” The performance also includes a dialogue with Robert Currie as the absent, “non-arriving” character ‘Godot’ from Samuel Beckett’s play ‘Waiting for Godot’ (1952), as well as a recorded reading in Arabic by Faisal bin Ali Jaber, an engineer from Yemen, whose nephew and brother-in-law were killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2012.

‘Lecture on the History of Skywriting’ was originally performed at the New York Live Ideas Festival in spring 2016 and followingly at the Whitney Museum in New York.

Anne Carson (b. 1950) is a Canadian poet, writer, essayist, translator, and professor of Classics. In the course of what has been called a “unclassifiable publishing career,” Carson has published a wide range of acclaimed “genre-bending” work such as ‘Eros the Bittersweet’ (1986) – which was named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time by the Modern Library – , ‘Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse’ (1998), ‘Men in the Off Hours’ (2001), ‘The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos’ (2001), ‘Nox’ (2010), ‘Red Doc’ (2013) and ‘Float’ (2016). She is the recipient of several prestigious awards including the Lannan Literary Award (1996), Griffin Poetry Prize (2001), T.S. Eliot Prize (2001), PEN Award for Poetry in Translation (2010) and Griffin Poetry Prize (2014).

Anne Carson and Robert Currie performed ‘Lecture on the History of Skywriting’ (2016) at the Louisiana Literature festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark in August 2018.

Camera: Anders Lindved & Rasmus Quistgaard
Edited by: Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen
Produced by: Christian Lund
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2019

Supported by Nordea-fonden

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[nyxdamonbogettiperez]

I love Anne Carson’s humor. Every joke is like a dare, an incitement to laugh if you think you’ve gotten close enough to understanding the sky-high, earthy elegance of her thoughts and images; every joke is also an invitation delivered without tyrannical intonation to the listener to possess a moment of illusory time and meaning, a penultimate act of generosity. I would call AC an inspiration, but that feels like a reduction of the duende that speaks to and from her, so instead I’ll just say “thank you”.

[myastralself]

I love it. Thanks for sharing. 'The tricky thing about practising if you're the sky is there's nowhere to go to be alone.'

[Kimbie]

"Christopher Hitchens once said to me that 'having a child is like your own heart walking around in another body', so there went my own heart walking towards its own death." One of my favorite set of words of all time.

[pepryan]

"She told me she found me an inelegant solution to a non-existent problem." Ouch.

[trizachai]

What a life changing experience that was

[nicolasbaudoin]

Someone has a translation of the passage in arab ?

[r.deeblanche]

You know, SOME people are actually doing research when they are going through YouTube, so calling this 'Lecture on the History of Skywriting' is pretty damn misleading since skywriting is what I'm looking for in terms of background for an article. "This is a reading" would have been accurate and helpful.