Jim McGarrah's Blog

Lets’ Consider Context - Misdemeanor Outlaw

It isn’t my fault that I’m an outlaw or that most of my life has been spent defining right and wrong in ways more relative to circumstance than legal code. Take this day in June for example. I’m in Horse Cave, Kentucky. Nobody in their right mind comes to Horse Cave, the birthplace of Hunter S. Thompson. Well, that’s just it. I was going to add some kind of appositive to that last statement – no one comes to Horse Cave for supply various reasons here – but there are none.

The town is simply devoid of any solid rationale that would make a weekend here worth a weekend here. Oh sure, the Smithsonian has a traveling exhibit of “American” music installed temporarily over the entrance to a huge cave where Indians once hid their horses.

But, the installation turns out to be mostly photos of hillbillies with empty jugs, Al Jolson characters in black face, and a couple of old Daguerreotypes of slaves stringing cat gut across cigar boxes for makeshift guitars. The cave itself seems to be mostly a dark hole with rock walls, and I had to pay to find that out.

Ostensibly, I am in Horse Cave to display and possible sell some of my books. Two very nice men, Mike and Andy, have staged a book festival for Kentucky authors in a large room next to their bookstore that bears a resemblance to the cave across the street. It’s their first effort and I applaud the motivation. But, no one is here to buy books except the other authors and they are an eclectic crowd ranging from ancient, snowy-haired men who write about Confederate ghosts to women in cowgirl outfits who write about beauty pageants.

Since writing is more of an urgent need for me than a hobby or dress up play date, I soon discover that I am once again infected with restlessness. The business of trying to sell books that follows creating them and the environment it puts me in is often boring. Although this atmosphere is far more pleasant than many conferences I’ve attended, I’m really not that interested in hustling my work like a snake oil salesman or carnival barker. This is because I’m sure my true genius will only by recognized posthumously along with insert your own name here.

Perhaps, a short walk around the corner somewhere a tavern will rise as an oasis in this desert of monotony. It is, after all, the home of Hunter Thompson.
Approaching my hosts for directions, I discover the reason Hunter left. The town is dry. I had forgotten that Kentucky is a state of contrasts. It produces some of the world’s best whiskey and yet within its boundaries counties have the option of refusing to sell any alcohol at all. Not only that, but someone has attached irony to this distinction. For example, Bourbon County is dry and Christian County is awash with various forms of liquid intoxicants.

The neon digits on the bank sign across the street read 107 degrees and no rain clouds appear anywhere near the horizon. – Side note to my fellow Kentucky residents who vote Republican: It’s JUNE, you dumb asses, and at least 25 degrees hotter that it should be. Climate change IS NOT “pie-in-the-sky” science fiction just because Rand Paul says so and by-the-way, Mitch McConnell makes money from your ignorance. –

The temperature and the lack of a tavern remind me of St. Thomas Aquinas, who must surely be in Hell for preaching temperance as a cardinal virtue. He often paraphrased the Apostle Paul’s Biblical principle that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

In the diamond bright sparkle of a summer sun, I understand perfectly the action that principle implies. “Where can I find a drink?” I ask Andy or maybe Mike. I am delirious by now. “You got to get back on I-65 and drive thirty miles to the exit for Bowling Green. There’s a liquor store at the intersection,” said one of them.

***

In the heart of Kentucky between Louisville and the Tennessee border, limestone creek beds, mineral rich grain, and the genius of ancient Celts have combined in brilliant synergism to create what we Irish call uisce beatha, the water of life. It is here I am breaking the law because the law is unjust. I admit it. I, James E. McGarrah, have taken a stand against tyranny.

Inside the liquor store my hosts directed me to I bought a bottle of bourbon, and its presence on the car seat tempts me beyond human endurance. Without considering the consequences and with another fifteen miles to drive back to the motel, I break the seal on the bottle and take a long pull.

Oh, don’t panic dear reader. There will be no drunk driving in this tale because I realize that for all my bluster and bravado I am nothing more than a misdemeanor outlaw by virtue of boredom.
I will not intentionally danger other people by hurtling down an interstate at 80 mph in a huge Lincoln while hammered on whiskey. I simply needed to obfuscate morality with legality in order to feel young and dangerous again.

This is a common occurrence with aging writers whose language often outstrips their deeds. Don’t get me wrong. I have been in the company of real outlaws on many occasions, certainly, but my days as a true desperado were very limited and influenced more by proximity than actual activity. I have always had more imagination than courage and more simple bad judgment than a true disdain for law and order.

I suspect these are traits widely assimilated into the more comfortable demographic of our American culture, we the people that don’t need to push legal boundaries for survival.

Our understanding of what constitutes “unjust” laws and our stand against those legal restrictions seem to be based, for the most part, on convenience rather than a struggle with the necessity of feeding a family or a war between good and evil. For example, most of us seem to think that speed limits are unnecessary, taxes are too high, and whatever we disagree with must surely be someone else’s fault.

This reasoning allows us the justification to fudge a little in our obedience to rules without the burden of guilt. The problem with this way of thinking comes to me as I take another long pull from my newly purchased and now, illegal, whiskey. We can and do use this logic to ignore our responsibilities to a community in favor of our own desires.

It is accurate to say that many rules passed by tyrants, corrupt politicians, rabid religious leaders, and corporate thieves are unjust. However, it does not always follow that wisdom instead of self-service, dictates which ones we choose to break, or that our reasons for breaking them are altruistic(in someone else’s best interest). This is a lesson I’m still learning as I take another drink from the bourbon bottle.

I just received word that I won the Legacy Nonfiction Prize for 2010 from the Eric Hoffer Foundation. It's a national book award given once a year:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: The Eric Hoffer Award
Date: Sun, May 9, 2010 at 12:23 PM
Subject: Hoffer Category Winner
To: James McGarrah

Hello James:

Your book, A Temporary Sort of Peace, has earned category award status for the 2010 Eric Hoffer Award. A general announcement will follow. All of the prizewinners are now listed on our website:

http://www.hofferaward.com/HAbookwinn....

Congratulations! An award package was mailed two days ago to the address of record on your registration form. Attached are forms to order gold seals, as well as a use agreement for those wishing to reproduce the official seal on the books and/or materials. Also attached is the official banner to use in your Internet marketing.

Here is the press release that will appear in the US Review of Books:

The Eric Hoffer Award for Legacy Nonfiction:

Titles in this category are nonfiction books over two years of age and held particular relevance to any subject matter or art form. Unlike many in the industry, we think good books last longer than one season.

Winner

A Temporary Sort of Peace, Jim McGarrah, Indiana Historical Society - McGarrah paints a remarkable canvas in a true-life account of his time in the Vietnam War. Our senses become in tune, as we feel, hear, smell, and touch the Viet Cong jungle. McGarrah offers a glimpse into his life before Viet Nam, his military years, the aftermath of coming
home, and his later return to Vietnam. Some accounts are candid and bold, such as his teenage quest for sex or the brutal reality of the Viet Cong jungle. It is an honest and memorable story.

Sincerely,
Dawn Show

The Eric Hoffer Award for Books and Prose
www.HofferAward.com
Book Deadline - January 21
Prose Deadline - March 31

Ray Carver, the poet who wrote prose
By
Jim McGarrah

Charles Bukoski began one of his poems with this statement, “If you want to write good poetry/ you have to fuck a lot of women/ and drink a lot of beer.” Certainly Raymond Carver fulfilled those qualifications in the early days of his literary career. However, Carver is also one of the most anthologized and awarded short story writers of all American short story writers in the last half of the twentieth century. Obviously, he got some real work done in the process of dissipation. What is interesting to me personally is how he began his brilliant prose career. Carver began his love affair with writing as a poet and it was his poetic love of language that led him into the clean, clear prose for which he is famous. Notice what he says regarding his authorial beginnings in a short essay entitled Some Prose on Poetry:

"I was eighteen or nineteen years old, obsessed with the need to write something, and by then I’d made a few clumsy attempts at poems. But it had never occurred to me that there might be a place where one actually sent these efforts in hopes they would be read and even, just possibly – incredibly, or so it seemed – considered for publication. But there in my hand was visible proof that there were responsible people somewhere out in the great world who produced, sweet Jesus, a monthly magazine of poetry. I was staggered. I felt, as I’ve said, in the presence of revelation. I thanked the old gentleman for the magazine and left the house…I never saw him again, and I don’t know his name. I can only say this encounter really happened…I was just a pup then, but nothing can explain, or explain away, such a moment: the moment when the very thing I needed most in my life – call it a polestar – was casually, generously given to me. Nothing remotely approaching that moment has happened since."

