ABSTRACT
Even though he considers Carver a potentially bad influence on other writers, Madison Bell concedes that he is a “superb technician” (Nesset, Stories 29). At first, it seems difficult to similarly praise Carver’s poetic technique. The narrative element is conspicuous, the contemporary poet Dave Smith referring to the poems as “very short stories” (39) and Harold Schweizer titling his article on Carver’s poetry “The Very Short Stories of Raymond Carver.” 1 Smith and Schweizer praise Carver’s poetic efforts, as does Kevin Boyle, who observes, “Carver’s words are as close to prose as poetry is likely to get,” as Carver “seems intent on blurring” the “norms or conventions” that separate prose and poetry (2087, 2088). Certainly one can see a prosaic quality in Carver’s poetry, which Boyle approves of, placing the poet in the tradition of Wordsworth who calls for a poetry in the language of common men in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. Some poetry critics have valorized narrative, moreover, Jonathan Holden asserting in The Fate of American Poetry: “Good poets recognize the value of the story behind what they personally know-of depicting the process by which they came to know something, … that the value of this knowledge is contingent upon some kind of narrative structure” (121). These observations about Carver and narrative notwithstanding, most readers expect more from poetry than a prosaic story. Indeed, if Carver just tells short short stories, why call them poems? In this chapter, my purpose is to show that Carver has an impressive, if not altogether traditional technique that goes well beyond narrative and its sister element, dialogue.
