The International Raymond Carver Society

Topic: “High Carver, Low Carver”

Robert Miltner, Kent State University Stark

rmiltner@stark.kent.edu

Angela Sorby, Marquette University

angela.sorby@mu.edu

Raymond Carver and the Temperance Tradition

Angela Sorby

Associate Professor of English, Marquette University

angela.sorby@mu.edu

Raymond Carver’s depictions of alcohol abuse have been linked, by Hamilton Cochrane and others, to the language and culture of Alcoholics Anonymous, However, Carver asserted that he never patterned his stories (or, implicitly, his poems) after things he heard in AA meetings. In this paper, I suggest that we take Carver’s denial seriously, insofar as his drinking-related poems draw on heterogenous popular cultural assumptions about alcohol--assumptions that are older and more conflicted than the Big Book’s rhetoric of egalitarian universalism. Beginning with a comparison of Ella Wilcox’s “The Mother’s Prayer” and Carver’s “To My Daughter,” I argue that for Carver (as for earlier temperance writers) alcohol is problematic partly because it blurs traditional class and gender distinctions. My aim in making this comparison is not to trace Wilcox’s literary influence on Carver but rather to show the persistence of what Raymond Williams calls structures of feeling. The temperance movement linked alcohol to class and gender trouble, and these links “trouble” Carver’s poetry as well.

Raymond Carver and the Love Poem Tradition

Sandra Lee Kleppe

Humanities Faculty, University of Tromsø, Norway

sandra.lee.kleppe@hum.uit.no

In both his short fiction and his poetry, Raymond Carver wrote of the real life situations of ordinary people in a colloquial language that mirrored their own. In Carver's love poetry, he combines age-old aesthetic and human concerns with his peculiar down-to-earth (‘low culture’) idiom. In the poem "For Semra, With Martial Vigor"—a striking lyric-narrative about a poet's night with a prostitute—the poet, when asked by the woman to write a love poem, proclaims "All poems are love poems." This paper examines how sexual love and the love of art, as well as compassion for animals, humans, and everyday objects all inhabit Carver’s poetic universe, making love poetry a clear locus of the intersections of major concerns in Carver’s work. Because of Carver’s peculiar contemporary style (which was imitated by many writers in his wake), the links to traditional literary forms, in this case the love poem tradition, may be obscure. By reading a number of such poems it should be possible to illustrate Carver's indebtedness to earlier periods and writers.

Raymond Carver and the Architecture of Emotion

Robert Miltner

Associate Professor of English, Kent State University Stark

rmiltner@stark.kent.edu

Raymond Carver’s poems and stories are clearly located in specific sites—motels, hotels, phone booths, cabins, trailers, homes, apartments, kitchens, restaurants, and gazebos—which are selected for their high or low culture status. In this paper, I will examine the cultural implications of Carver’s settings. In the story “Gazebo,” Holly, part of the rootless couple who manage a motel to try to “get ahead,” dreams of a gazebo the couple once visited at a private home where people live “dignified” lives; in “Why Don’t You Dance?” a young couple stumbles upon a yard where a man placed all his furniture, symbolically demonstrating that his life is turned inside out; and in “Neighbors,” a couple who apartment-sit for friends enter their friend’s apartment and voyeuristically take on the projected identities of the lives of others who live across the hall. Thus, Carver’s selecting his settings operates as an architecture of emotion, representing the emotional states and cultural positions of his characters. Further, I’d like to suggest that Carver’s use of emotional architecture is closely related to the way Stanley Kunitz uses this same technique in his poems.