ABSTRACT
This chapter considers intratextual links between Raymond Carvers poems and stories. It discusses autopoetic transfer in which insides and outsides of lives jumbled. The chapter discusses Distress Sale, Late Night with Fog and Horses, and Mother all depict such trafficking between indoor and outdoor worlds. An initial consideration of Carvers frequent use of the motif of the telephone across his oeuvre provides examples of how intratextual crossover functions. The telephone network can be seen as one of several metaphors for Carvers auto poetics of outside and inside, as it connects interior and exterior worlds and is concerned with communication between the two. Indoor domestic situations that spill over into the outside in all of these poems and stories are frequent in Carver Country. Robert Miltner has termed Carvers poetic style as lyric-narrative for the ways in which it fuses the two main thrusts of his writing career.
