All of Us (3 page)

In addition, obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

Where a stanza break occurs at the head or foot of a page it is indicated by a single asterisk (*). The absence of an asterisk indicates that the text runs on without a break.

Within the notes, variant readings are separated by a slash mark (/). To the left of the slash is the reading text of
All of Us
; to the right are variant readings from other printings. In a few instances where an early version of a poem differs extensively from a later one, the early version has been printed in full for comparison. Emendations—corrections of the copy-text based on Carver’s subsequent revisions—are clearly indicated.

Editing
All of Us
has been the work of several years and many hands. The book owes its conception to Tess Gallagher. Its realization was made possible by Bill Swainson of The Harvill Press. For assistance with collating and proofreading, I thank my research associates Raymond Ouellette, Anna Maria Rainone, and Jennifer Hocko. For inspiration, insight, and encouragement I thank my wife, Maureen P. Carroll.

WILLIAM L. STULL
University of Hartford
Connecticut, February 1996

“Without hope and without despair”—this quiet banner of determination from Isak Dinesen flew over the last ten years of Raymond Carver’s life. Most of these poems were written during that time, some in a great lunge of reception, almost two hundred drafted between October 1983 and August 1985.

Ray had written poetry and fiction in tandem, beginning in 1957. This collection, which spans more than thirty years, allows us to see that his poetry was not something he wrote between stories. Rather, it was the spiritual current out of which he moved to write the short stories for which, after his death, he would be called by the
Guardian
newspaper (London), “America’s Chekhov”. Now that the entirety of his poetry has been collected, its full mass and density can at last be appreciated.

It is said of Lao-tzu, the great Chinese author of the
Tao Te Ching
, that people became attached to his style because it had a “gem-like lucidity”, was “radiant with humour and grace and large-heartedness and deep wisdom” (Stephen Mitchell). In looking for a way to characterize what endears Ray’s poems to me, these remarks seem appropriate.

With poetry we come to love, and with Ray’s in particular, at some point we surrender, and the consciousness of the speaker in the poems is taken into the bloodstream to be recirculated through our lives. We are grateful when a poet gives us new ways of thinking and feeling on trampled ground, and for radiance itself as that new way. What we also find in these poems is an extraordinary sensibility that stays approachable, even companionable.

Ray’s presence in the poems, as with the man himself in life, continually disarms through some paradoxical capacity both for knowing and innocence. His self-humor steadily redeems him, along with his amazement and curiosity about the complexities of human life and its connection to animal life. I think of a moment in “Prosser”, when he wants to find out what geese like about green wheat. He writes: “I ate some of it once too, to see.” As in his fiction, he demonstrates often that he knows how to pace himself and knows too, with Isaac Babel, that a period in the right place can stop the heart: “Geese love this shattered wheat also. / They will die for it.”

I recall a commentary on the life and work of Emily Dickinson in which Dickinson’s poems were described as having arrived so directly out of the necessities of the soul that they violated even the notion of poetry as a formed artifact of language. They were instead the soul incarnate in its most vital appearance. The meaning was perhaps that language and the poet’s nature were so in accord that the interlocutor of voice was wholly absorbed by what it was saying. In a similar way, Ray’s artlessness burned so fiercely it consumed all trace of process. Once in a while we get a writer like this, a comet without a tail, yet whose arrival and impact are undeniable.

Anyone who has ever felt befriended by a poem at a crucial moment will recognize the place from which I prefer to regard this lifetime in poetry. For ten years I was Ray’s companion and literary collaborator, and finally his wife. I saw the poems in draft and, from
Fires
onward had the great pleasure of arranging them in books. Because of this, I experienced the poems as intimates. Sojourners. The sinew of a shared life. And this intimacy embraces even those poems written before we met in 1977. Often in revised versions, they form an integral part of the story. Since this book is essentially the tracing of a passage from one shore to another, inception is as important as arrival.

