Ray Carver - The Poet Who Wrote Prose
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
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
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