Overlooked Genius: Ramond Carver by Christopher Lott
"I can't think of anything else I'd rather be called than a writer-unless it's a poet." --Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver is generally remembered as a master craftsman of the short story. His first volume Will You Please Be Quiet Please ushered in a new technique in fiction often referred to as "minimalism," while his acclaimed collections What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and Cathedral are rightly considered primary forces in the rehabilitation of the short story form in America-as well as the source of nearly two decades of frightfully poor imitations by writers at home and at university workshops across the country. Largely forgotten is the fact that Raymond Carver simultaneously produced a respectably sized and phenomenally crafted body of poetry. Although he won numerous prizes for his poetry, including Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize in 1985, Carver's poems have been largely overlooked by critics in favor of his more obviously influential fiction. Carver's poetry is largely concerned with the same "obsessions" (he disliked the term "themes") as his fiction: the dispossessed, alcoholism and unflinching looks at the emptiness of people living nearly insufferable lives with no saccharine hints of redemption. The tone and diction are flat and, like his stories, the reader who is not too careful is likely to be left wondering why he even bothered to write about such ordinary matters. Raymond Carver's gift lay in his ability to depict the ordinary and show what was happening beneath the surface-as bleak as that might be-without resorting to allegory, sentimentality or moralizing. "Get in. Get Out. Don't Linger. Go on." and "No tricks, period!" were his favorite sayings about the craft of writing. To make a large and probably unsound generalization, Carver's body of poetry can be divided into three parts that correspond with the chronology of his life. The first period lasted a decade starting in the mid-1960's. The second, middle period was shorter, lasting from 1976-1980, with the third, final period ending with his death in August 1988. With many quotes and a little commentary, I hope to outline Carver's body of poetry and provide enough examples that his style becomes clear.
Terrible Dreaming: The Early Years
Carver began publishing in the early 1960's, and was immediately successful with both fiction and poetry. Unlike his fiction, which quickly left the stage of obvious experimentation and became undeniably "Carverish," his poetry during this time was often experimental, at times verging on the surreal. In the poem "Not Far From Here" for example, the narrator of the poem sees a "long-haired brat" enter his door carrying a dog:
I move closer And place my ear against the tiny lips. Corpse, she whispers. The dog grins. But I don't have time for games This morning and send her away With a plum.
Lines like these are not typical of Carver's work, though a method that can be found throughout his poems develops out of the madness. This method consists of producing similar bizarre perspectives through the more subtle means of examining real human events. Sometimes life is stranger than fiction, even in an "Iowa Summer 1967":
The paperboy shakes me awake. "I have been dreaming you'd come," I tell him, rising from the bed. He is accompanied By a giant Negro from the university who seems Itching to get his hands on me. I stall for time. Sweat runs off our faces; we stand waiting. I don't offer them chairs and no one speaks. It is only later, after they have gone, I realize they have delivered a letter from my wife. "What are you doing there?" my wife asks, "Are you drinking?" I study the postmark for hours until it, too, begins to fade. Someday, I hope to forget all this.
Of course, all of the Raymond Carver trademark concerns are here as well, such as bankruptcy, dispossession, despair and alcoholism rendered in a voice whose intensity comes from its stark neutrality:
If I closed my eyes for a minute I would be lost, yet I could gladly lie down and sleep forever beside this road. My brother nudges me. Any minute now, something is going to happen. (Drinking While Driving)
The poems of this period are populated by characters who seek solace even in activities they know are "wrong"-though they rarely find it-as in the poem "Adultery" where the narrator tells of his latest liaison but ends with a curious command to listen to "the first heavy drops of rain / strike the patio / Listen / How splendid these gifts." Such affirmation is obviously double edged, and it can even turn sinister. The narrator of the poem "Seeds" exchanges "nervous glances" with a salesman selling his young daughter watermelon seeds and then has an unsettling exchange with his daughter:
You offer my choice of seeds. Already you have forgotten the man the horse the watermelons themselves & the shadow was something unseen between the vendor & myself. I accept your gift here on the dry roadside. I reach out your hand to receive your blessing.
The sense of foreboding, of a shadow or hidden darkness, is heavy in these poems. All of them were written at a time when Carver could feel himself slipping into the same alcoholic abyss that claimed his father, a burden he is distinctly aware of when he sees an old picture:
But the eyes give him away, and the hands That limply offer the string of dead perch And the bottle of beer. Father, I loved you, Yet how can I say thank you, I who cannot hold my liquor either And do not even know the places to fish? (Photograph of My Father in his Twenty-Second Year)
Carver generally wrote in bursts of activity and found poems to be even more subject to such creative vagaries. After the early books from which these poems are taken-Near Klamath, At Night the Salmon Move and Winter Insomnia-Carver turned his attention to fiction… and the bottle.