I am stricken to the core by an early poem, “Morning, Thinking of Empire”, where a mundane act becomes the chilling image for a marriage’s inevitable interior dissolution: “I coolly crack the egg of a fine Leghorn chicken.” The moment seems unsurvivable, the collapse of a shared universe rendered unflinchingly. In the context of the entire poem we experience it action by action, as a series of spiritually irretrievable moments which cut the partners off from each other and obliterate all hope for the regeneration of the marriage:

The word “surely” here is a cliff and an avalanche, accompanied by the steel-eyed gaze and barely containable assessment of the speaker.

The poems, throughout, are keenly attentive to life as it is being lived, but from 1979 on they also make retrospective safaris into the jungle of
old harms, renegotiated from safer, saner ground. Ray had gradually absorbed some attitudes I held toward time in poetry—for one thing, that it was more than lived time, and might therefore enlarge one’s spiritual reach. My feeling that all time—past, present and future—exists within reach at the moment the poem is being written was helpful to him. He allowed himself to re-enter older work with the present moment as definitive and regenerative.

From early to late, the poems
are
beautifully clear, and this clarity, like the sweet clang of spring water to the mouth, needs no apology. Time spent reading Ray’s poems becomes quickly fruitful, for the poems give themselves as easily and unselfconsciously as breath. Who wouldn’t be disarmed by poetry which requires so much less of us than it unstintingly gives?

I am aware of those honed minds that find Ray’s transparency somehow an insult to intelligence. They would have applied an editor like a tourniquet. I might have served as such, had I thought it true to his gift. I didn’t. If Ray hadn’t given and published in the ample way he did, I believe we would not receive his guileless offering with the same credulity and gratitude. Certainly poems like “My Boat”, “The Old Days”, “Woolworth’s, 1954”, “My Car”, “Earwigs”, “You Don’t Know What Love Is”, “Happiness”, and any number of poems I love might have been omitted. Overreach was natural and necessary to him, and to fault him for it would be like spanking a cat for swallowing the goldfish.

The narrative directness of his poems, as well as the precision of phrase and image, amplifies access until we push through into yet another chamber of astonishing, unadorned truth. Suddenly, like deer caught at night in headlights, blind mystery stares back at us with equal force. We are pinioned—“flimsy as / balsa wood” (“Balsa Wood”)—or told “the mind can’t sleep, can only lie awake and / gorge” (“Winter Insomnia”), or birds arrive as omens, “the clacking of their bills / like iron on iron” (“The News Carried to Macedonia”). We glimpse the extravagant yet matter-of-fact sensuality of the world around us: “lean haunches” of deer “flicker / under an assault of white butterflies” (“Rhodes”). Wonder in everyday forms appears in a shirt on a clothes-line filling out to “near human shape” (“Louise”) or a hand reaches through to touch the sleeve of a suit inside a garment bag, a burial suit, and this “reaching through” (“Another Mystery”) becomes an entrance to another world which is also the same world.

Many of the later poems have the daybook quality of nature and life observed moment to moment. We feel befriended and accompanied by the spirit in these. Ray’s often third-person fictionalized stance places him alongside the reader, watching with conflicting feelings as
events unfold. He is a poet of great suppleness of being, and his ability to hold contraries in balance while sorting out their ramifications, not oversubscribing to either side, amounts to courage for us all.

We are often with the poems as we are with our neighbors and loved ones, taking them for granted, failing deeply to assess their comings and goings—we are that used to them. Then one day something happens. A father’s wallet, an ordinary, familiar object, comes into our hands, suddenly luminous with the power of the dead. In the final moments of Ray’s “My Dad’s Wallet”—perhaps a working-class version of Rilke’s “Washing the Corpse”—it is “our breath coming and going” which signals death’s communal arrival. Readers of his fiction will recognize that this phrase overlaps the ending of his story “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love”. Sometimes, without embarrassment, Ray used the same events or recognitions in both poems and stories. The poems often clarify emotional or biographical ground left obscure in the stories. “Use it up,” he used to say. “Don’t save anything for later.”