Considering the fact that this essay was written after Carver had received various prestigious awards for fiction, conquered his old nemesis alcohol, and fallen in love with Tess Gallagher, the idea that finding a book of poetry as a teenager would remain the single most momentous event in his memory becomes a very intriguing one. What was Carver’s lifelong attraction to poetry? Did it generate his brilliant prose or exist as a result of it? Were his poetry and his fiction somehow so interrelated that, like Siamese twins, one could not live without the other? Most importantly, what does this symbiotic relationship of two genres, which are often at cross-purposes, tell us about the art of writing and the inspiration and perspiration that drives it?

Very few authors who are acknowledged as short story masters also receive critical acclaim for their poetry. Very few storytellers even bother to write poetry for public consumption. A hundred and fifty years ago, Edgar Allan Poe claimed mastery in both genres. His actual contributions to American literature are still being argued. Anton Chekov, one of Carver’s acknowledged influences, wrote stories and poems, but outside of academic circles, Chekov is best known to the world as a great playwright. In the post-modern era, Stephen Dobyns and Denis Johnson come to my mind as American writers who have become accepted as talented poets and prose creators. I am sure that others could be placed on this list as well, but not many.

In Carver’s case, many critics tend to read his poetry as incidental and, in some cases, as inconsequential. For example David St. John, a literary critic and highly regarded poet himself, says that Carver’s poems tend to moralize and explain, to be narrative and antidotal, and while they do have a “deep, meditative center,” are quite often overwritten. St. John is not alone in this opinion. Other critics have been more forthcoming. Literary critic for the Village Voice Jonathan Dee says that Carver’s poems are “nothing more than journal entries with a ragged right edge.”

It is true that Ray Carver’s poetry at times seems to achieve almost no aesthetic distance from his actual life experience to the expression of that experience, but a similar observation could be made for his prose as well, and neither is true. The purpose of this paper will be to examine closely one of the original questions I proposed as to whether his prose could exist as brilliantly as it does without his poetry and whether or not the genius of his poetry is often overlooked in the shadow of his prose.

First of all, to arrive at any kind of reasonable conclusion, it is necessary to understand influences and environment in Carver’s life because that is where the correlation between his short stories and his poems begins.
His characters in both genres are most often people who lead lives of quiet desperation, who struggle and strain through a life of hard work and emotional turmoil only to find that their struggle does not produce the desired result. In many ways Raymond Carver was a paradigm for his characters. The person and the persona become very blurred on the page. Carver’s own perception of his childhood and attitude toward it is best recorded in the poem Shiftless written originally for his 1986 collection, Ultramarine:

The people who were better than us were comfortable.
They lived in painted houses with flush toilets.
Drove Cars whose year and make were recognizable.
The ones worse off were sorry and didn’t work.
Their strange cars sat on blocks in dusty yards.
The years go by and everything and everyone
gets replaced. But this much is still true –
I never liked work. My goal was always
to be shiftless. I saw the merit in that.
I liked the idea of sitting in a chair
in front of your house for hours, doing nothing
but wearing a hat and drinking cola.
What’s wrong with that?
Drawing on a cigarette from time to time.
Spitting. Making things out of wood with a knife.
Where’s the harm there? Now and then calling the dogs
to hunt rabbits. Try it sometime.
Once in awhile hailing a fat, blond kid like me
and saying, “Don’t I know you?”
Not, “What are you going to do when you grow up.”

This blue collar, white trash attitude dominated Carver’s work most probably because it was the only attitude that allowed him to survive his early life and what dominated his life almost always eventually appeared in his writing. The idea that humans struggle through existence with occasional glimpses of clarity that force the realization - hard work doesn’t bring the “good life” – was an idea that remained clear and constant in Carver’s mind till the day he died.

By 1957, his father had suffered a complete physical and mental breakdown. Though only nineteen years old at the time, Ray married Maryann Burk while working as a delivery boy in Yakima, Washington. Ironically, his first of two children was born that same year in the hospital where his father lay almost catatonic and literally insane.

The next few years proved to be important ones in the formation of Raymond Carver, the writer, as well as Raymond Carver, the human. Moving his small family to Paradise, California he enrolled in Chico State College as a part-time student. The teacher of Creative Writing 101was a relatively obscure author by the name of John Gardner. Gardner worked him like a dog, requiring endless revision on every piece that Carver wrote. “He believed in revision…it was something very close to his heart and something he felt vital for writers… and he never lost patience with a student’s story,” said Carver of his classroom experience.

Ray learned a set of values about writing that were non-negotiable, among other things the belief that there was one specific word that was always better than any other word and that only those best words combined created a worthy story or poem. He always believed that his relationship with Gardner marked a turning point in his writing career. It certainly aided in the perception of Carver as a “minimalist” through the decade of the seventies because Gardner taught him to make each word in each sentence necessary and perfect. Whether or not the label of minimalist proved accurate ultimately is open for debate.

Like his early mentor, Carver fought against the overwhelming tide of nihilistic, post-modern writing. He always maintained that truly great literature should be life-connected, life-affirming and life-changing. “In the best fiction,” he said, “the central character, the hero, or heroine, is also the moved character to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happened that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world.” This is an important point because it places Carver outside the metafictional school of Barth, Bartholme, and others who were very influential and popular at the time. His way of thinking allowed him to explore and develop his own unique voice, both in poetry and prose.

In 1967, Carver was hired as a textbook editor and met Gordon Lish, the famous editor. His story “Will You Be Quiet Please?” was included in The Best American Short Stories 1967. A few months after this story appeared he published his first collection of poems, Near Klamath, and his wife received a one-year scholarship to study at Tel-Aviv University. Ray took a leave of absence from his job. They moved to Israel, but due to financial difficulties, were forced to move back to California before the year was over.

This constant state of flux and the battle for economic stability began to take a toll on Carver’s personal life. He started drinking heavily in 1968 and what was a habit soon became a disease. There has always been considerable speculation as to the causes for this downward spiral into chronic alcoholism. In his essay, “Carver’s Vision,” Phillip Carson speculates that Carver’s despair about finding the “good life” through menial work, struggling with finances, the fact that his father was an alcoholic, and even his early successes at publishing could all have been contributing factors.

Whether any of this speculation is true or whether some other bomb in Carver’s psyche exploded coincidently at this time is something that will probably never be fully understood. What is important is the fact that this horribly spirit-numbing, physically debilitating experience did provide him with fodder for future creative outbursts. In his own words, he acknowledges the paradox of destructiveness and creativity:

"Obviously my drinking experiences helped me write several stories that have to do with alcoholism. But the fact that I went through that and was able to write those stories was nothing short of a miracle. No, I don’t see anything coming out of my drinking experiences except waste and pain and misery…No good came out of it except in the way that someone might spend ten years in the penitentiary and then come out and wirte about the experience."

Although he claims to not see any good that came out of his drunkenness, and certainly that is understandable from a human perspective, the amount and quality of work he did during his inebriated decade has to be considered in the bigger picture of his entire life.

Between 1968 and 1978, Carver received a National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Award for his poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship for fiction, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for fiction. Academically, he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and was appointed visiting lecturer at the University of California and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Of the many literary prizes that came his way, some were for fiction and some for poetry. His short story “Sixty Acres” was included in The Best Little Magazine Fiction. His story “What Is It?” won an O Henry Award. Five poems were published in New Voices in American Poetry. His collection of stories Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? was nominated for a National Book Award. Besides the three books of fiction and the three collections of poems he wrote during this decade, Gordon Lish began publishing Carver’s work in major commercial magazines, including but not limited to Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar.

This ten years of unprecedented productivity and high quality work as a writer was also the decade that almost ended his life. By 1975, Carver was forced to resign his teaching positions at both the University of California and Iowa due to heavy drinking. His wife drank heavily as well, which only contributed to his decline. They filed for bankruptcy during this year for the second time and their family life in general was in a constant state of chaos. Between October of 1976 and January of 1977, he had to be hospitalized four times for acute alcoholism, including seizures, and he and Maryann separated. Near death, Carver made a decision that would not only save his life, but add another decade of great writing to the American literary canon. On June 2nd, 1977, he stopped drinking forever.

