Raymond Carver’s In/Famous After/Life

Session Organizer: Sandra Kleppe

Univ. of Tromso, Norway

ircs@internationalraymondcarversociety.org

“Carver in the Famous Writers School”

Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Verlaine, Kafka, Tennyson, Browning, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Xenophon--these and other famous writers of the European canon are evoked from time to time in Carver’s poetry. What are they doing there? What is Carver, the quintessential trailer-park working-class American realist writer, doing hobnobbing with the greats? Did he adopt some of them, at least, as models? Or is he merely dropping names? Do they only serve as ornamentation, elevating the tone?

In this paper I will try to answer those questions by examining how these canonical writers function in the particular poems in which they appear and, when it appears that a sequential structure is evident at those points in the collection, in the context of the surrounding fabric of the sequence. What is the canon to Carver, in other words--and the follow-up question, what is Carver to the canon? If Carver is becoming canonical, and it appears he is, what is it in his stories and poems that is bringing this about?

Randolph Runyon:

University of Miami, Ohio

runyonr@muohio.edu

“Infamous Incidents in Carver’s Poetry”

Carver’s poetry was presumably more intimate and personal than his fiction, a phenomenon that both he and his poet-spouse Tess Gallagher have noted. It is not surprising, then, that infamous incidents in Carver’s life, such the marriage crisis with his first wife, bankruptcy, family violence, alcoholism, and wild parties with famous witers are frequent topics in his poems. This paper will discuss a number of passages where Carver weaves such episodes into a lyrical or narrative poem (or more to the point: a lyric-narrative, which is a term employed by Carver scholar Robert Miltner), and how such outrage or infamy is treated as an artistic source. The task is not to measure or test the correctness of the biographical information employed in the making of art, but rather to examine how Carver allowed embarrassing moments to be transposed into attempts at making a permanent mark on the canon. At times he is simply relentless in his exploitation private or even criminal behavior, at others we discern a forgiving and self-deprecatory speaker.

Sandra Kleppe

University of Tromso, Norway

ircs@internationalraymondcarversociety.org