At their best Raymond Carver’s poems are horrible to read, because the pain they describe is horrible and he describes it so vividly in such a convincing voice it’s impossible not to wince. As if we’d booked a vacation in hell.
Until the mid-twentieth century, literature’s purpose was mostly uplift. Even biting satire – Swift, say – envisioned a possibility of improvement. Then droves of dispirited souls quit searching for silver linings. They would say what they saw even if what they saw was hopelessness. Their bleakness might not even be musical, sweetened by rhyme, rhythm, and poetry’s other pleasures, just, well, bleak, sometimes as bleak as a suicide note. More than a few of these gloom purveyors destroyed themselves, true to their word.
Where’s the uplift in downcast? “The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it,” Dr. Johnson wrote, encapsulating the traditional view. Why read to feel bad? Wasn’t imposing one’s pain on readers sadism of a sort? Readers weren’t therapists being paid to listen!
A silver-lining guy, I shy from gloom, fearful of its contagion. Twice depression’s kneecapped me, so I steer clear. And yet I return – gingerly – but hungrily – to the geniuses of this genre. Am I an existential Peeping Tom? Or indulging in Schadenfreude, that my pain’s less bad?
Partly it’s curiosity – how low can you go? – and partly relief that entice me. Face it, it feels good feeling better than someone. But I glimpse other avidities prodding me.
Honesty is thrilling. Few are capable of heroic candor. These confessional poets at their best are deep-sea divers into dangerous psychic depths, risking annihilation by self-inspection. “Human kind,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “cannot bear very much reality.” These investigators bear very much and live to tell the tale, at least for a while. If they can do it, maybe I can too.
Then there’s the art. How with words do these poets yank us into their dark interiors? Any inviting style is a mystery, but this style serves an excruciating ordeal. Carver magnifies his challenge by forsaking poetry’s familiar festoons, not just rhyme and rhythm, but metaphor, analogy, alliteration, repetition, lexical surprise. And he writes English so plain and intelligible we cannot evade its meaning.
One can read Carver almost at random for it’s less the poem one reads than the person. The poems aren’t all that quotable or memorable as poems. What haunts is the pain, which resembles yours, only so much darker.
I chose a poem on my (and Henry’s) least favorite topic: “Your Dog Dies.” Read it below. [Pause] You still with me? Has a poem ever made you feel so creepy? Has a poem ever struck you as so ruthlessly, mercilessly true?
Bad enough the dog dies. (And note, from the title, it is your dog.) Bad enough the dog belonged to your small daughter, who doted on it. OK to compose a poem about the episode, I suppose, but then to welcome its occurrence because it permitted you the poem? And then, while writing the poem, the poet hears a woman, his wife presumably, screaming “RAY-MOND! – and instead of rushing to assist her he endeavors to ignore her distress. Not OK, Raymond, not at all, such egotism, selfishness, yikes, what a monster! And don’t we recognize, though we’re loath to admit it, traces of such monstrosity in ourselves?
On the whole, a most unpleasant excursion, wouldn’t you say? Irked, I shelve the book. And the next day take it down again. Oh, to be so fearless facing myself! Oh, to write so true!
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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedYour Dog Dies
it gets run over by a van.you find it at the side of the roadand bury it.you feel bad about it.you feel bad personally,but you feel bad for your daughterbecause it was her pet,and she loved it so.she used to croon to itand 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 vanand how you looked after it,took it out into the woodsand buried it deep, deep,and that poem turns out so goodyou're almost glad the little dogwas run over, or else you'd neverhave written that good poem.then you sit down to writea poem about writing a poemabout the death of that dog,but while you're writing youhear a woman screamyour 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.