Today’s Poem<\/strong><\/p>\n“Happiness”
\nby Raymond Carver<\/p>\n
So early it’s still almost dark out.
\nI’m near the window with coffee,
\nand the usual early morning stuff
\nthat passes for thought.
\nWhen I see the boy and his friend
\nwalking up the road
\nto deliver the newspaper.
\nThey wear caps and sweaters,
\nand one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
\nThey are so happy
\nthey aren’t saying anything, these boys.
\nI think if they could, they would take
\neach other’s arm.
\nIt’s early in the morning,
\nand they are doing this thing together.
\nThey come on, slowly.
\nThe sky is taking on light,
\nthough the moon still hangs pale over the water.
\nSuch beauty that for a minute
\ndeath and ambition, even love,
\ndoesn’t enter into this.
\nHappiness. It comes on
\nunexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
\nany early morning talk about it.<\/p>\n
From All of Us: The Collected Poems, copyright \u00a9 by Tess Gallagher. Used by permission of
\nAlfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.<\/h6>\n
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<\/p>\n
Poet and short-story writer Raymond Carver<\/strong> 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 \u201cpicked tulips, pumped gas, swept hospital corridors, swabbed toilets, [and] managed an apartment complex,\u201d according to Bruce Weber in a New York Times Magazine profile of the author. Not coincidentally, \u201cof all the writers at work today, Carver may have [had] the most distinct vision of the working class,\u201d 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\u2019 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 \u201call his writing tends toward dramatic monologue, present-tense soliloquy that wears the past like a hairshirt.\u201d 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: \u201cA Carver poem instantly establishes its presence.\u201d (Photo courtesy: Poetry Foundation)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Published:<\/strong>\u00a0Mon, 24 Apr 2023 12:05:43 +0000 by\u00a0j.austin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In celebration of National Poetry Month, the entire campus community is invited to join the Campus Poetry Project sponsored…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2086,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[161],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-student-announcement-college-related"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20041\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chronicle.hvcc.edu\/wpdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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Today’s Poem<\/strong><\/p>\n