After almost a year of sobriety, the University of Texas gave him a position as distinguished writer in residence. Ray moved to El Paso, was soon divorced from Maryann, and began a close relationship with Tess Gallagher. This chain of events not only proved healthy emotionally and physically for him, but also seems to have propelled his writing in a new and innovative direction.

In the early days of his new sobriety, Carver got no writing done. This was not necessarily a bad thing. In the only interview about Raymond that she ever gave, his ex-wife Maryann remarked that it took him five or six years to process any material that eventually ended up in a story, whether that material came from something he’d heard or was a matter of personal experience.

After four years of “finding himself” and redefining what it meant to be human, Carver wrote and published the short story collection What We Talked About When We Talked About Love in 1981. Gordon Lish was the editor of this collection, and as always, had Ray revise the stories down to their bare minimum. However, this collection proved to be the end of Carver’s sparse writing style that critics had dubbed “minimalist” for want of a better term.
As I mentioned earlier, I am not sure that the label is accurate or fair. It is true that the stories he wrote were lean. The dialogue, like Hemingway’s, was terse and resonant and the characters jaded, sometimes beyond redemption. And, it is also true that his prose writing underwent a radical change after 1981. However, did his philosophy and process of writing actually become something that it never was, something brand new?

A good example to consider in this regard is the story that won the Carlos Fuentes Award in 1981 called “The Bath.” It appeared in the last collection mentioned above, a collection often considered textbook in terms of the “minimalist” school of writing. Interestingly, that same story reappeared in 1983 in the collection Cathedrals, revised and retitled, “A Small, Good Thing” and it won the O. Henry Award. The second version was twice the length of the first and the characters were much more fully developed. This would seem to indicate that Ray Carver had indeed left an old style and moved into a new style, if not for the fact that this was the third revision of the story instead of the second. “The Bath” was originally written and published in a small literary magazine called Columbia and appeared as minimalist fiction only after Gordon Lish edited it to almost nothing for the 1981 collection.

Couple this with the fact that the poetry written in his 1983 collection Fires, the poetry written in his 1986 collection Ultramarine, and the poetry published posthumously in his 1989 collection A New Path to the Waterfall maintained the same stylistic manner and narrative intent as all of his earlier poetry and critics are faced with a dilemma. If Ray Carver intended to be a true minimalist writer, then how was it possible that his writing style went from traditional narrative, to minimal narrative, only to end up in a very similar place to where it started? The answer must be that he didn’t and it can only be proven by eliminating the label of minimalist and searching for the connection between his prose and his poetry.

Carver’s own words are useful in this regard. He said in an interview with Italian journalist, Silvia Del Pozzo that “…critics often use the term minimalist when discussing my prose. …it suggests a narrow vision of life, low ambitions, and limited cultural horizons. And, frankly, I don’t believe that’s my case…my writing is lean and tends to avoid excess.” I think that the connection I’m looking for must lie in the word precision rather than minimal in understanding the how and why Carver chose the language he used in both genres and realizing that what he searched for was not the way to say something with the least words, but rather the way to say something with the best words. “Precisionist” may prove to be the ultimate label, if labeling is even possible, to apply to the work of this author. And his obsession with using the right language above all else may very well have come from his love of poetry.

In the decade of the 1980’s, Carver became a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He was awarded the first ever Mildred and Harold Strauss Livings, a renewable five-year fellowship that gave him and annual, tax-free stipend of 35,000. His short story collection Cathedral received a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. He also won Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize. He taught at Syracuse University and traveled the world with his longtime lover, Tess Gallagher. They were married in 1988. For the first time in his life, he was financially secure and of sound mind. However, he remained suspicious of “the good life”, remembering how much success had cost him emotionally through the 1970’s. Apparently his suspicious nature was justified because, just as it seemed that things could not get better, Carver developed lung and brain cancer and died in 1988, less that three months after his marriage. In a way, his life and death proved that writers cannot escape from the characters they create.

The protagonists he created both in poetry and prose often searched for a firm hold on the “good life” through hard work, but it proved illusive at best, impossible at worst. So it was with Ray Carver. His legacy to American writers and readers will not soon be forgotten. But, the sacrifices he made to his own emotional and physical well being in generating that legacy continue to perplex us all as we strive to understand the nature between genius and self-destructiveness.

One thing remains to be discussed. Was his great prose inexorably linked to his poetry and were they both important products of his desire to write the elusive and precise “one true sentence” that Hemingway claimed all people worthy of the name “writer” must strive for.

Perhaps to understand Ray Carver’s tremendous achievement involved in writing well in more than one genre, we must first understand the similarities between creating a short story and a narrative, free-verse poem because the devices and tools (i.e. language compression, time compression, imagistic leaping, terse metaphor, alliteration, brief dramatic narrative, resonant dialogue, theme, etc.) and ultimate structure of one tend to be useful in the other. Therefore, the same short, sharp burst of creative energy is expended in both forms unlike longer works such as novels and essays. For many writers this phenomenon causes lack of focus or flatness in one form or the other. Consequently, the writer who undertakes the task of writing in both genres simultaneously, as Carver did, runs the risk of becoming less than unique in both material and talent.

Since writing very good short stories was an area where Ray Carver excelled, why did he even bother to continue writing poetry when his readers clamored for more prose? Consider his own words in a 1987 interview with French literary critic, Claude Grimal:

CG: Do you consider yourself as a good a poet as a short story writer? And what relationship do you see between your poetry and your prose?

RC: My stories are better known, but, myself, I love my poetry. Relationship?…I write the same way, and I say the effects are similar. There’s a compression of language, of emotion that isn’t to be found in the novel. The short story and the poem, I’ve often said, are closer to each other than the short story and the novel.

CG: You approach the problem of image the same way?

RC: I don’t feel, as someone said to me, that I center my poems or my stories on an image. The image emerges from the story, not the other way around. I don’t think in terms of image when I write.

Carver saw his poems and stories coming from exactly the same place, his life experience. The language of his stories was the way to understand the poetry of the self and the narrative of his poems was his way to understand the stories of the self. He believed that he could only write the kinds of stories he did because the language came to him through his love of poems and his appreciation for the poetry of life. Despite the hardships of living, Carver had always recognized and was always grateful for his gift. Tess Gallagher published his poem called “Gravy” shortly after his death:

No other word will do.
For that’s what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
Being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
Ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was goingnowhere but down.
So, he changed his ways, somehow.
He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things were breaking down and
building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”
he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
Expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”

The narrative voice in this poem is third person limited. The syntax is rhythmic, but simple and lean. The language is direct and very conversational. There are no complex images or extended metaphors that might be found in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, for example. There is just a plain sort of communication with the reader that emphasizes the “variable foot” patterns of normal speech utilized by William Carlos Williams first and many free verse poets later. Interestingly, in his interview with Claude Grimal quoted above, Carver said he disliked the poetry of Wallace Stevens and that Williams was one of his favorite poets.

In comparing this famous poem in close proximity to excerpts from the first and last paragraphs of his famous story Cathedral several interesting point are noticeable:



And:

But I had closed my eyes. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little while longer. I thought it was something I ought to do. “Well, he said. “Are you looking?” My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything. “It’s really something, “ I said.>

Beyond the fact that both narrative voice are empathetic and enroute to a self-discovery, the first thing that comes to mind examining Gravy and Cathedral together is the similarity in language. If I were to create a series of poetic line breaks and extend them throughout the prose story, and re-label it a Ray Carver, free verse poem, the difference between his works in both genres might very well become indiscernible. The narratives are, of course, different, but the monosyllabic active and passive verb combinations, the “hemingwayesque” short declarative sentences, and the simple realistic detail would remain the same because he approached poetry and prose from the same place. “It is possible,” he wrote, “ in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise (italics mine) language, and to endow those things…with immense, even startling power.”

And, this place from which Carver approached all his writing was not relegated to linguistic style and revisionary practice alone, the mechanics of art. His philosophy of writing, his understanding and values regarding writing remained constant whether he struggled with the flawed characters in a story, or the flawed psyche in a poem. “Art is not self-expression, it is communication, and I am interested in communication…a writer wants to communicate, and communication is a two way street between writer and reader.”

