In celebration of National Poetry Month, the entire campus community is invited to join the Campus Poetry Project sponsored by the English, Foreign Languages and English as a Second Language Department.
Throughout April, be on the lookout for poetry postings in the Campus Chronicle and on digital monitors across campus, as well as our cardboard poet cutouts and poetry lawn signs. Take a selfie with your favorite poet!
This year, the American Academy of Poets is highlighting this verse: “we were all made for something” (Ada Limon). That is why we decided to focus on poems about work this year. We’ll include songs and lyrics about work, too! (Below is the official 2023 National Poetry Month poster from the American Academy of Poets.)
Today’s Poem
“Happiness”
by Raymond Carver
So early it’s still almost dark out.
I’m near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren’t saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take
each other’s arm.
It’s early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn’t enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.
From All of Us: The Collected Poems, copyright © by Tess Gallagher. Used by permission of
Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Poet and short-story writer Raymond Carver was born in the logging town of Clatskanie, Oregon, and grew up in Yakima, Washington. He was married and the father of two before he was 20, and he held a number of low-paying jobs: he “picked tulips, pumped gas, swept hospital corridors, swabbed toilets, [and] managed an apartment complex,” according to Bruce Weber in a New York Times Magazine profile of the author. Not coincidentally, “of all the writers at work today, Carver may have [had] the most distinct vision of the working class,” as Ray Anello observed in a Newsweek article. Carver attended Chico State University, where he studied with John Gardner, and earned his BA from Humboldt State College in 1963. He published his first short-story and poem while at Humboldt State. Carver went on to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Returning to the Northwest, he took jobs as a janitor, farm worker, and delivery man. His first wife, Maryann Burk, also held a series of jobs to support Carver as he began writing and eventually publishing acclaimed short-story collections such as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), and Cathedral (1983). Carver also published poetry collections, including A New Path to the Waterfall (1989), which was published posthumously. Carver also wrote extensively as a poet. A collection of his poetry, including some works being written shortly before his death, was published in A New Path to the Waterfall. Although he had already released a volume of his collected verse, the diagnosis of lung cancer inspired him to write another volume. These poems are characterized by a reliance on sentence-sounds and a structure steeped in storytelling. Edna Longley commented in the London Review of Books that “all his writing tends toward dramatic monologue, present-tense soliloquy that wears the past like a hairshirt.” He explored tortured marriages and strained familial relationships, all of which lead him bravely into discussing his own terminal illness. Longley praised Carver for his ability to forge solid beginnings and endings: “A Carver poem instantly establishes its presence.” (Photo courtesy: Poetry Foundation)