Carver's Dream

Raymond Carver's story can be rehashed by rote by any semiserious student of twentieth-century American literature. Together with Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor, he is one of the three most important and influential story writers in American history. He transformed the literary landscape in the 1980s with tales of men and women struggling to pay the bills and achieve love. Prior to his success he endured years of alcoholism, menial labor, and rabid unhappiness with a wife and with children that came too soon. And then came the "second life," after his alcoholism, that came too late, a second life that included his marriage to the writer Tess Gallagher and his friendships with Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff. Then arose the controversy involving Gordon Lish; the brouhaha over the term minimalist; followed by the cancer that killed him in 1988. He was fifty years old. His death is an incalculable loss to American literature and to the many hearts who called him beloved, a loss akin in magnitude to Anton Chekhov—Carver's hero—who died of consumption at the age of forty-four. To think of the stories Carver would have written had he lived, all that pleasure available to the people who needed it most, is to experience a ghastly shudder.

The studies of his life and work have been slow in coming out, and an authorized biography has yet to appear. This newest addition to the growing body of scholarship, New Paths to Raymond Carver, is unique in that its contributors take Carver's poetry seriously. That Carver preferred to think of himself as primarily a poet is only slightly less beguiling than, say, if the author of Lolita had chosen to introduce himself to strangers as a butterfly catcher. Carver's poems are not really poems but are instead short stories stripped to the barest essentials. They are driven mostly by the mechanisms of narrative instead of lyric in a free verse that, by definition, does not attend to form or structure. And a poet who is not conscious of form is akin to a driver who ignores traffic laws. Frost said that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net, although he did not mean by this that all free verse is a wasted effort; if it were, we would have to consign Leaves of Grass to the trash heap. Carver, though, was no Whitman, and his verses are anemic as poetry. The editors of this present volume admit that Carver's poetry remains "understudied and undervalued," but this is for good reason. The poems are so bare, so forthright, so obvious, that there is very little poetical substance to study. Bringing high-minded criticism to them, as some of these scholars do, is comparable to hanging Christmas bulbs on a twig.

One can flip through Carver's collected poems, All of Us, and choose almost at random unexceptional lines from any of the early, middle, or late verse. Consider the second half of "Drinking While Driving":

        I am happyriding in a car with my brotherand drinking from a pint of Old Crow.We do not have any place in mind to go,we are just driving.If I closed my eyes for a minuteI would be lost, yetI could gladly lie down and sleep foreverbeside this road. My brother nudges me.Any minute now, something will happen.

Those lines are indistinguishable from prose; their register is narrative, not lyrical or metrical. The line breaks are arbitrary. There is no tactical enjambment and so no internal tension, no self-contained and packed power that causes a poem to pulse, as in the sonnets of Milton and Hopkins. The personal pronouns force it to feel like one-half of a conversation at a pub. And so the poem is a loose and flimsy mini-story that cheats the reader because the real story happens after...