This self-proclaimed manifesto, the technical examples that I have given, and the stories and poems themselves would certainly seem to indicate a strong connection between Carver’s prose and poetry. Perhaps it would be easy to speculate as some critics have done, that Carver just added white space and a few line breaks to short, short stories and called them poems, that his poetry was the effort of a “minimalist” fiction writer seeking better minimal expression. But, the polemic of this paper is to place an idea before readers that Ray Carver was a good poet and his love of the ironic, poetic nuances of life was a strong influence in his fiction. He may not have been able to write one without the other. I have already established that poetry was his first love and that his fiction did not deviate very far linguistically, or even thematically, from his poetry. What enabled him to write both, prolifically and simultaneously, however, was the artistic vision that evolved from his poems and extended into his fiction. What is cultivated in a garden grows there. Carver’s fiction grew from his poetic seeds.

Ray’s Vision:

“If only I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are fresh, in words that have not been used, free from repetition – not utterances men of old have spoken.

-Written, circa 2000 BCE by the Egyptian scribe, Khakheperresenb

“All of us who write of calamity know this before all else: there is nothing exceptional about our lives, however these may differ in their particulars. What we can offer you, when the time comes, is companionship in a common venture.”

-Nancy Mairs, “The Literature of Personal Disaster,” 1994

These two statements were made without considering Ray Carver’s vision of writing anything, particularly poetry. Yet, both statements give us some insight into Carver’s vision of what he hoped to accomplish. He sought a unique way to communicate his experience of living and share it with a reading public who could relate to the trials, the struggles, the weaknesses, the strengths, and the joys because they were ordinary, flawed people, like him. He did it first, and continued to do it throughout his life, with his conversational, working class poetry, and ultimately, through his stories. Remember, as quoted from him directly of page fifteen of this paper, Carver always maintained one of his primary functions in writing was to be in touch with his readers, to give them a better understanding of what was happening to them through the voices of his characters. Unlike the prose, this is where Carver’s poetic vision seems to run into difficulty with critics because it raises a literary question. Is something defined only by its function?

Many of Carver’s contemporaries, critics and poets alike, would argue, as the French Symbolists did, that a poem is not necessarily written to fulfill the function of communication, that it is, in fact, just there, like a great painting or sculpture. Therefore, because his poems are so accessible and common placed, they are inferior. This argument lacks credibility for two reasons.

If it were completely true that poems are just there, then each poem written could only be valued as art using the same criteria that Sir Edmund Hillary used to climb Mt. Everest. When asked by a United Press journalist why he had climbed the highest mountain in the world, he replied, “because it was there.” We would have to view each poem written as a mountain to be arduously and vigorously scaled with the possibility existing that poems impossible to scale are the most worthy of being called literary art.

More realistic is the view that there is a line drawn between obscurity and communication and, if it is crossed too far on either side, the poem is lost. In his essay, “Metaphor and the Authenticating Act of Memory,” Stephen Dobyns indicates that the two extremes, communication and obscurity, must be found concurrently in all poetry if it is good poetry. He says that writers may do this in one of two ways, by the use of metaphor or by authenticating memory. In other words, there must be stimuli in the poem that trigger our senses and enable us to enter the poem as readers at the level of personal experience or imagination, a level that heightens our self-awareness. A writer who does this well makes good poems. Does Ray Carver’s poetry straddle this line between obscurity and communication well enough to pass Dobyns’ test for artistic balance? Consider the poem “Your Dog Dies” from his 1983 book Fires:

it gets run over by a van.
you find it on the side of the road
and bury it.
you feel bad about it.
you feel bad personally
but you feel bad for your daughter
because it was her pet,
and she loved it so.
she used to croon to it
and let it sleep in her bed.
you write a poem about it.
you call it a poem for your daughter,
about the dog getting run over by a van
and how you looked after it,
took it out in the woods
and buried it deep, deep,
and the poem turned out so good
you’re almost glad the little dog
was run over, or else you’d never
have written that good poem.
then you sit down to write
a poem about writing a poem
about the death of that dog,
but while you’re writing you
hear a woman scream
your name, your first name,
both syllables,
and your heart stops.
after a minute, you continue writing.
she screams again.
you wonder how long this can go on.

I can almost hear one of the poetry workshops I’ve taught over the years deconstructing this poem. “It relies on non-specific relativisms. How do we know what a good poem is? What does it mean to feel bad. Show me don’t tell me. How deep is deep, deep? Why is it written in second person. It repeats the same, obscure phrases. What happened to the daughter? Who’s screaming? …and on and on and on.” Part of the reason for this lies in the fact that most all of Carver’s poems are written with these built in intellectual flaws. However, also part of the reason for this is because my workshop, and many others like it, has been taught to analyze poems as academics and critics rather than as readers.

Ray Carver’s vision was to write stories and poems that communicate the universal struggle of ordinary people living within the ordinary circumstances that are generated by normal life. Oftentimes the result is discomforting. In that respect, this poem is successful, and according to Stephen Dobyns, artistic as well. Who among us has not lost a pet, or been faced with explaining death to a child? Carver has authenticated our memory through his own. At the same time, the poem works as a metaphor for a relationship between a man and woman, a relationship that has been crushed by the forward motion of life itself. When the poems turns at what poet Leslie Ullman calls the “dark star” point, or the entrance of the screaming woman, an obscure mystery energizes our imaginations and we leave the page, taking the mystery – “you wonder how long this can go on” – with us. By using the second person singular voice, Carver gives himself aesthetic distance and draws his audience into the scene at the same time. Tremendous resonance is at work here. The undercurrent that runs through short stories like Cathedral, A Small Good Thing, So Much Water Close to Home, and many others, can be felt from start to finish in this poem. When the narrator at the end of Cathedral says, “But my eyes were closed. I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.” The same goose bumps tingle in the reader’s psyche. We don’t just know that something major occurs outside of our control called life we feel it occurring.

The second aspect of Ray Carver’s vision and the second reason his poems can’t be dismissed for their seeming simplicity, but rather need to be recognized as catalysts for his other work rests with a word I’ve mentioned in this paper several times before, precision. Again, I turn to Dobyns and Best Words, Best order for aid in understanding the complex nature of Carver’s writing process. In the essay “The Voice One Listens To” Dobyns points out that the writing process is always an act of discovery and that includes many revisions of a story or a poem. We already know that Carver was an obsessive reviser ever since his classroom experience in the early 1960’s with John Gardner. In fact, many of the stories that appear in the collections he wrote during the last decade of his life were revisions and enhancements of stories he had already published as a so-called “minimalist” writer a decade earlier. Was his habit for revision simply a means to work out some anal Freudian neuroses, or a way to find the best words to give his stories authority? The information on Carver, much of which has already been shared in this paper, would indicate the latter.

Are we to assume then that Ray Carver, whose first love in writing was poetry, didn’t apply the same work ethic to his poems? That is a rhetorical question. The idea that his poems were a spontaneous outburst of expression with no thought for language and structure while his stories are methodical and precise is ridiculous. He wrote the poems the way he did because his vision, his voice, and his authority were best expressed with the same type language spoken by the same type personas that appear in his prose. The poems were well thought out, revised, and structured to bring his vision of man’s struggle with life to readers in a way that would be meaningful emotionally, not just literarily.

The Poet Who Wrote Prose:

We, as individuals, perceive truth to be the expression of our needs. Truth becomes truth only when it serves our interest. Very seldom do we acknowledge truth as absolute or an actual revelation of the real world as it is and always will be. This view of truth relates particularly to poetry because poetry is, by its own nature, subjective. It is most successful when the reader can connect with the mind of the writer who is trying to learn what is true for him in a given context. Poetry that tries to be objective becomes too general and often incomprehensible regarding specific meaning. It is also boring and clichéd. This places a responsibility directly on the shoulders of those writers who claim to be poets.

Most of us write from a particular context of what was true for us. However, we also believe that what we write helps clarify some universal question and is therefore beneficial to readers. With that belief in mind it is very important to resist our own bias, to not rant, preach, or be judgmental, but to bring to life. This is called a voice with authority.

In an essay called “The Voice of Authority” poet Carl Dennis mentions that a writer must incorporate three things in what he writes if it is to have authority – passion, discrimination, and inclusiveness. With passion, a poet shows that he cares about what he is saying. With discrimination that same poet considers all the relevant views and finds them wanting. With inclusiveness, he connects his immediate subject to other, larger, issues.