Breaking Free of the Bottle: The Middle Years
After a prolonged period of serious alcoholism, which didn't prevent him from somehow finishing books and holding a series of one-year teaching appointments ("All we did was drink," he said of teaching with John Cheever, "I don't think we took the covers off of our typewriters once."), Raymond Carver quit drinking and found himself able to steadily write poems again. The poems of this period-including the years just before and just after the institution of sobriety-clearly reflect the difficulties and hopes of his life and dreams:
I dream of yellow-jackets and near frostbite, two hazards facing the whitefish fishermen of Satus Creek. But there is something moving there in the frozen reeds, something on its side that is slowly filling with water. I turn onto my back. All of me is lifting at once, as if it were impossible to drown. (Trying to Sleep)
Carver's poetry, like his life, was caught between rising and falling, with the constantly his mind… there was the ever-present possibility that one more fall would be his last. The message is obvious in a poem written for Karl Wallenda, the famous high-wire artist:
That morning, 74 years old and 10 stories up, midway between hotel and hotel, a promotional stunt on the first day of spring, that wind which has been everywhere with you comes in from the Caribbean to throw itself once and for all into your arms, like a young lover! Your hair stands on end. You try to crouch, to reach for the wire. Later, men come to clean up and take down the wire. They take down the wire where you spent your life. Imagine that: wire. (Poem for Karl Wallenda: Aerialist Supreme)
It is not surprising that the stress of extraordinary life-events was such that Carver was not especially prolific during these years, particularly when it came to writing poetry. Though the body of work is not large, it is important because it bears the early marks of a turning point in his poetic obsessions. The characters of the poems become more introspective, the depictions more generous ("charitable" is another term that comes to mind, but the connotation is one that implies an earlier stinginess rather than a change in focus and nuance), the concern with redemption replaced with simply-though not easily-living, wondering what was to come next without so many feelings of dread. "Amazing! Tonight is a milestone / in my life," Carver writes about seeing a simple garden snail, "After tonight // how can I ever go back to that / other life?"
Unbeknownst: The Final Years
Once when Raymond Carver was asked how he was able to stop drinking, he replied, "I'm not sure. I guess I just wanted to live." He had always embraced life, as evidenced by the simple fact of his survival (many of his later poems would make clear just how tenuous even that became at times), but after another hiatus from poetry, Raymond Carver returned with a vengeance in 1984 with a new poetry that explicitly acknowledged this embrace as love, as clearly shown in the title poem to his first volume of this period:
I could sit and watch these rivers for hours. Not one of them like any other. I'm 45 years old today. Would anyone believe it if I said I was once 35? My heart empty and sere at 35! Five more years had to pass before it began to flow again. I'll take all the time I please this afternoon before leaving my place alongside this river. It pleases me, loving rivers. (Where Water Comes Together with Other Water)
After seven years of sobriety, as free from alcohol as any alcoholic can hope to be, he embarked upon perhaps the most creative period in his life. His stories were growing larger and his poems as open as his previous work had been brief and closed. Finally, Ray Carver was truly coming into his own. The poetry of what was to be his final four years fills three good sized books and demonstrates a clear pattern of development. Where Water Comes Together With Other Water shows a change in sentiment but little modification in technique. The poems are still short in line and total length, the tone unmistakably that of Raymond Carver:
[This guy] called for another round. But I had to go. We never saw each other again. Never spoke another word to each other, or did anything worth getting excited about the rest of our lives. (Extirpation)
But in addition to most of these poems being more accomplished, they also mark the emergence of two different and surprising themes—death and affirmation—that are ultimately intertwined. Though he had no idea at the time, these years would prove to be his last, and it often seems that he was beset by premonitions:
… I want you to know I was happy when I was here. And remember I told you this a while ago— April 1984. But be glad for me if I can die in the presence of friends and family. If this happens, believe me, I came out ahead. I didn't lose this one. (My Death)
Ironically, now that he was living a healthier lifestyle and enjoying renewed and greater success, he found himself with more time to ponder his eventual fate:
I heard Death's engines turning. But I was young at the time, and drunk, and wanted to play. I didn't have to listen. So I walked away. Didn't turn back, ever, or find this in my head, until today. (Blood)
Understandably, such concerns paired with a feeling that he'd been granted a new chance in life, led Carver also to a new sense of affirmation and hope that is reflected back on him when he sees a young couple walking on the beach:
