A Raymond Carver Poem I Like a Lot

Two authors I admire quite a bit, whom generally everybody I know seems to dislike or devalue, are Raymond Carver and Marguerite Duras.

Generally, these people admire Carver's fiction (or a small subset of it) and hate his poetry.

Generally, these people think Duras a drama queen.

The argument usually goes that Carver's poems are nothing more than chopped prose laid out as poems.

While that superficially sounds like a plausible argument, it isn't, but I won't go into it here. Perloff's essay "Lucent and Inescapable Rhythms" is the long answer that really needs to be given. I consider that the locus classicus rebuttal on that prose argument.

And sure, Carver wrote a few maudlin poems, and bad poems. Every poet does.

But some of his poems have just stayed with me forever after one reading.

That was a lot of afflatus to introduce a single poem, but enjoy....



      Music


Franz Liszt eloped with Countess Marie d'Agoult,
who wrote novels. Polite society washed its hands
of him, and his novelist-countess-whore.
Liszt gave her three children, and music.
Then went off with Princess Wittgenstein.
Cosima, Liszt's daughter, married
the conductor, Hans von Bulow.
But Richard Wagner stole her. Took her away
to Bayreuth. Where Liszt showed up one morning.
Long white hair flouncing.
Shaking his fist. Music. Music!
Everybody grew more famous.