THE HERO’S JOURNEY: THE POETRY OF RAYMOND CARVER
The title of the show is well chosen, for in these poems Carver is a hero, someone who faces death–as well as his own sordid past–with quiet courage. The Hero’s Journey shows that by the time Carver died in 1988 he had achieved Freud’s equation for happiness–the ability to work and to love. In the final 11 years of his life, after he’d conquered his near-fatal addiction to alcohol, Carver wrote constantly, establishing himself as a master of the short story. He also moved in with Gallagher, and began the richly rewarding love affair that culminated in their marriage shortly before his death. That is why Carver called his final years “gravy.”
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And he did. He immersed himself in writing. His short stories–plainspoken, emotionally subdued chronicles of working-class people–were published and praised. While living with Gallagher, he returned to poetry, too, with a new zeal. As she tells the audience in The Hero’s Journey, poetry became a “spiritual necessity” for him, a way of seeing more deeply into his own experience: “He was not “building a career’; he was living a vocation.”
The final poem in the book–and in the show–is called “Late Fragment,” and although it is a dying man’s retrospective on his life, the contentment expressed makes it a poignant guide for the living:
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
