LATE FRAGMENTPoet and short story writer Raymond Carver died in Port Angeles, Washington on this day in 1988 (aged 50). He is buried at Ocean View Cemetery in Port Angeles. The inscription on his tombstone reads:
And did you get whatyou wanted from this life, even so?I did.And what did you want?To call myself beloved, to feel myselfbeloved on the earth.
The Road by Raymond Carver
What a rough night! It’s either no dreams at all,
or else a dream that may or may not be
a dream portending loss. Last night I was dropped off
without a word on a country road.
A house back in the hills showed a light
no bigger than a star.
But I was afraid to go there, and kept walking.
Then to wake up to rain striking the glass.
Flowers in a vase near the window.
The smell of coffee, and you touching your hair
with a gesture like someone who has been gone for years.
But there’s a piece of bread under the table
near your feet. And a line of ants
moving back and forth from a crack in the floor.
You’ve stopped smiling.
Do me a favor this morning. Draw the curtain and come back to bed.
Forget the coffee. We’ll pretend
we’re in a foreign country. And in love.
Carver’s second wife, Tess Gallagher, and writers Jay McInerney and Richard Ford, his close friends, explore Carver’s artistic legacy: his stories and poems about the other side of the American Dream.
‘Another tragedy in a long line of low-rent tragedies’—thus the mother of a fifteen-year-old girl describes the situation that arises when the daughter, reacting to her drunken and abusive father, stays out of school for weeks and says that no one can make her go. And thus might most of the stories that make up Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love be described: low-rent tragedies involving people who read Popular Mechanics and Field and Stream, people who play bingo, hunt deer, fish, and drink.Read more
Portions of the interview were conducted through the mail, during 1981–1982. When we met Carver, the No Visitors sign was not up and several Syracuse students dropped by to visit during the course of the interview, including Carver's son, a senior. For lunch, Carver made us sandwiches with salmon he had caught off the coast of Washington. Both he and Gallagher are from Washington state and at the time of the interview, they were having a house built in Port Angeles, where they plan to live part of each year. We asked Carver if that house would feel more like a home to him. He replied, “No, wherever I am is fine. This is fine.”More: Paris Review
One August evening in 1973, Raymond Carver heard a knock on the door of his faculty apartment at the famed Iowa Writer's Workshop in Iowa City. Standing in the threshold was an older man, holding an empty glass.
"Pardon me," the man said, "I'm John Cheever. Could I borrow some scotch?" Carver was right to immediately sense a "dual intersection of interests."
— with Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and F. Scott Fitzgerald.Facebook link
I am a writer and poet,
one, bear with me here, of the “major” writers of the late 20th century,though just typing that felt desperate.
I received a B.A. in English at Humboldt State University, then went on to attend the esteemed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, thus launching my career. I also like to drink.
