Kay Ryan on Anne Carson

 "How does smart sound? It isn’t the Greek and Latin references. The smartness is a tone, something light—dry—exact and amused. It makes it a pleasure to listen to her language and thought experiments; they are offered lightly; you are under no emotional obligation to care. Which of course makes it more possible to do so. Noting what a very big audience it is (as though she hadn’t known it would be), she begins differently than she had planned. She’ll start with a thirteen-second (as I recall) interactive love poem relying upon the audience for a small recitative part. She divides us in half with her tiny commanding arm: this million will say this when I indicate (“What a deal!”) and this million will say this (“I’ll take it!”). She says her parts, we roar our briefer parts, and we’re in cahoots, co-creating (we flatter ourselves to think) a heady ambient smartness. It keeps on like that. She does a bunch of Catullus translations—in which she lobs modern references into classical poems (at one point Catullus looks in the “fridge”) the way she lobs Latin into her contemporary stuff—not quite beautiful or exactly amusing, but always out of left field."

Here is some good prose. You feel that she appreciates Anne Carson for highly specific reason; no uncritical admiration here. She sees through it, but still gets into it. I feel before Kay Ryan's writing the same way that she does in  relation to Anne Carson's writing.