For me, this third point is the key to good poetry. Most poets care about their poems and look at the raison d’etre of their poems from several different angles. But, it is often difficult to connect the poem to a universal idea that registers quickly and clearly in the mind of a reader. Ray Carver had this ability to connect and not just in small quantities. He had it brilliantly. So much so, that it spilled over from his love of poetry onto the pages of his prose. And it may be that his talent for communicating with and empathizing with humanity was best expressed in his short stories. Youthful optimism, early marriage, alcoholism, near death experiences, recovery, sobriety, characters with little or no hope, these themes certainly play out well in his short stories because they are all too common human themes and his stories revolve around their exposition in ways that could strum a chord in almost all of us.

However, the way Ray Carver came to understand these themes well enough to be able to communicate them as stories was, first of all, to live through them, and secondly, to become self-aware of them through his poetry. If we relegate his poetry to an inferior position in the body of his work, we run the risk of missing how his vision of writing came to fruition and how his process of writing evolved. Carver himself knew that the relationship between his poems and stories was important enough that without one the other might well have had no forward motion at all. He examined this idea in a poem written for two authors that he admired above all others. If we keep Dobyns’ points in mind regarding metaphor and memory while we read this poem, then we can conclude that Ray Carver was, not only a great writer of short stories, but a skillful poet fully aware of the important role his poetry played in his prose.

Understanding that concept, it may be necessary for us, as students of writing, to give his poetry a more than cursory examination, thus gaining the freedom through close study to appreciate and increase the already extensive canon of a gifted writer.
Poem for Hemingway
& W. C. Williams

3 fat trout
in the still pool
below the new
steel bridge.
two friends
come slowly up
the track.
one of them,
ex-heavyweight
wears an old
hunting cap.
he wants to kill,
that is, catch & eat,
the fish.
the other,
medical man,
he knows the chances
of that.
he thinks it fine
that they should
simply hang there
always
in the clear water.
the two keep going
but they
discuss it as
they disappear
into the fading trees
& fields & light,
upstream.

This poem seems to be a ragged burst of imagination until we look closely at the structure, including the line breaks. Carver weaves his vision of poetry and prose together by dropping lines at the exact point where one line is incomprehensible without the other. To understand the image of Hemingway without connecting it to the image of Williams is impossible. So it is with the genre of prose and the genre of poetry in the career of Ray Carver. The preponderance of available evidence seems to indicate that poetry was the anchor for his soul, the art form that kept him aware of self and through his awareness write his stories for us all.

End Notes:

Carver, Raymond, All of Us (New York: Knopf, 1996), 266.
St. John, David, Review of Ultramarine ( LA Times Book Review: 12/28/86), 3.
Dee, Jonathan, in Village Voice, 6/25/1985, 7.
Carver, Ray, All of Us (New York: Knopf, 1996) 175
Carson, Philip, “Carver’s Vision” ( http://world.std.com/~ptc 2/19/01) 1
Stull, William, “Raymond Carver” ibid. 3
ibid. 5
Carson, ibid. 4
Gentry, Marshall Bruce and Stull, William, eds. Conversations With Ray Carver (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990) 115
Stull, William, “Ray Carver” ibid. 3
ibid., 5
Halpert, Sam, ed. …when we talk about Raymond Carver (Layton: Gibbs Smith, 1991) 90
Hashimoto, Hiromi, “Trying to Understand Raymond Carver’s Vision” in Tokai English Review, No. 5, December, 1995. 116
Stull, William, translator, “Prose as Architecture: Two Interviews with Raymond Carver” (http://titan.iwu.edu/~iplath/carver.htm 1995) 4
Stull, William, “Ray Carver” ibid. 5
Stull, William, translator, “Prose as Architecture” ibid. 7
Carver, Ray, “All of Us” ibid. 292
Carver, Ray, “Cathedral” in Short Fiction, Charles Bohner and Dean Doughtery, eds. (Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999) 152-161
Carver, Ray, “On Writing” in Fires (New York” Vintage, 1989) 24
Carver, Ray in Alive and Writing, Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, eds. (Chicago: Uof Il Press, 1987) 77
Dobyns, Stephen, “Metaphor and the Authenticating Act of Memory” in Best Words, Best Order (New York: St. Martins Press. 1996) 11-35
Carver, Ray, “Your Dog Dies” in All of Us, ibid. 6-7
Dobyns, Stephen, “The Voice One Listens To” ibid. 81
Dennis, Carl, “The Voice of Authority” in Poets Teaching Poetry (New York: Knopf, 1991) 65
Carver, Ray, “Poem for Hemingway & W. C. Williams in All of Us, ibid. 40

Creativity, especially as it concerns the written text, is a process of symbiotic interaction between memory and imagination. If the text is fiction or poetry, memory shapes imagination. If the text is memoir or creative nonfiction, then the opposite is most often true. Imagination nudges memory. Memory perceives through the lens of imagination while specific images are formed from composite recollections. To assume an autobiographical piece of creative writing is accurately processed into facts on the page from what the writer remembers is to assume that he or she recalls where lunch was taken one year, two months, three weeks, and four days from the time of writing and in exact detail, including what kind of soup stain was on the tablecloth and what words were spoken to the waiter when leaving. How many people can really do that? Really? To assume a novel or a short story has been born from a purely unconscious imagining of characters, scene, dialogue, plot, and setting without drawing on past personal experience and observation is to make believe that a writer never saw a man with a moustache, or a woman with short hair, or a blue sky. Both concepts are ridiculous.

So, what differentiates fiction and imaginative poetry from creative nonfiction? To understand the major and simplest difference, you must first consider the necessary similarity in the reading process, the willing suspension of disbelief. For a writer to sustain a reader’s interest through the narrative, any narrative, the reader has to be able to enter the world of the story through the senses and at an emotional level and then interact with it. This requires both memory and imagination. Good science fiction works, not because people believe it’s factual, but rather because it’s so well written, so detailed, and the characters so specifically human that the reader is willing to say for a period of time, “I’m going to believe this while I have the book open.” The reality of the episode doesn’t matter. The story entertains and sometimes educates. The same phenomenon occurs when the event written about is real but from a slightly different angle. Readers accept the fact what they’re being told is a memory and actually happened, but are willing to accept also the small details impossible to remember as true, even though supplied by the imagination of the author. Why? For the very same reasons the reader engaged the science fiction as believable. He or she wants to believe it because the way it has been written stimulated that desire. He or she may leave the story with different conclusions and perspectives based on genre, but have become involved emotionally with the story due to the same suspension of disbelief.

Once you have accepted the similarities between all forms of writing, then the line between fiction and nonfiction seems to become blurred for many writers. This causes and ethical dilemma for some and creates economic opportunity for others. As we have seen in recent years, some writers motivated by the need for profit and fame rather than the need – to paraphrase Hemingway – to write one true sentence, have sold engagingly written stories as nonfiction. However, the events that form the core of the narrative never occurred. And, therein lies the simplest difference between fiction and nonfiction writing of any kind. One happened. The other, as specific history, never did. Contrary to the tricksters who call themselves nonfiction writers for the purpose of selling books and justify the philosophy of manipulating major events, or in some cases fabricating them, “for the sake of the story,” I believe that the boundary between something that happened and something that did not happen is solid and easily identifiable. It is the line that separates conscience from greed that more often gets blurred.

Transcending Narrative

An Interview with Lynn Emanuel by Jim McGarrah - first published in Southern Indiana Review, 2004.


Like the sun, Lynn Emanuel was born in the east. She lived in the small, upstate New York town of Katonah until early adolescence when, like the sun, she moved west, settling in Denver. Perhaps this metaphorical motion coupled with the early influence of a father who sculpted and painted and a mother who read aloud to her constantly as a child created within her the color, the fire, the rhythm, and the light so prevalent in her poems. To quote Jake Barnes – “Isn’t it pretty to think so.” If you ask Lynn to explain the genesis of her art, she will simply smile and say, “I became intoxicated with words.” For whatever reason, Lynn Emanuel ranks as one of the premier poets working in America today. She directs the University of Pittsburgh Writing Program and has published three critically acclaimed volumes of poetry, Hotel Fiesta, The Dig, and Then, Suddenly. Her list of awards includes two NEA fellowships, The National Poetry Series Award, and The Eric Matthieu Award from the American Academy of Poets. Her poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and in Best American Poetry, 1994, 1995, 1998, and 1999. It was my privilege to speak with Lynn about her poems and poetry in general when she served as a guest faculty member for RopeWalk Writers Retreat in New Harmony, Indiana. Following is the text of that conversation:

What have you discovered is the most difficult thing about being a poet in today’s society?

