on raymond carver

There’s a poem of his called “Luck” about two boys at a house where a party is going on, and they get excited by the noise and the drinking. They go out and spend the night in the woods and come back the next morning and everyone’s gone, the house is a shambles, and drinks are all around the house. The narrator, the poet, pours all the drinks together and says, “Friends, I thought this was living. A house where no one was home, and all I could drink”. Notice the word “friends”, the way he uses that word. With most writers, it would be an affectation, but it wasn’t with him. That was his address to the world.

- Tobias Wolff (writer and friend)