The Poetry of Raymond Carver by Kleppe Sandra Lee

Author:Kleppe, Sandra Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2014-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Near Klamath (1968) and At Night the Salmon Move (1976)

Many of the poems from the first half of Carver’s career share a compact, descriptive, and lyrical quality, but there are different poles of focus in what we might term Carver’s fishing versus fish poems. His fishing poems tend to be about a quest or journey, especially into a masculine world of initiation. His fish poems, on the other hand, are more frequently about the object of the quest, and a fish might carry symbolic power intimating art, memory, muse, or mystery. In “Poem for Hemingway and W.C. Williams,” written at mid-career in 1976, Carver employs two writers as representatives of these two approaches, as they stand observing “3 fat trout” in a pool below a bridge. Carver was asked by interviewer Kasia Boddy in 1987, “Do you agree that Hemingway could be called the model for your stories and Willimas for your poems?” He replied that they “both influenced me when I was young and malleable” and that he still had a “great deal of admiration” for both (in CRC 200–201).

The Hemingway figure in the 1976 poem wants to “catch & eat/ the fish” while Williams “thinks it fine” that the fish “simply hang there/ always/ in the clear water” (40). Placing these writers he admired inside a scene inside a poem is a double gesture of homage and control. Carver fuses his fictional and poetic vocations by using the style and language of the poet Williams to describe the fiction writer Hemingway—“ex-heavyweight”—and to allude to his story “Big Two-Hearted River,” where “Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge” (Hemingway 163).3 Carver is exploring different literary models, from an active involved ‘fishing’ stance to a detached imagist gaze on ‘fish.’ These active and passive approaches enable fish to become object or subject, depending on the text.

Carver chose two poems that represent these different aesthetic approaches of pursuit versus observation as titles for early collections. The first, “Near Klamath” from 1968, alludes to Klamath Falls, Oregon, where Carver spent time fishing as a young adult, and it describes such a scene. In “At Night the Salmon Move” from 1976, on the other hand, there are no fishermen and the quest is reversed in a surreal switch, as the fish enter the human world. However, these title poems share the conspicuous use of the first person plural pronoun “we” that creates a peculiar dialogue of inclusiveness in Carver’s early verse.

“Near Klamath” is an example of a fishing poem about sports and male bonding.4 It is the opening poem of Near Klamath (1968), where it appears with nine lines and no stanza breaks. In Fires (1983), Carver split the poem into three stanzas of equal length. The first one reads:

We stand around the burning oil drum

and we warm ourselves, our hands

and faces, in its pure lapping heat. (AU 32, lines 1–3)

The image of the heat lapping the humans as a dog would links the elemental, animal, and human kingdoms. The repetition

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