Maybe it will last forever. If they are lucky, and good, and forbearing. And careful. If they go on loving each other without stint. Are true to each other— that most of all. As they will be, of course, as they will be, as they know they will be. I go back to my work. My work goes back to me. A wind picks up out over the water. (My Work)
In Ultramarine, the second book of this last period, Carver continues to develop and experiment. He focuses more and more on other people, as he did in his earliest work, but without the despair and bleakness. When he does write about himself, as in the poem "What I Can Do" in which the narrator tells about being stretched by so many competing demands, the initial unease and stress does not hold sway:
… In a minute I'll have to plug in the phone and try to separate what's right from what's wrong. Until then a dozen tiny birds, no bigger than teacups, perch in the branches outside the window. Suddenly they stop singing and turn their heads. It's clear they've felt something. They dive into flight. (What I Can Do)
At the same time, Carver is experimenting with extending the length of his line, juxtaposing this new form with his habitual short declaratives (and, considering the content in this case, a clever title):
I don't know what. But I'd let her bring my hand to her breast. At which point I'd open my eyes and stare at the ceiling, or else the floor. Then my fingers strayed to her leg. Which was warm and shapely, ready to tremble and raise slightly, at the slightest touch. But my mind was unclear and shaky. Nothing was happening. Everything was happening. Life was a stone, grinding and sharpening. (The Autopsy Room)
Finally, Ultramarine is also rife with questions of death, though Carver composed the poems in the volume with no indication that he would soon be battling cancer himself. In addition to "An Account," a startling poem about the death of a neighbor and "The Lightning Speed of the Past" which reckons with death directly ("The worn-out face of death! / The lightning speed of the past"), this feeling of precognition is most evident in "Migration". This poem can only be read with a shaking of the head at the strange mechanism of premonition:
… Summer, and the living is easy. But my friend went to see a doctor friend of his. Who took his arm and gave him three months, no longer.
Carver writes, before describing the "crazy and dishonorable" thought that his friends illness might be contagious. Throughout the poem, he and his friend move cautiously around one another, unsure what to say or do. Carver is able to head home to rest, but his friend will not be so lucky:
He'll be on the move from now on. Traveling night and day, without cease, all of him, every last exploding piece of him. Until he reaches a place only he knows about. An Arctic place, cold and frozen. Where he thinks, This is far enough. This is the place. And lies down, for he is tired. (Migration)
Soon Carver himself was to become the unlucky one. In mid-1987, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. After intensive chemotherapy and a short hope of remission, in March 1988 he was diagnosed with brain cancer and in May of the same year with a rash of untreatable lung tumors. Although he steadfastly insisted that he was going to pull through— "I've got fish to catch and stories and poems to write," he said just two months before his death—there was a clear sense of urgency in the speed in which he composed and arranged his last book of poems, and a clearer sense of finality (though not despair) in them. This last book, A New Path to the Waterfall, is not only Raymond Carver's best, but one of contemporary poetry's best. Woven around quotes from Chekhov, Milosz and others— his favorite authors— are fifty solid poems with almost no weak or faulty lines despite a wide variety of subjects and descriptions. In this volume Carver synthesizes all of the threads of his previous volumes. All of the themes, voices and poetic means which had come before are molded into one stunning whole. In fact, as Tess Gallagher notes in the introduction, the book arranged itself naturally into six sections that follow the same trends that I have noted in Carver's poetry as a whole. If a reader is going to read just one book of Carver poetry, or seeks maximum understanding in minimum time, this is the book to choose. Everything is here, including early uncollected poems with some interesting revisions which are too detailed to go into here, but which clearly reflect the author's changing perspective. Especially moving. though without melodrama or pathos, are the poems of the last two sections, which open with a quote from Lowell's "Epilogue" ("Yet why not say what happened?") and Chekhov's story "Foreboding" respectively. The quotations accurately reflect the thematic direction of these two sections. Part five of the book is an epilogue in more than one sense of the term: the poems are an end, but also an opening-up into an understanding that not only was the body of Carver's life full, but his death can and will lead those he has known and loved in new directions. In "An Old Photograph of My Son" Carver writes of finding a photo of a son who has obviously been much trouble to him. He decides to send to his ex-wife, the boy's mother, who has always wished her son were different:
But wishes don't come true, and it's a good thing. Still, she's bound to keep your picture out on the table for a while and make you over for a time. Then, soon, you'll go into the big family album along with the other crazies— herself, her daughter and me, her former husband. You'll be safe in there, cheek to jowl with all your victims. But don't worry, my boy—the pages turn, my son. We all do better in the future.
