PORT ANGELES — Raymond Carver wrote about Port Angeles, the Northwest and his nightly dreams and everyday adventures.
“Suddenly, I find a new path to the waterfall,” he writes in the title poem to one of his books.
“I begin to hurry. Wake up, my wife says. You’re dreaming.”
Carver was a dreamer and a realist, a man who wrote short stories and shorter poems that burned his name into America’s literary canon.
He lived the last decade of his life in Port Angeles, and died here, at age 50.
Now, to mark what would have been his 75th birthday, his widow, poet Tess Gallagher, has assembled the May 9-25 Raymond Carver Festival.
A main event comes at 7 p.m. tonight. An ensemble of poets of the Pacific Northwest will gather in the Raymond Carver Room at the Port Angeles Library, 2210 S. Peabody St., for selected readings from All of Us, the Carver collection released in 2000.
“At night the salmon move/ out from the river and into town,” goes one of his odes to fish.
“We wait up for them. We leave our back windows open and call out when we hear a splash.”
Carver also takes us outside town, for “Eagles.”
“It was a sixteen inch ling cod that the eagle dropped near our feet at the top of Bagley Creek canyon, at the edge of the green woods.”
These and other Carver poems will make their way back to Carver’s last home town, to the community meeting space named after him.
Port Angeles poet Alice Derry will host the free poetry reading along with Gallagher.
If the list of selections is any sign, the poetry will leap and dart like the salmon Carver loved. There’s “Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In;” “Looking for Work;” “Wind;” “Aspens” and “What the Doctor Said.”
That one came after Carver learned of his advanced cancer, the disease that would end his life in August 1988.
The Carver Festival is a celebration of a life full of comedy, tragedy and love.
The poetry reading will end with “For Tess,” Carver’s ode to his wife.
Gallagher will read the piece that ends:
“As I was laying there with my eyes closed,
just after I’d imagined what it might be like
if in fact I never got up again, I thought of you.
I opened my eyes then and got right up
and went back to being happy again
I’m grateful to you, you see.”
Gallagher and Derry have also invited poets including Kate Reavey, Carmen Germain, Tim Roos, Holly Hughes, Howard Chadwick, Charlotte Warren and Joan Swift.
They will step up to the podium beside Alfredo Arreguín’s dreamlike painting, “The Ghost Fish.” From it, Carver’s eyes look out through a mass of red-finned swimmers. Carver and Arreguin, a Mexican-born artist who lives in Seattle, were fishermen and close friends.
More information about these and other Carver Festival events this week, visit cosponsor Peninsula College’s website at www.PenCol.edu.
Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
