Melanie Rehak

The New York Times Magazine

In the winter of 1991, the novelist Jonathan Franzen was poking around the library at Yaddo, the writers' colony in upstate New York, looking for something new to read. He pulled a slim volume titled ''Desperate Characters'' from the shelf and sat down to look it over. The author's name was Paula Fox.

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Anne Carson is a poet who likes to get under people's skin. Her new collection, ''Men in the Off Hours,'' features verse in which she variously inhabits the minds (and bodies) of Tolstoy, Lazarus, Freud, Catullus, Sappho and Emily Dickinson. Perhaps her boldest act of channeling, though, comes in a prose poem, ''Irony Is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve,'' which casts the French movie siren in the role of a witty classics professor.

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People are going to Mary Zimmerman's adaptation of ''Metamorphoses'' in droves, and now your play has just opened. Why do you think we're drawn to classics right now?

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I started at the age of 3, so that's 15 years now. I was probably O.K. until I was 14, and then my friends started not to be in the sport anymore. I really wasn't into anything else. My whole life was gymnastics. There was good and bad at times, but I've definitely gotten more out of life than I ever would have not doing a sport.

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You stunned a lot of people by going back to work two weeks after your second daughter was born -- and going back onstage three weeks after that. Was that a difficult decision for you? Or was it inevitable?

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People say the era of great public spaces has passed. But your plans for a new Penn Station couldn't be much more ambitious, or much grander in scale. So who's right?

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Your new film, ''Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl,'' focuses on the plight of children during the Chinese Cultural Revolution in China. What was life like for you during those years?

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You're one of America's most prominent poets, but you're also famous for being purposefully ''difficult'' -- the sort of writer who's not so much misunderstood as simply not understood at all. How have you resisted the pressure to give in to your critics?

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There are all sorts of books about the technique of dying, but there is no technique of dying. It happens in a trillionth of a second. You can spend your whole life learning, but when the time comes, you're completely unprepared. Everything turns into a cliche, and everyone feels the same thing. And yet it's unique for everybody.

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I think the principal difference is realizing that your house is someplace that you can exclude people from. Almost everybody who is homeless for any period of time has some kind of usual haunts that they tend to orbit around. They know the places, they know where to sleep. But you have no right to be where you are and so you can't keep somebody else out. Before you deal with these things you just don't think that's what the idea of having a place is, to try to keep other people out.

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What's the most surprising thing you've learned over the many years you've been writing about cops?

I think it's how absolutely fragile they are. They live with a lot of fear, and the way they deal with their sensitivity and the horror of their work is that they laugh at things sometimes I thought they shouldn't laugh at. It's not because they're callous, it's not even because they're sexist when they're sitting there talking about some woman's body and describing whether they like it or not when the poor person's got a bullet in her head. It's because they can't cope.