I would have to say the act of defining poetry itself, addressing the question – “what is a poem?” There is an amplitude of poetic styles and ambitions in America today. No single touchstone for “the good work” exists. On one hand, this allows for a wonderful plurality of voices. On the other hand, the fact that there is no single tradition to try ourselves against places an enormous responsibility on each of us as an individual talent, to use Eliot’s terms.

Given those conditions, what keeps you coming back to the page and writing more poetry?

When I first started writing, I wondered, “Is anybody going to hear me? Ever?” “ Am I waving or drowning?” I think beginning writers face this existential question: “As a writer, will I live?” It was that energy, that pressure, and fear out of which I wrote. As I got older and had published books, I realized that I was going to be part of the conversation in contemporary poetry. I was going to have an opportunity to put my oar in, to use a phrase from Kenneth Burke. The early initiative disappeared, but was replaced by a desire for change, not development or evolution--that sounds too Darwinian for my tastes--but now I had my own work to look back on, to press against, to move away from.

Some literary critics that I’ve read have remarked that American poetry has lost its aesthetic. It’s no longer an art form, but rather a forum for multi-cultural whining. It’s too involved with society rather than the abstract concept of “art for art’s sake.” How do you respond to that?

To me that seems to be a very naïve position to take intellectually. I don’t think it’s possible to read poetry, even from some distant so-called “Golden Age,” and dismiss the poet’s connection with society or the fact that “inspiration” has external as well as internal origins. The idea that a poet creates in a vacuum is sentimental and nostalgic. It’s getting to be pretty boring, too.

So would you say that it’s possible to find a balance for both readers and writers of poetry between for example, a literary elitist attitude and a literary affirmative action that excludes good poetry from one ethnic or gender group just to include mediocre poetry from another perhaps under represented group? This question seems particularly important to me with the proliferation of MFA in Writing programs across the country because there’s a lot of poetry coming from everywhere to pick from and it isn’t all good.

I’d like to change the terms for just a moment. Suppose, instead of a proliferation of “programs in writing,” we were to substitute “programs in music.” Further, suppose we were describing something like this: Everywhere in this country people are studying music. Some of these music students turn out to be wonderful musicians and composers and perform publicly and create a great excitement and stir. And some of the students may or may not be wonderful musicians and composers, but, after they study music, they continue to play music (perhaps just for the pleasure and joy of continuing to play), or they create quartets in their neighborhoods or they teach other people in their communities to play and learn how to read and write music. And suppose we were to substitute, say, “Switzerland” for “America.” All of this proliferation of the study of music was happening in Switzerland. I for one would feel that all of this study of music and playing of music was a wonderful sign of civility. I would see it as a sign of cultural vigor. I would be impressed that as many, or perhaps more, citizens of this country were studying music as were studying finance. I would expect debates about “high” and “low” art to arise (especially with so many musicians). I would also expect questions and debates about how we judge “the good,” given this proliferation of musicians. But I would say that these very questions would be proof that music (or writing) was an important feature in the culture of this country. And I would find that an interesting thing.

Let’s talk about your poetry specifically. If I asked you to name the first poem you wrote that made you feel like an actual poet, what would it be?

In 1972, I was an undergraduate student at Bennington College. I took a workshop with Steven Sandy, and in that workshop, I wrote a sonnet. Keep in mind that very few people—well, very few people at Bennington--were writing sonnets in the ‘70s. But, he praised that poem and for the first time, a poem became solid to me, visible as an entity in its own right.

Do you see yourself as part of a school or tradition of poetry, maybe a movement?

No, not really. I see myself as a poet who, at least until now, has undertaken an investigation and complication of the issues of narrative. That’s an individual process. I write narrative in order to undo narrative.

The line breaks in your poems give them a wonderful sense of downward speed and power, very similar to a tornado. You seem very adept at creating a vortex with language that sucks a reader in and makes them want to read on. Is this an intuitive process for you, or part of an intellectual calculation that comes during revision?

People often divide creation and revision into an intuitive and then an intellectual process. Revision is also an intuitive process. My line breaks have to do with the way I experience language and my own energies. And that’s true even during revision. In my new poems, I’m trying to “break” my own habits of lineation, but it’s very difficult.

In your poem “The Planet Krypton” you talk about America’s testing of the atomic bomb at the Tonapah Artillery Range in Nevada during the 1950’s, the overwhelming sense of awe and mystery and power, and maybe a fascination with the danger to humanity through the eyes of an individual, certainly the idea that the world was forever changed. Given the climate of fear and terrorism and fanaticism today, what do you see as the poet’s ongoing role in society, his or her social responsibilities I guess?

In a certain sense, poets have the same responsibilities that any other citizen does. And yet, perhaps to an even greater degree that during the Viet Nam War our public language is being fashioned into a blunt object for knocking its citizens senseless. I do believe poets should resist what I consider to be the toxic nature of our national rhetoric. I have been disappointed in most of the poems that have been written in response to 9/ll. Wittingly or not, they have seemed to me to participate in the general lack of public thoughtfulness. It is not easy to resist this oppressive language. Poets may even have an obligation to keep silent if poetry becomes largely ineffectual in its resistance to this demoralization of our thinking.

In several of your earlier poems a character appears and reappears. So, to satisfy my own curiosity, who is Raoul?

(laughter) A character, as characters in fiction, who appears and reappears. Raoul is partly invented and partly a composite of “characters” I’ve known.

Your later poems, and I’ll name one, “Out of Metropolis” for example, seem to be reaching for something more than language. There is a restless, reflective quality, a forward motion toward something new, but the newness seems structured around a feeling of nostalgia, almost a paradox. Can you give me some thoughts on the direction your writing is currently taking and when did you sense a change?

My last book, Then, Suddenly--, was a fairly dramatic break from my earlier books. I don’t think I knew how dramatic until I started giving readings and heard my own work out loud again and again. The poems since Then, Suddenly--are more meditative. I find myself interested in the actual site of writing: the poet at her desk, kitchen table, office and the confrontation between the writer and the effects of technology. I compose with pen and with computer. I write on the page and on the screen of the terminal. I write by moving back and forth between what I am calling the “low” or “dry” technology of the slowish scratch of the pencil on paper, and the “high” or “wet” technology of the computer where language is much quicker and seems more liquid and impermanent. I see myself stuck between the wet and dry technologies, between two different languages or the same language produced in two different ways, and I find it very interesting.

There’s also a sense of estrangement in the poems in Then, Suddenly--, as if the speaker is actually alienated from the life she’s involved in? Could you comment on that?

I think you’re right. At first, I wrote with a conscious effort not to write a book of narratives. I wanted to alienate myself from that. But, after I was finished, I realized that the poems had a resonance, an echoing of a deeper alienation that had been unknown to me. Those are the kinds of discoveries that we say make poetry wonderful. They also make poetry terrifying, dismaying, difficult.

With a bagful of literary awards, students who adore you, and the respect of your peers, what do you still hope to accomplish?

(more laughter) At one point in his life, Giacometti, the sculptor, said that the only thing he desired was the sensation he got from working. I do think that at this point the thing that really deeply interests me is writing the book—the book unlike the other books. I want to find a way to think more fully in poetry.

Not being much for labels, I’ve never thought about exactly what kind of poetry I write. We all throw around terms like free verse, narrative, lyric, sticchic, strophic, among others, but for all practical purposes those terms are relative to the people you’re having a conversation with and not much else. Denise Levertov’s book, The Poet in the World, gave me pause and caused me to reflect on the work I’m actually doing. According to her, the type of poems I write could only be called “organic” because free verse implies no structure or association.

The best way I can describe what I think she’s talking about is through jazz. In the late 1940’s and through the decade of the 1950’s, musicians like Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, and John Coltrane played a type of jazz referred to as “bebop.” What that meant, in simple terms, was taking a standard song with a definite melody and improvising “riffs” off of the melody, returning to it at their leisure and riffing again as the spirit moved them. This was organic jazz.

In the 1960’s, Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Mingus, and others began experimenting with “free” jazz. This consisted of complete improvisation, no melody, form, or structure, just a series of grunts, groans, wails, and random moans. I could very easily liken this to what true free verse poetry should be in Levertov’s opinion. And, it is not what most of us write. I guess I’m a bebop poet. I write with a specific narrative in mind. I riff off of that narrative, but return to it. The structure and form changes with each poem based on content, but structure and form do exist.

