ABSTRACT

Carver poetically recalls or imagines Charles Bukowski proclaiming at a college poetry reading: “You have to have been in love to write poetry” (19). More sedately, the speaker-writer in “For Semra” asserts, “All poems are love poems” (11), a claim that Carver subsequently elaborated:

Every poem is an act of love, and faith. There is so little other reward for writing poems, either monetarily or in terms of … fame and glory, that the act of writing a poem has to be an act that justifies itself and really has no other end in sight. To want to do it, you really have to love doing it. In that sense, then, every poem is a “love poem.” (McCaffery and Gregory 105)

This chapter aims to show Carver’s key ideas and their development in his favorite medium and, doing so, provide students with analysis of Carver’s best poems. Divided thematically and, within each theme, generally chronologically, this chapter examines poems developing the following subjects: metapoetry and tributes; alcoholism; marriage and family; nature; and death and beyond. 1 These categories are not mutually exclusive-for instance, a poem may have implications for Carver’s treatment of both alcoholism and death-but are used because they foreground essential concerns in Carver’s poetry. As I shift between how collections treat a particular theme, I clarify the relevant differences between collections. There is considerable difference, for instance, between the treatment of marriage in 1983’s Fires, which includes poems from three prior collections-Near Klamath (1968), Winter Insomnia (1970), and At Night the Salmon Move (1976)-and 1985’s Where Water Comes Together with Other Water and 1986’s Ultramarine. While necessarily condensed, my quotation of the poetry allows for Carver’s talent to emerge. 2