Jared Carter Poetry

About the Poetry

Three aspects of Jared Carter's poems are worth noting: the involvement with landscape, the frequent reliance on narrative, and the balance between free verse and traditional forms. Out of their fusion comes the characteristic profile of his poetry.

Carter's work begins with the people and places to be found in the American Midwest. The poems in the first two books, written during the 1970s and 80s, offer "a local habitation and a name," and invite the reader to explore a place called Mississinewa County, a world of small towns, family farms, and hard-working people who live close to the land.

Mississinewa, pronounced "Miss-sin-uh-wah," with the second "-iss" elided and the accent on the second syllable, is the Native American name for an actual river in northern Indiana. It is a tributary of the system leading to the Wabash River and from there to the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Carter's Mississinewa County, like a field of indeterminate sub-atomic particles, seems real and concrete at one moment, and imaginative and elusive in the next.

Thomas Hardy wrote of such an evocative yet enduring landscape in his Wessex novels. Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels provide outstanding examples of this tradition in American literature.

The many characters in Carter's poems—soldiers in the militia, Shakers, farmers, ex-football players, bikers, berry pickers, derelicts—strive to maintain their dignity and to uphold their traditions. It is the striving that connects them with the universal, and it is the author's craftsmanship—a style one critic, H. L. Hix, has described as "diamond-hard clarity"—that makes them memorable.

From the Heartland

Mississinewa County first sprang to life in Carter's initial book, Work, for the Night Is Coming. He had been writing and publishing such poems for many years in small-press magazines. When the Whitman Award volume appeared in the spring of 1981, critical response was immediate.

"Carter recreates the farms and towns of the Midwest, the weather and landscape, incidents and people, with amazing accuracy and authenticity," James Finn Cotter wrote in the Catholic journal America. "This is a book to be grateful for."

Carter's second collection, After the Rain, attracted similar notice. It offered "proof," Robert Phillips wrote in the Houston Post, "that the art of poetry is alive and well in America." It also developed several of the themes and incidents that had been present in the first book.

"After the Rain extends and deepens what Work, for the Night Is Coming begins," according to Timothy J. Deines in his 1998 study of Carter's poetry. "It further develops the idea that underlying the characters and snippets of narrative that abound in both books is a 'Mississinewa novel,' a single thread that connects all of the poems together."

Carter's third collection, Les Barricades Mystérieuses, published by Cleveland State in 1999, takes the reader even farther into Mississinewa territory. At the same time it pays homage to one of Carter's particular interests, the heritage of French exploration and discovery in the American heartland.

Narrative Strategies

Carter's writing centers on Mississinewa County, but the "thread that runs so true" through all three books is the continued reliance on narrative and storytelling. "Things happen" in many of the poems—an enormous reservoir is constructed, forcing hundreds of rural inhabitants to leave their ancestral lands; an ancient barn collapses on a scavenger who has come to rustle old lumber; ex- football players fight with Klansmen; tornadoes touch down; Shakers dance.

Carter reading at the Bisbee Poetry Festival in 1982

Even in the third book, which consists of thirty-two villanelles, the careful reader will begin to make out the dim outlines of an implied narrative built up from one poem to the next. The story begins with a snowstorm, and a rendezvous in a nineteenth-century farmhouse located somewhere in rural Mississinewa County. The unnamed couple have visited this place before, in summer and winter, and now they explore their own past by examining the house itself and its contents, and by going for walks in the surrounding countryside.

Each of the villanelles in Les Barricades Mystérieuses can stand alone, both as a poem and as an example of poetic craft. Taken together, they add up to something more than a random collection of poems. As in this book, so with the two earlier books: there are many poems written in traditional forms that still serve to advance the overall flow of the Mississinewa saga. They fit unobtrusively alongside the many free-verse poems to be found in the same pages.

Free Verse and Form

From the beginning, Carter has sought a balance between free verse and traditional form. His first appearance in print was in the 1967 anthology Indiana Sesquicentennial Poets. Of the eleven poems he contributed to that volume, four were written in free verse and seven in traditional forms. Noteworthy in this debut were two poems of over a hundred lines, the first a narrative in heroic couplets, the second a dramatic monologue in blank verse.