Levertov’s essays throughout the book had me speculating like this on many different subjects. That makes me believe the book was well worth reading. I call it a book of essays, but that may be too rigid of a classification. It’s really a collection of speeches, journal notes, lectures and random thoughts. Each section, however, is valuable in understanding Levertov and her poetics. For example, in one entry she bemoans the state of poetry in the late 20th century. She says:

The best poems of recent years that are about chaos… including “Howl”
are intricately structured, not chaotic. The force is there, the horror, but only precisely because these are works of art, not self-indulgent spittle drippings. They have the “inner harmony” that is a contrast to the confusion around them.

This idea is of particular interest to me because I have argued with high school English teachers for years that teaching students to write poetry as a form of expression is a cop- out. Poetry is a form of expression, but it’s also much more than that. Good poems are works of art and, like any work of art, subject to standards. They are not spittle drippings of teenaged angst.

According to Levertov, poets don’t look for answers. They seek to clarify the existence and nature of questions. The way they do this is through dialogue with their inner selves. If I believe Levertov, and I do, then the task of the poet is to strive for a universality of subject or theme within the poem, a way to reach others by reaching himself. The circumstance that generates the poem becomes far less important than the communion between author and reader regarding the questions the circumstance raises.

I could probably continue this discourse with myself for several more pages. This book certainly gives rise to reflection as to why I write, and particularly, why I write poetry. However, for the sake of brevity, I’m going to stop hitting the keyboard with the thought that Denise Levertov was right on target in this book with her main connecting theme that good poetry translates experience rather than invents it.

Alright, I admit it. I'm a closet geek. Who else gets up so early in the morning to rethink theories? This morning I'm wondering about totemic words, if they actually exists and if they truly have power. Carl Jung envisioned the unconscious mind of Freud's theories to be a collective unconscious. He believed there were archetypal images that reflected the deepest recesses of our human minds regardless of race, culture, or geography. In a 1930 essay he argued that the poet is a shaman, a conscience figure, exploring the mysteries of his/her own mind while bringing into focus universal primal experiences, such as those surrounding birth and death, shared by everyone.

Based on this concept, certain words the poet uses then become what I call totemic. Like an Indian totem, each image on the pole, or in this case in a poem,
represents a consistent symbol within the society to everyone. A whole school of poetry, maybe two, developed in the 60's and 70's based on this idea called the Deep Image School. Words like silence, blood, water, stone, fire, ash, and bone all became unconscious collective symbols in their poetry. The problem with that idea lies in the fact that they all had to get together and consciously create this concept.

So, while seeing it has some merit, I don't think I buy the concept entirely. It too easily removes all responsibility from the poet regarding the world he/she lives in. Denise Levertov, who I consider a great poetic theorist and social activist from the 60's, argues that poets are responsible for their words, meaning they should take an active part in the world around them - be not only observer, but participant as well. The point she makes is that, whether we like it or not, what we write has a moral and social influence on ourselves and others. When coupled with Wayne Booth’s idea that no one writes in a vacuum and no one utilizes narrative tools without expecting, or hoping for, an audience, we owe it to our world to make poems that are a high expression of artistic craft, but also accessible and connectable to the human condition. Now, I've always bought this particular argument, that poems can and should be balanced works of art, which is why I spend so much time in my poems trying to get at the truth, rather than make a judgment about it. I see my job more as a translator of experience than a creator of it and what I translate life’s experiences into is an accessible pattern of images that can connect, hopefully, with resonance and in layers of meaning, to a larger audience than an academic elite.

It may be true that certain words create universal sensory perceptions for both poet and reader, but the poet, at some point, consciously chooses the order in which those words appear, thereby creating the overall imagistic effect. The word order may at first appear randomly from the unconscious, but all poets end up revising word order consciously, whether they like to admit it or not, just as artists will go back and make another swipe with the paint brush because the first one isn't quite right, whether they like to admit it or not. If I put Levertov and Jung together, then the implication is that certain words have great power in my culture, so I have a moral responsibility that transcends aesthetics to consider how and why I chose to use those words the way I did. In other words, there must be more than "art for art's sake" and the Beat generation’s admonition first word, best word must be braided into Stephen Dobyns’ advice to make a poem from the best words in the best order if the poet is to fulfill the role of shaman in his/her society and this may be where we've gotten off base in contemporary literature that has become increasingly self-indulgent and boring. These are the poetics I work from every time I sit down to try and write a poem.

Is something defined only by its function? Many of the French Symbolists poets might argue that a poem is not necessarily written to fulfill the function of communication with a reader, that it is in fact just there.

If this were completely true wouldn’t a poem be like Mt. Everest? Sir Edmund Hillary said he climbed this greatest of all mountains simply because it was there. Using that perspective we must view each poem as a mountain to be vigorously and arduously scaled, and this with the possibility that some mountainous poems rise to an unassailable height.

On the other hand, many poets have felt that a line exists between communication and obscurity. If a poet crosses the boundary from the well-mapped land of rhetoric into the uncharted territory of complete shadow, then the poem is lost. William Carlos Williams is a fine poet to examine who invokes this prosody. Poets like Stephen Dobyns might argue that both communication and obscurity are found, must be found, concurrently in all good poetry.

I tend to find myself rather solidly in the Dobyns camp on this issue. A poem, like life, is most successful, when it reaches and maintains balance. It needs to communicate something meaningful to a reader, but it has to do it with some imagistic and linguistic complexity or it languishes in banality.

So, how can a poem reach this balance? Dobyns says in his book on poetics Best Words, Best Order that one way is by metaphor (he includes simile, analogy and allegory). The other way is by authenticating memory, or by interjecting stimuli in the poem that allow a reader to interact with the poem either at the level of personal experience or imagination. Every symbol, by virtue of its existence, would be connected to something it symbolizes. If you wanted to symbolize a feeling of frustrated power or entrapment for example, you might create a panther in a cage at the zoo as Rilke does in one of his great poems. Most people reading that poem have been to a zoo and have felt some empathy for the animals in their cages. This concept is true, however, only in so much as the poet can link the metaphor to something that will stimulate a memory process in the reader, particularly a process that heightens a reader’s self awareness. A symbol for a railroad crossing in a culture that has no trains is useless.

Back to my original question – is something defined only by its function? It can’t be if it’s poetry. Poetry has to find the level ground, the balance if you will, between communicating emotions, activities, thoughts, and insights to readers and simply expressing the images and contexts that make us write to explore our relationships with ourselves. Metaphors act as bridge between our audience, and us but we must give the reader enough specific information in the poem to understand the metaphor or the bridge we create is burning behind us.

I’ll leave those purists among you who believe poetry is such a personal thing that none of what I’ve said matters, that it is an art form of introspection and individual introspection only, with a quote from the great American literary theorist Wayne Booth –

This is not to say that the novelist (i.e. writer) must think consciously of his audience, or that novelists who worry about their readers will necessarily write better than those who do not. No doubt some authors work better when they think of their writing as self-expression and of their technique as self-discovery. But, regardless of how we define art or artistry, the very concept of writing a story seems to have implicit within it the notion of finding techniques of expression that will make the work accessible in the highest possible degree. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction – page 105

This concept is applicable and necessary in poetry as well as fiction. There’s nothing wrong with writing a poem to express yourself; however, if you have included in that poem any rhetorical or narrative device, then you have implied that you expect someone else to read it and have created a responsibility to make it understandable at some level and at some point. Keep both things in mind when you craft poetry, especially in the revision process. Have I expressed my vision fully, but also, have I created enough metaphorical bridges so that other people reading my vision can share it?

Interview with Vietnam vet memoir writer Jim McGarrah
August 20th, 2008
by Jerry Waxler

The Vietnam War memoir “A Temporary Sort of Peace” by Jim McGarrah, struck me with its fearless honesty. So much can happen to a person during war. The terrible experiences become embedded in mind as terrible memories. So what does it take to convert these terrible memories into a story that can be shared with other people? To learn more about what that feels like, I asked the author a few questions about his memoir writing process.

JW: You talk in the book about how hard it was to face your war memories. And yet, you managed to write a whole book about it. I am hoping you can share some of what that felt like.
JM: Yes, I did write a whole book, but I was thirty plus years and a lot of therapy past the war before I could look at it objectively and with the honest perspective of an old man, able to admit my own character flaws and willing to face the fact that politicians use words like honor and patriotism to manipulate their personal agendas. You can’t write a credible war memoir if you’re still stuck on either end of the extremes - pumped up with pseudo-glory or bitter from reality. I’ve felt both ways in the past and I had to learn to balance those issues emotionally before I could describe them and reflect on their influences personally with any credibility. Any attempt at honest reflection involves some painful introspection.

