ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Raymond Carver employs the love poem as a means of presenting his idiosyncratic ars poetica. It discusses the centrality of Wallace Stevens and Walt Whitman in relation to American self-reflexive poetry. The chapter discusses the love poems for Semra, With Martial Vigor and The Blue Stones both have strong intertextual and self-expressive elements that contribute to Carvers idiomatic ars poetica. Carver's love poems are examples of ars poetica that intertwine three forms of self-reference: the self-reflexive, the self-expressive, and the simultaneous narrative. The chapter explains the apt image of fish sperm and roe fertilizing the poet's brain. Carver included The Blue Stones in the poem section of Fires, but it appeared in Mississippi Review in 1978 and was published around the time he met Tess Gallagher but before his divorce from Maryann Burk Carver. In this case, the fiction writer Gustave Flaubert legitimizes Carvers concern with the precise formulation in the creation of a literary text.
