TOP114-DES111

This Old Poem #114:

Raymond Carver’s Your Dog Dies

Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 9/3/06

  Raymond Carver was 1 of the premier short story writers of the late 20^th Century, but like many practitioners of an art who garner fame or recognition in 1 area there comes a strange desire to want to be taken ‘seriously’ in another. Forget the higher arts for a moment- think of how many movie or tv stars (not even real actors) cut a CD, or the reverse- how many secondary or tertiary singers (notably not ‘musicians’ who actually have mastered an instrument) start popping up in small indie films, or tv movies of the week, just so their celebrity in 1 area can cross-promote in another.

  Well, such also happens in the higher arts- poets like e.e. cummings paint- not that well, or playwrights like Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill publish books of doggerel. No, I won’t even mention musician/poets like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jewel, nor Billy Corgan. The truth is that I’d be hard pressed to think of a name poet who did well as far as poetry. Walt Whitman’s prose was dull, tedious, & bereft of the life his poetry was. Herman Melville’s poetry was layered with the dust of formalism his poetry was freed from. There are many other examples, but that leads me back to RC. Why would someone whose reputation was so high in 1 area choose to diminish it with bad writing in another? Granted, it would be 1 thing if these were scribblings found & published in a posthumous Collected Writings, where their context would make clear that the writer did not seek to embarrass himself. But, RC actually published books of poetry in his lifetime. The problem is while they’re discursive & narrative they utterly lack anything that makes them ‘poetry’ vs. ‘prose’- save for some willy-nilly enjambment.

  The obligatory online bio:

  Raymond Carver was a short-story writer credited with revitalizing the form in the United States during the 1970s and '80s. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest- Clatskanie, Oregon, on May 25, 1938- Carver moved to California and took up writing in the early 1960s. His 1974 collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? established his reputation and featured some of his trademarks: alcohol, poverty and ordinary people in ordinary but desperate situations. Carver, who also taught writing and wrote poetry, has been called a "minimalist" because of his spare and realistic fiction, and has been compared to Ernest Hemingway and Anton Chekhov. In the late 1970s Carver required hospitalization four times in under two years for acute alcoholism. By the mid-1980s, however, he was sober, writing full-time and married to the poet Tess Gallagher (it was his second marriage).

  He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1979 and was twice awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1983 Carver received the prestigious Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award which gave him $35,000 per year tax free and required that he give up any employment other than writing, and in 1985 Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize. In 1988 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Hartford. He received a Brandeis Citation for fiction in 1988. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

  He lived in Port Angeles, Washington during his last ten, sober years until his death from lung cancer on August 2, 1988, at the age of fifty, and his last collection of stories, Where I'm Calling From, was published posthumously in 1989. His collections of poetry include Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (1985) and Ultramarine (1986).

  At least that's the basic biography. Of course there's no room in it for the nature of the hardship he and his family went through during most of those fifty years between birth and death. There's no mention of his marriage at 19, the birth of his two children, Christine and Vance, by the time he was 21. No mention of his sometimes ferocious fights with his first wife, Maryann. No mention, either, of his near death, the hospitalizations - four times in 1976 and 1977 - for acute alcoholism.

  A good example of the bland prosaic diction that could work in prose but falls flat in verse is from this poem, Stupid:

A storm thrashes outside. Heavy seas

with gale winds from the west. The table he sits at

is, say, two cubits long and one wide.

The darkness in the room teems with insight.

Could be he’ll write an adventure novel. Or else 

a children’s story. A play for two female characters,

one of whom is blind. Cutthroat should be coming

into the river. One thing he’ll do is learn

to tie his own flies. Maybe he should give

more money to each of his surviving

family members. The ones who already expect a little

something in the mail first of each month.

  Now, the rest of the poem is more of the same, a litany of domestic ills of the sort RC is famed for evoking in his short stories. The diction is flat, unmusicked, but the narrative could engage. The real question, though, is why make it a lined poem?

  On to the poem in question:

Your Dog Dies

it gets run over by a van. 
you find it at the side of the road 

and bury it. 

you feel bad about it. 

you feel bad personally, 

but you feel bad for your daughter 

because it was her pet, 

and she loved it so. 

she used to croon to it 

and let it sleep in her bed. 

you write a poem about it. 

you call it a poem for your daughter, 

about the dog getting run over by a van 

and how you looked after it, 

took it out into the woods 

and buried it deep, deep, 

and that poem turns out so good 

you’re almost glad the little dog 

was run over, or else you’d never 

have written that good poem. 

then you sit down to write 

a poem about writing a poem 

about the death of that dog, 

but while you’re writing you 

hear a woman scream 

your name, your first name, 

both syllables, 

and your heart stops. 

after a minute, you continue writing. 

she screams again. 

you wonder how long this can go on.

  Again, like the previous selection, this is actually the making of an interesting short story. The use of the ‘poetic tropes’- line breaks, especially, work against the poem. The breaks give a breathiness to a poem that is clearly a reflection. Put into proem form is 1 way to improve this work without doing anything else:

Your Dog Dies

it gets run over by a van. you find it at the side of the road and bury it. you feel bad about it. you feel bad personally, but you feel bad for your daughter because it was her pet, and she loved it so. she used to croon to it and let it sleep in her bed. you write a poem about it. you call it a poem for your daughter, about the dog getting run over by a van and how you looked after it, took it out into the woods and buried it deep, deep, and that poem turns out so good you’re almost glad the little dog was run over, or else you’d never have written that good poem. then you sit down to write a poem about writing a poem about the death of that dog, but while you’re writing you hear a woman scream your name, your first name, both syllables, and your heart stops. after a minute, you continue writing. she screams again. you wonder how long this can go on.

  Certainly an improvement over the lined form, but there are still a lot of tautologies that would gain in power by eliminating redundancies. A single gun mentioned once early in a tale has more menace if someone dies at tale’s end than knowing a wjole armament exists. Let’s trim:

Your Dog Dies

it gets run over by a van. you find it at the side of the road and bury it. you feel bad about it personally. you feel bad for your daughter because it was her pet, and she loved it so. she used to croon to it and let it sleep in her bed. you write a poem about it. you call it a poem for your daughter, about the dog getting run over by a van and how you looked after it, took it out into the woods and buried it. that poem turns out so good you’re almost glad the little dog was run over, or else you’d never have written that good poem. you sit down to write a poem about writing a poem about the death of that dog. you wonder how long this can go on.

  Some may feel that the ‘Mickey Spillane’ moment at the end of the original is the whole payoff, but it’s really a distraction, a sort of deus ex machine that doesn’t resolve, only muddies the tale. It’s only thrown in for shock effect, as if RC knew the poem was limp & had to energize it. It might’ve worked in a short story version, with a bit more explication, but not here. A realistic narrative immediately descends into pap genre. By focusing on the effect of the dog on the writer, and trimming some excess the melodrama is excised, even as the solipsism is heightened. It’s not a perfect solution, but there is also the monostream of thought that is lost when the piece is enjambed. I would still look to drop in a few select modifiers here & there, but the proem is already better than the more melodramatic poem. Not that either is a masterpiece, but the proem has potential freed from the verse form. Ah, liberty!

Final Score: (1-100):

Raymond Carver’s Your Dog Dies: 40

TOP’s Your Dog Dies: 60

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