We’re big Anne Carson fans around here, so I’d be remiss not to point out that she’s interviewed in the newest Paris Review.

This exchange, about a line from Carson’s poem “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions,” is both interesting–I love Carson’s description of the way the line came to her–and amusing:

INTERVIEWER

The other line, the one I persist in using as the title of the poem despite your efforts, “I want to be unbearable,” is one of the most startling lines you’ve ever written. I thought it was exact and expressive of you as a writer.

CARSON

I remember that sentence driving at me in the dark like a glacier. I felt like a ship going toward the South Pole and then all of a sudden a glacier comes zooming out of the dark, and I just took it down. I appreciate that it’s accurate of what I both have and choose to have as my effect on people. I don’t know exactly why that’s the case.

INTERVIEWER

You once said you meant “unbearable” in a metaphysical sense.

CARSON

Well, yes, it couldn’t be physical, could it? Unless I went around hammering people.

INTERVIEWER

There are those days.

You can read the whole interview at the Paris Review cite, or in the magazine, or I suppose you could wait for The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 5, if you’re the masochistically patient sort.