The humor, love and lack of accusation in the poems of this last section gives them a particular power, particularly when one realizes that it was a time in the author's life that could well have brought anger, bitterness and despair… Carver himself remarked just before his death that, given "half a chance" to go back and start again, he would do everything in his life much the same. When Carver does speak directly of death (rare even in this volume), it is often about someone else, such as the poem "Summer Fog," in which he has just received word of a friend's sudden death:
I light my first cigarette of the day and turn away from the window with a shudder. The foghorn sounds again, filling me with apprehension, and then, then stupendous grief.
It is poems like these that, I think, illustrate the strength and conviction of Carver's use of words. Some may question why many of these works are poems at all—indeed this was perhaps the most common criticism leveled at Carver's poetry—but I think a careful reader who is not committed to formal innovation will immediately recognize the poetic power inherent in them. Can one really question the power of the first poem in the section of the book called "Foreboding," which I quote here in full:
I go to sleep on one beach, wake up on another. Boat all fitted out, tugging against its rope. (Quiet Nights)
Even without the knowledge that this poem was written in the last days of the author's life, it is a masterpiece of quiet statement and metaphor! Of course, considering the situation, Carver wrote a number of poems that deal directly with the fact that he is about to die. If there are occasional lapses into the ultra-personal and melodramatic, I think he is to be forgiven. Lapses are rare, however, another surprise from a man whose position could easily have lent itself to them ("No other word will do. For that's what it was. Gravy. / Gravy these past ten years" Carver writes). Instead he chose to write poems that were poetry first and statements second, an act I find to be astonishing and admirable. In one of the most haunting poems in the book—and, not incidentally, the next to the last one—Carver writes about stumbling across his own photograph, paralleling the situation of finding his son's photo earlier. In this case, however, the dying author sees a photo of his younger self and finds himself caught between that image and his own mortality:
The man goes on mugging. I put the picture back in its place along with the others and give my attention instead to the after-glow along the far ridge, light golden on the roses in the garden. Then, I can't help myself, I glance once more at the picture. The wink, the broad smile, the jaunty slant of the cigarette. (After-Glow) Afterwards And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. —Late Fragment
Raymond Carver's death in 1988 robbed the world of a rare gift—an author whose skill was manifest in both poetry and fiction (not to mention his occasional reviews and essays, which are equally well-written). Though critics have focused their attention on the latter, as they continue to seek fertile ground for inquiry, there is little doubt that his poetry will begin to receive more notice. Like his fiction, Carver's poetry appears simple, but it demands careful and slow reading, out loud if possible. His talent was such that he found the power in what others had written off as mundane, the extraordinary in the everyday occurrence, the strength in "regular" language. To recognize these qualities demands time and attention—as all good poetry does, regardless of method. Those who are willing to approach his poems in this way will be surprised and amply rewarded.
A Select Bibliography Poetry Winter Insomnia (Santa Cruz: Kayak, 1970) At Night the Salmon Move (Santa Barbara: Capra, 1976) Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories (Santa Barbara: Capra, 1985) Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (New York: Random House, 1985) Ultramarine (New York: Random House, 1986) A New Path to the Waterfall (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989) No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings (New York: Random House, 1991) Fiction Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (New York: Knopf, 1981) Cathedral (New York: Knopf, 1983) Where I'm Calling From (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988) No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings (New York: Random House, 1991) Interviews Kellerman, Stewart. "Grace Has Come Into My Life," New York Time Book Review, 15 May 1988: 40 Sexton, David. "David Sexton Talks to Raymond Carver," Literary Review, 85 (July 1985): 36-40 Stull, William. "Matters of Life and Death," in Living in Words, edited by Gregory McNamee (Portland: Breitenbush, 1988): 143-156 Web Resources Philip Carson's Raymond Carver page - bibliography, papers, gravesite photos Selection of prose from the story "Vitamins" plus web-links to resources and book purchasing A Paper on "Carver's Vision" "Distress Sale" A Poem from Fires Info on Carver from the Medical Humanities Database Also, like his fiction, Carver's poetry underwent a broad transformation in his final years.