Regardless of their form or method, Carter's poems are invariably clear, accessible, and easy to follow. David Lee Garrison, reviewing the third volume in the Southern Indiana Review, found the villanelles to be "as simple and subtle as the change in light and shadow against a wall created by the shift of a log in the fire, the sound of a door swinging open in the wind, or peonies that reveal an old pathway through an orchard."

Jough Dempsey, in a review for Poetry X, points to the same dark, sensuous quality that suffuses much of Carter's work, and is especially prominent in Les Barricades Mystérieuses. He notices the "images of something vanishing, disappearing, retreating or receding. Candles are blown out, darkness covers the snow, minnows disappear, narrow scaffolding gathers shadows, and we are returned poem after poem to dimming light, or a furrow of shade."

A Road Less Taken

Beyond the world of appearances and quotidian change there are additional avenues to be explored in Carter's work. Joseph Salemi, in a review published in Iambs & Trochees, notices the larger implications of certain poems—villanelles that seem quite simple on first reading, but which harbor deeper meanings. "Interlude," which may be read in full on The Hypertexts web site, is an example.

"Interlude," appears midway in the third volume. It describes the peregrinations of the unnamed couple who have gone for a walk in the abandoned yet richly historic rural countryside surrounding the nineteenth-century farmhouse. On their way home, they stop to visit a hidden spring known to only one of them.

The careful reader will sense the kinship of this poem with earlier poems about springs and water, such as Hardy's "Under the Waterfall," and Frost's "The Pasture" and "Directive." Salemi quotes the opening lines:

Here is the spring I promised we would find
if we came back this way—a hollow space
beneath the hillside, waiting all this time

for us to angle through the leaves, and climb
down to the ledge, to where it slows its pace.

"In context," he writes, "the larger sense here is that a 'source' or 'spring' is available to us not just in the external world, but also psychically." He continues:

This spring can only be located by looking for the traces that have been left by past use. Carter's book is profoundly conservative, in that it suggests a return to tradition, no matter how temporarily overgrown that tradition might seem, is the only way to resuscitate a dead world and an impoverished culture. New things won't save us, but locating the old things can. This amazing collection of linked villanelles is Carter's contribution to that project of recovery.

These larger meanings resonate because of their firm grounding in a specific landscape, in narrative, and in an acquaintance with poetry in English that goes back to the beginnings of English verse. The poet Galway Kinnell remarked on the overall craftsmanship in Carter's poetry in his citation for the Whitman Award in 1980:

It is an agreeable book to read, quite without pretensions and poeticisms. It focuses with loving carefulness on the things and creatures of the world. The poems are unusually well-made and perfected.

H. L. Hix, in his 2002 essay "Training for Poets," asks, in effect, how does "well-made and perfected" writing come about? He cites certain observations on human behavior made by the late Iris Murdoch. "Our ability to act well 'when the time comes'" Murdoch suggested, "depends partly, perhaps largely, on the quality of our habitual objects of attention."

Hix quotes Murdoch further: "Freedom is not strictly the exercise of will, but rather the experience of accurate vision. . . . By the time the moment of choice has arrived the quality of attention has probably determined the nature of the act." For Hix, these remarks, in turn, point to Carter's overall achievement:

So in poetry. Jared Carter writes [in memorable ways], not because at the moment of writing he consistently makes better choices of words to include in his poems (although that effect follows as a corollary), but because he has so highly elevated the quality of the habitual objects of his attention.

Jared Carter in 1999

If there is a "habitual object of attention" in Carter's work, it is the potential for tragedy and transcendence to be found in the everyday world. Throughout his poetry, a fundamental question is being asked: what does it mean to be human? Mississinewa County, like a Midwestern Garden of Eden, is not an end but a beginning, a point of departure for an even longer journey.

In more recent poems written throughout the 1990s, Carter seems to be venturing beyond his native ground. He draws on his interests in the past—in archeology and myth, and in America's own history. In poems such as "Sphinx" and "Snow," both present on this web site, he gives indication of the direction in which this journey might lead.