This event is part of the Poesiefestival Berlin 2026, organised by the Haus für Poesie Berlin in collaboration with EXC 2020.

For the first time in nearly 20 years, Canadian poet Anne Carson will perform live in Berlin. As a poet, essayist, translator, and classicist, she moves virtuously across different forms and genres—indeed, she has even invented some of them herself for her own use.

On the evening of Pentecost Sunday, Anne Carson, together with her partner, the British artist Robert Currie, will present a performance of her text Lecture on the History of Skywriting, translated especially for the event. Carson describes this lecture as a “short history of her life as a writer,” told as an alternative origin myth in which science and the biblical creation narrative intertwine.

The poet expands alongside the universe over the seven days of creation—from redshift to redshift—on an infinite and infinitely brief journey during which Heracles is conceived, Christopher Hitchens comments on fatherhood, and clouds take the shape of Werner Herzog. Interspersed are quotations from John Cage, Virginia Woolf, Immanuel Kant, and Marcel Proust (translated by Lydia Davis), as well as an interview with Beckett’s character Godot, who seeks advice from Yoko Ono on how to pass the time while everyone else is waiting for him. And hidden in the middle of the text is an insight framed as a question—one that applies to everything Anne Carson has ever written: “Who would be bothered doing science if it weren't erotic?”

Lecture & Performance by Anne Carson and Robert Currie, conversation moderated by Marie Luise Knott.