Raymond Carver as Poet

Raymond Carver wrote a prosy kind of poem. Which shouldn’t surprise us since prose is what his reputation mainly rests on. He penned poems, it seems, when his short-story muscles needed a rest. And, like Walt Whitman, he did it almost entirely in free verse. A typical Carver poem consists of sentences and phrases arranged on the page to resemble poetry, but don’t bother trying to scan them. Some have found this off-putting. Fred Chappell, writing in the Kenyon Review, once said of a collection of Carver’s verse, “It is difficult to think of these productions as poems; they stand in relation to poetry rather as iron ore does to a Giacometti sculpture.”

That’s mean, but it’s easy enough to see where Chappell is coming from. Still, though, Carver’s poetry is not without interest. His best poems, and there are a number of pretty good ones, represent a triumph of content over technique, of feeling over method. Take, for instance, the little poem “Mother” in the collection Ultramarine, which begins, “My mother calls to wish me a Merry Christmas. / And to tell me if this snow keeps on / she intends to kill herself.” Now there’s an interesting opening—for a poem, or a piece of prose, or whatever. And it’s what Carver had going for him: an interesting life, a life out of the ordinary, something worth reporting on. Carver’s family—his wife, his kids, his feckless parents (his mother constantly threatening to kill herself)—were a treasure trove of material. Everyone wanted a piece of Raymond, to hear Raymond tell it, and everyone seemed to get more than his share.

Carver married at eighteen. His bride was sixteen. They were the parents of two children, a boy and a girl, while still in their teens. This circumstance largely shaped their lives for the next twenty years. It was Ray’s misfortune to hook up with a girl slightly less stable, even, than he was. If she had been slightly more stable, they might have become upright citizens of the Republic, as predictable and boring as the rest of us. As it was, though, they fed off each other, led each other on, and the eventual results were alcoholism, trouble with landlords and the law, and, not just one, but two bankruptcy filings. Much is written these days about the pathology that keeps the poor poor; Ray and his first wife Maryann, if they’d come along later, might have been textbook cases.

There’s a longish poem called “Miracle” in A New Path to the Waterfall, Carver’s last, posthumously published collection. It’s about a husband and wife returning home on an airplane from their second bankruptcy proceeding. Having been dumped at the airport “like so much garbage,” they are a miserable pair. Once they’re aloft, the wife, in her anger and frustration, begins to pummel her husband with her fists. She keeps it up, just pounding away at him, until finally his nose starts to bleed. Then the poem tells us,

        They tearthrough the thin night air, belted in, bloody husbandand wife, both so still and pale they could bedead. But they’re not, and that’s part ofthe miracle. All of this is one more giant stepinto the mysterious experience of their lives.

Like his short stories this poem has Ray Carver written all over it. It’s Carver territory, Carver material—hard to imagine its having been written by anyone else. And it’s so vivid and immediate the reader is left with a slightly queasy feeling, as if he’d been in the seat across the aisle from the couple and had witnessed and overheard what had happened.

Then there were his parents—Ella and C. R. They were from Arkansas originally, but had come out to the Pacific Northwest during the Depression, looking for sawmill work for C. R. C. R. was a boozer and a talker who would eventually lose his job and suffer a nervous breakdown. Ella was pretty and restless and moved from...