In the last lines of “The Caucasus: A Romance” the speaker calls his effort to represent what took place “but a rough record of the actual and the passing”. This line might be a talisman for what Ray aimed at throughout—the felicitous hazard of rough record. While we may locate his pulse with this phrase, we must also understand that he revised tirelessly and that “rough” indicates truth unbeguiled, not carelessness. Ray meant to graft language onto experience in all its tenacious vitality, its rawness. To that end he gave us “yellow jackets and near / frostbite” (“Trying to Sleep Late on a Saturday Morning in November”), the “large dark bullethole / through the slender, delicate-looking / right hand” (“Wes Hardin: From a Photograph”), a heart “on the table” that is “a parody of affection” (“Poem for Dr Pratt, a Lady Pathologist”), the young man “who keeps on drinking / and getting spit on for years” (“Reading”). His brilliant intuition for moments of consequence can wield a scythe across a lifetime—“The dying body is a clumsy partner” (“The Garden”)—or discover “violets cut just an hour before lunch” (“The Pipe”).

There is the feeling that all Ray’s poems are in some sense escapes into the act of self-witness, as in “The Poem I Didn’t Write”. Each one bears the scarred patina of words gotten down on the page however the writer could, something wrestled from the torrent, using only that language which came readily, even haphazardly. Artifice gives way to velocity, to daring—“But the soul is also a smooth son of a bitch” (“Radio Waves”)—to improvisation and exactitude of the moment: “At night, a moon broad and deep as a serving dish / sallies out” (“The Caucasus: A Romance”).
Clichés go by like underbrush: “my hair stood on end” (“Wenas Ridge”). Then suddenly we are ambushed by memory “like a blow to the calf” (also “Wenas Ridge”). Clichés in Carver cajole the actual, until his attentiveness brings the next nuance of miracle into focus: “Suddenly as at a signal, the birds / pass silently back into pine trees” (“With a Telescope Rod on Cowiche Creek”). His diction and syntax are American and find their antecedents in William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, Emily Dickinson and Louise Bogan. He also absorbed poets I brought close, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodore Roethke, Paul Celan, William Heyen, Seamus Heaney, Federico García Lorca, Robert Lowell, Czeslaw Milosz, Marianne Moore, Derek Mahon, W. B. Yeats and Anna Akhmatova.

From the vantage of his poetry, Ray’s life took on pattern and reason and gratitude—“my whole life, in switchbacks, ahead of me” (“Wenas Ridge”). Poetry, helicopter-like, gave him maneuverability over rugged, hostile terrain, a place where he could admit such things as ambivalence about Jesus while he continued to pray to “snake” (“Wenas Ridge”). Perhaps in the blunt-nosed zigzag of poems he could attain elevation without the sleek evasions of elegance, irony or even the easy exit of transcendence—all of which he would have chosen to forgo had they not, for the most part, been outside his nature and his aesthetic.

We don’t love his poetry for its biographical peaks and valleys alone—though who wouldn’t marvel at a man who walks away from near death by alcohol, and who keeps writing with a brain tumor and two-thirds of a lung gone to cancer? Rather, it’s the intensity of down-to-earth searching that holds us throughout, the poet’s willingness to revisit extremities, the sites of loss. We admire his ability to embody experience in fresh language and actions which occur not as biography, but in moments created for and by those very poems: “I bashed that beautiful window. / And stepped back in” (“Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In”).

Many American poetic voices of the past thirty years have traveled far, too far, on sincerity. Still more have proffered the sad and ofttimes dire contents of their lives as their main currency. Their sincerity often involves a subtle kind of salesmanship, an attempt to convince by forthrightness, by emptying a kit bag at the listener’s feet, hoping for the reward of attention at any cost. Such writers assume themselves to be somehow bold and courageous for having torn the door off the confessional.

Ray’s poetry escapes the pitfalls of the merely sincere by forming another kind of relationship with the reader. It attempts not the bond of commerce, but the bond of mutuality. The voice in the poems is,
in fact, self-mutual, doubled and self-companioned to such a high degree in tone and stance that, indeed, we feel much relief in not being called out like the Mounties or inveigled to commiserate falsely. Ray is profitably his own interlocutor. The neighborliness and amplitude of the poems compel by a circuitry of strong emotional moments in which we join the events at a place beyond invitation. To our surprise we find we have come both to ourselves and our differences in another form.