Wachtel: I read somewhere you quote Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst and philosopher, who said we don’t go to poetry for wisdom but for the dismantling of wisdom. How does poetry do that?
Carson: I feel it’s a kind of fervour of mine to get away from whatever body of information I rest on when I give opinions. And I think poetic activity is a method for doing that—you leap off the building when you think poetically; you don’t amass your data and then move from point to point, you have to just know what you know in that moment. Something freeing about that.
Wachtel: Maybe I’m being too literal-minded when I think of dismantling because when I think of taking the poem apart word by word—
Carson: Yes it is a mantle, the confidence that you can ever know what words mean because really we don’t. They’re just these signs that we pretend to nail down in dictionaries, tokens of usage, but frankly they’re all wild integers. Disassembling it is a way of exposing that myth at the bottom of language.
-An Interview with Anne Carson, Brick