JW: When did you first start thinking you wanted to write about those years? What were your initial thoughts, misgivings, or plans?
JM: I wrote an essay about ten years ago for a magazine called Southern Indiana Review. The subject was returning to the Veterans Administration out-patient clinic to be examined for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The VA had only recently begun to admit that such a condition existed, even though historians as old as Tacitus, among others, were describing similar symptoms in Roman soldiers 2,000 years ago. After the article was published, I put it out of my mind and went on to other things.

When we invaded Iraq five years ago, the parallels with the 1960’s came immediately to mind. Politicians and journalists were even using some of the same phrases to fire up the population for a limited war with a third world country. One of my university students, a beautiful and sensitive and talented young writer, had joined the National Guard the year before the invasion to help pay her way through school. She was called up and returned home a paraplegic at the age of twenty. At that point, I went back and looked at the old essay and started to wonder how I had managed to get myself involved so easily in an event that influenced my life so heavily for decades afterwards. Not only that, but I wondered why we had learned so little between Vietnam and Iraq.

So, I started writing a series of inter-connected essays about that period in my life in an attempt to understand my own thoughts and feelings at the time. I believed that by doing this I might somehow discover why history seems to always repeat itself. My only misgiving was that I might not be talented enough to do the subject justice. After a few of those essays had been published and I saw there was an interest in the subject, I also saw that what I was doing was evolving into a book. I don’t really plan projects. I start writing about things I feel and try to discover something worth knowing in them.

JW: What sorts of steps did you go through to gather the skills, and organize the information and arrange the structure?
JM: The first step in writing about life is to live it. As an editor, so often I read stuff that is technically flawless, but says nothing interesting. As writers, we are translators, not creators. And, what we translate is specific experience, or composites of experience, into language that’s both accessible and full of emotional substance. If we have never involved ourselves emotionally in the process of living, we have nothing to translate and it becomes difficult to make a connection on a level that resonates with a reader.

Secondly, we have to overcome our own fears and our own feelings of self-importance. We’re making ourselves open and vulnerable so others may learn something about what it is to be human. I put these things down as steps because they often require conscious discipline to accomplish. Another very important step is reading. I read constantly and I read everything lying around, from labels to Ladies Home Journal to James Joyce to Salmon Rushdie to Gaston Bachelard. I’ve read the Bible several times, not because I’m a religious man, but because it’s an anthology of forty great poets and story tellers. Not only does reading help you gather skills and see how they are used, it also teaches you variations of structure and organization.

Possibly the most important step I ever made, and it’s a one time step that never quits, is moving my writing from a means of expression into a tool to search for meaning in life or discover something or relearn something that we forgot about human nature. Then we create an opportunity for a reader to learn something new as well. Robert Frost once said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” This is the quality that sometimes allows writing to approach the level of true art.

JW: What sorts of feedback or coaching did you get?
JM: I was privileged to study with some of the best writers currently working, not necessarily the most famous, but the best. From 1999-2001, I went through the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at Vermont College and the faculty at that time was simply amazing. I don’t know how else to put it. The class I graduated with is responsible for dozens of good books in the 21st century, largely due to the influence and encouragement of the faculty that was there at the time and the intensity of the curriculum.

JW: What did you tell yourself, to sustain your commitment to putting these difficult memories on paper.
JM: I just kept telling myself that besides exorcising my own demons, I might actually help some other person deal with similar circumstances. I forced myself to believe that what I was doing might make a difference, might turn out to be greater than the sum of its parts. I have always believed that my experience was not unique, only my reaction was and through a record of that some connection might be made with someone else. Judging from the responses I’ve received by people who’ve read the book, I’d say the assumption was true, and I’m thankful for that.

JW: What reactions did you get from other combat veterans?
JM: One example - I gave a public reading last December. In the audience, I noticed a man whose eyes started to get moist. After the reading, he came up to me and asked if I remembered him. I confessed I didn’t. He told me his name and that we went to high school together. He had enlisted in the Marine Corps after graduation and gone to ‘Nam. I hadn’t seen him in forty years, but he thanked me over and over again for finally getting things right, for telling the world how it really was. That was a very humbling and inspiring moment for me. I’ve had several more like it. I’ve also had some older vets from WWII who felt like I was unpatriotic for talking about the war the way I did.

JW: What did you find surprising about the response to your book?
JM: What I’ve found surprising is the overwhelmingly positive response I’ve been getting from younger, college-age, readers. Many of them who have never studied much contemporary American history wondered how baby-boomers could relate Vietnam to Iraq and had a much clearer understanding after reading this memoir. Also, I’ve had several students come up to make after readings and say “thanks, now I understand my dad better.”

JW: Do you speak to groups, or reach out to other veterans or other trauma survivors about your experience?
JM: I speak to as many people as I can as often as I can and I ask a lot of questions. I also do public readings and book signings and teach writing workshops in various places. But, that’s contingent on my time schedule and whether or not I can earn enough money from the engagement to pay for the trip. I’ll go just about anywhere.

JW: I hate admitting my frailties so I am impressed by your telling of experiences you weren’t proud of. How did you feel about writing so frankly?
JM: No human is all good or all bad. All humans equivocate. If you create a character in fiction that is all one way or another, that character doesn’t read real. He or she reads as a stereotype and the text becomes boring very quickly. If you write non-fiction and you describe a real person as all one way or another, you’re lying. To write a memoir, an author must be able to confront himself or herself with honesty and integrity, no matter how humiliating the experience. Anything less and you’re cheating yourself and your audience. Good readers know immediately if they’re being led down the path of bull shit.

Also, what makes books interesting is drama. What makes drama is conflict. A person in real life is conflicted about most things, no matter how insignificant, on most days. When you capture that on the page, it FEELS real to a reader.

As to how I felt - relieved.

JW: But it seems so final, putting yourself in this light in a published book. You can never retract it. Doesn’t that bother you?
JM: if I worried about wanting to retract them, I wouldn’t have written them. Not everything we write is pretty. Not everything we write is accurate, or with the best judgment. But, we are responsible for everything we write. Therefore, if you don’t want to communicate something keep it off the page. When it’s printed you are saying to the world, right or wrong I accept the consequences of this language. Being a writer requires a thick skin and a certain mental toughness that most people don’t have. Everyone thinks they can write wonderfully until they try and find out they don’t have the stomach to do what’s necessary emotionally.

JW: As a memoir writer, you looked back across time, and saw your own life moving through decades. I wonder what lessons and discoveries this long view gave you about how your life has worked.
JM: That’s a very complex question without an easy answer. I can’t say that, looking back, there weren’t things in my past I might have done differently, or better. On the other hand, I don’t regret the experiences I’ve had because the sum total of them is who I am today and, for better or worse, I like who I am today. I have received a lot of privileges in my life and I’ve shared my benefits with others. I’ve raised two fine children and influenced a lot of people, both positively and negatively. But, a long view of my life tells me my life has worked for me and I’m truly appreciative that I’ve lived long enough to enjoy it. Many of my closest friends didn’t.

JW: What’s next?
JM: My newest collection of poems, “When the Stars Go Dark,” is due to be released nationally this winter as part of Main Street Rag’s Select Poetry Series. I’m working on a second memoir that picks up after the Vietnam war that examines where my generation went after the war and why.

There are no famous poets living in America. There are poets who are famous among other poets, but mention their names outside the doorways of a few obscure coffee houses or outside the cloistered and cloying rooms of the academy and all you get are blank stares. Even the poet-laureate of this country is unheard of and unread in most households (Come on, be honest. How many people even know his name?)

Why is this the case? In many countries poets, both past AND present, are revered. In times of political turmoil, they have the honor of being lined up and shot first because poetry has the power to move people to action as no other art form (save possibly some forms of music) can. Poetry can force you to feel and think simultaneously. Good poems contain nobility and candor and a universal connection with readers and American poets write very well. Setting aside the usual reasoning (i..e. no one reads anymore, everyone has ADD, video games, movies, I-pods, etc.), perhaps we work too hard at writing around truth instead of seeking to discover it. It's more politically correct that way. But, it also makes poems less interesting, more self-indulgent, and beneign in a society that desperately needs honest and open commentary.