About six hours before she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, I sent a text message about Anne Carson to a friend. I’d like to write about her, I told her, in case Carson won the prize. My temperament rebels against the bookie reader, those that place their bets on writers as if they were horses at a Derby. I’ve made bad jokes about prizes and their swayamvar-like air, the relay race of passing the halo that such recognition temporarily foists on writers. And yet I wrote that text.

A week before the announcement of the prize, I had begun teaching a class by showing my students a video of Anne Carson’s Stacks. In this course that I’ve called The Disobedient Women of the Essay, Carson has been — if we can tweak the phrase — writer-in-residence. We’ve had to turn to her often, whether discussing Joan Didion or Jane Gallop, Virginia Woolf or Susan Sontag, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Guber, Anahid Nersessian or Gillian Rose. We’re still a couple of weeks away from reading ‘The Glass Essay’, but Carson will visit our class again, I know, when we read Dubravka........

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