Nobel Prize Winner for Literature 2026
–By J.S. Porter
She is our most original poet-thinker since Marshall McLuhan. She often says at the end of her pieces of writing: “Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches Greek for a living.” When the Nobel secretary called, she was in Iceland, “listening to the wind.” She has McLuhan’s sense of play, Emily Dickinson’s and Sappho’s compression and coming-at-things slant, Simone Weil’s precision and Oscar Wilde’s wit and daring.
She has discovered new ways of making books. In Nox, a kind of paper accordion, she mingles photographs, lyric shards, fragments, cutouts, clippings, and handwritten jottings. In Float, 23 individual chapbooks in a plastic container, she presents a wide, disparate range of poetry, prose poetry and poetic prose, including “Merry Christmas from Hegel,” another meditation on her lost brother. H of HPlaybook showcases her drawings as well as her translated words from Euripides, and Wrong Normal couples her whimsical drawings with her fiercely piercing words.
Her work is best characterized in the word-coinage of bpNichol as: borderblur, and his description of writing as “everything at once/altogether/completely tangled together” depicts her work perfectly. Her work crosses boundaries and borders with the ease of a wily coyote. She is a mongrel writer who mixes genres and forms with the ease of a circus juggler. But no matter what she writes, she writes informed by the ancient Greeks, as befits a professor of Classical Literature.
Here’s a small taste of her, a brief tribute to her:
NOX
for Kate Van Viegen
When Anne Carson lost her brother, she wrote a book about him. Anne Carson, a Canadian poet, wrote a book called Nox about her dead brother whom she barely knew. She experienced him in fragments. She didn’t see much of him. He was always away. He sent a few letters. She kept some lines from the letters—the stamps, a few photographs of him when he was young, remembers a telephone call.
Nox contains photographs, ephemera, dictionary definitions, lyric shards, fragments, cutouts, clippings, handwritten jottings and incomplete narratives. The contents sit in a box, open like an accordion, and contain the soul of a dead brother as remembered by a sister. Carson’s book is an elegy, a eulogy, a coffin, a gravesite, a memorial service for her brother, Michael. While she grieves, she translates the Roman poet Catullus’ elegy for his brother (known as “Catullus 101”) as parallel grief.
Nox, which means night in Latin, is a box with two dead brothers and a dead poet and a dead language inside. Nox is a report on death and a letter to an unknown god who keeps record of things.
While you hold the book in your hand, hold Helen Humphreys’ Nocturne and Terry Ann Carter’s A Crazy Man Thinks He’s Ernest in Paris—also meditations on dead brothers. Do brothers ever write about dead sisters?
I’m particularly fond of Glass, Irony, and God, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho and Eros, the Bittersweet, but you can begin anywhere. In any given book, on any given page, you’ll be jolted, stunned, amazed. She has what Harold Bloom says great literature must: strangeness, mystery, cognitive power.
I once deluded myself into thinking that I had entered a small crevice in her mind, that I had entered her “Merry Christmas from Hegel,” a meditation on a lost brother, Hegel, Christmas, and winter. The four elements “tenderly mingle in speculation,” speculation “being the effort to grasp reality in its interactive entirety.” Such tender mingling, in the right tone and mood, leads her to ecstasy in which she is “overjoyed by this notion of a philosophic space where words drift in gentle mutual redefinition of one another.” Then she puts on her boots and coat and goes out to the woods “to do some snow standing.” It’s winter, her brother is dead, it’s the birthday of a child, friends are far away. She’s alone with her thoughts on Hegel, lost and standing in the snow, feeling strangely rapturous.
