I buy the latest Carver book. With a poet friend we discussed how much we liked it, we felt there, in that handful of texts, the North American world, the decrepitude of capitalism at the heart of the system.
A few days ago I had the opportunity to go to the beach for three days. It is February. I am fused. And I take Carver's voice with me. And I read the foreword by his partner Tess Gallagher who insists on reminding us of Raymond's twilight, the slow preparation for his death once the doctors have detected lung cancer. Tess writes: "The book's pretext allowed us to enjoy a few more mornings with each other before what would be the final attack of his illness."
If we think about it, this prologue made with love and biographical insistence, surely, is an introduction to Carver's wonderful performance: Raymond dramatizes his end caressing the world, its objects, nature, the sunsets, thanking the time lived with fine will with Tess.
Ever since I met him, I have always liked Carver. He has beginnings like this that are quite a rubric: "Without faith, we have come this far." His poems approach the things of the present without much detour, and things feel. To designate objects is to give them existence. Speech acts that make Austin's phrase true: saying is doing.
Raymond Carver dies and still thinks about his work. Or rather, he insists on thinking about his work more than ever, and literaturizes the next absence with the only thing he has, with the only thing he can give in those days: the readings, the writing, the beginning of a poem that he can not only record. a sensation but to accompany it through a symbiosis of the letter with the terminal body. It is in those sublime moments of extreme materiality that the letter ceases to be an "expression" and becomes an event.