Jared Carter Poetry

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A Brief Biography

Jared Carter is originally from Elwood, a small town in the central part of Indiana. He was educated at Yale and at Goddard and served two years with the United States Army in France. He worked in textbook publishing in Indianapolis during the 1970s. The first of his three books of poetry appeared in 1981. "He is the rare poet who is rooted in a certain place, which is of course Indiana," one critic has observed, "yet he deals with it in such a way that it is of universal interest."

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Carter was born in 1939, a year that marked the end of the Depression and the beginning of the war in Europe. Although he can remember people and places visited during a family vacation in Michigan in the summer of 1941, he has no recollection of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which occurred when he was almost three years old. For him, the war years were a time of learning patriotic songs such as "Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer" and "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition," and playing "soldier" with the neighborhood children in the back yard.

Carter's father, Robert, a general contractor and himself the son of a contractor, joined the Seabees and served three years in the South Pacific. He returned unharmed in 1945. Carter's mother, Cleva, a devout Methodist, helped keep the books for her husband's construction company, and later in life launched a career as a fabrics artist. Carter was the second oldest of two boys in the family; there were two younger girls, Michelle and Candace.

Early Ambitions

Carter learned to read when he was five and did well at school. A favorite high-school English teacher, Mary Records, encouraged his early writing ambitions, as did his parents. In the early 1950s, his older brother, Dee, then a student at Purdue, brought home copies of paperback books by Joyce, Kafka, Gide, and Freud, and encouraged his younger brother to read them. A high point of those early years came during the summer of 1954, when the two brothers were allowed to take the family car for an extended trip east.

They drove first to North Carolina to visit friends, then traveled up the east coast as far north as Cape Cod. Carter saw Washington and New York for the first time, stopped at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village (a year too late for a glimpse of Dylan Thomas), and got a look at the campuses of Yale and M.I.T., two schools he was already interested in attending.

Carter entered Yale as a scholarship student in the fall of 1956. During his college years, he hitch-hiked back and forth between his home town and the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut. For a high-school graduation present, Carter's parents had given him an Olympia portable manual typewriter made in West Germany. It weighed eighteen pounds and came in a silver-gray, molded-plywood carrying case that looked like a small Airstream Trailer. For Ivy League undergrads in the mid-1950s, an Olympia portable was essential; almost everybody had one. Carter made dozens of trips lugging this typewriter in one hand and a suitcase full of books and clothes in the other.

On the Road

In those days Eisenhower's Interstate highway system was only beginning to be built. Carter's route to Yale took him through central Ohio along old US 40, into and out of Wheeling, all the way across Pennsylvania on the Turnpike, then up the New Jersey Turnpike to New York. The Merritt Parkway, built in the 1930s, connected Manhattan with New Haven. Waiting for lifts and talking with the people who gave him rides, Carter got an extended look at the eastern part of the country. During weekends away from Yale, he visited friends on other campuses, and spent time in both Greenwich Village and Cambridge, Mass.

At Yale, Carter majored in English literature. He shied away from campus literary circles, but in his spare time he was already writing poems and stories. During summers back in Elwood, he worked in a can factory to earn money for school. He was halfway through his junior year when college no longer seemed to matter. In a recent memoir, he recounted what happened next:

In the late 1950s I dropped out of college and went to work as a reporter for a daily newspaper in Huntington, Indiana. There were six people in the newsroom. Step through a door, and you were in the compositors' room, with two Linotypes clacking away, and the air rich with the smell of hot machine oil. Next was the makeup room, with people carrying trays of metal type and locking them into page forms, and beyond that the press room, where, seven days a week, 18,000 copies of the newspaper were run off on a web-fed offset press. In mid-afternoon when the press began to roll and the day's evening edition was coming down the chute, sometimes I would go out to the dock and climb up on a flatbed truck and ride around town to help the workers throw off bundles of papers to the newsboys. My fingers and hands would turn black from the fresh ink.

He stayed six months in Huntington. Among the stories he covered was the beginning of the construction of a series of flood-control projects on the Mississinewa, Salamonie, and Huntington Rivers. Years later, he would write several poems dealing with the building of a large dam in a mythical county he called Mississinewa.

Carter's newspaper days were brief, but they made a lasting impression, and he has retained a fondness for small-town dailies and for the traditions of American journalism that go back to Whitman, Twain, Bierce, Hemingway, and Sherwood Anderson.

He returned to Yale in the fall of 1960 and left again the following spring without taking a degree. During that final year in New Haven he won the campus prize for poetry given annually by the Academy of American Poets. He also met a young woman who was from Springfield, Mass., and a recent graduate of Bennington College. He continued to visit her in New York during the summer and fall of 1961. Friends let them stay temporarily in a series of apartments and lofts on the upper Westside and in Greenwich Village. The two were married in New Haven in December. They immediately drove cross-country to San Francisco and found a place to stay on Steiner Street. A few weeks after their arrival, Carter's draft notice came in the mail.

European Interlude

The Army assigned him to the Signal Corps and sent him to Fontainebleau, France, where he would be stationed for the next two years. His wife was able to join him there. They lived in an apartment five kilometers from the military post, in the village of By-Thomery, on a hill overlooking the Seine.

A few doors up the street from their courtyard was the abandoned but still intact Chateau of By, a fifteenth-century building that in the nineteenth century had become the residence of the celebrated painter of animals, Rosa Bonheur. Older residents in the village could remember Bonheur's pet African lion, that had been given the run of the walled grounds, and could often be heard roaring in the night.

With a key to the front door of the chateau provided by a friendly concierge, Carter and his wife often explored the building's seemingly endless rooms and corridors, which were filled with half- finished paintings, animal figurines, period furniture, and other mementoes of the Second Empire and the early days of the Third Republic. (In more recent years, the building has been restored and turned into the Musée de l'Atelier Rosa Bonheur).

A short distance up the same street was a cemetery in which Carter happened one day to notice a marker for the mysterious teacher and mage, Georges Gurdjieff, who died in 1949, and whose teachings had influenced a number of writers and artists in Paris during the period between the wars. Nearby was the grave of New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield, who early in 1923 had died of tuberculosis while staying at Gurdjieff's Institute for Harmonious Development near Fontainebleau.

This was the beginning of Carter's interest in the legends and lore surrounding Gurdjieff and his followers. He also began to read Mansfield's fiction and to learn more about D. H. Lawrence, Frieda Lawrence, A. R. Orage, and J. Middleton Murry.

The village of By-Thomery stands at the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, the third-largest forest in France. Paris, where the Carters spent many weekends, was only twenty minutes away by train. From 1962 to 1964 they visited nearly every museum, church, and landmark in that city. Seeking to extend their range, they saved enough money to purchase a secondhand car—a 1950 Citroën 15CV.

A Classic Car

Originally designed in 1938, but not produced in quantity until after the war, the 15CV was manufactured in a series of models that changed only slightly until the mid-50s, when it went out of production. The models in those years were almost invariably black; a distinctive pair of inverted chrome V's appeared on the radiator. The "Quinze," as everyone called it, was for many years the official automobile of the French government and of Charles de Gaulle; it was also the preferred getaway car of French gangsters. Examples can still be seen in old Inspector Maigret movies and other French films of the post-war period.

The car the Carters bought was thirteen years old and had 150,000 miles on it, but it ran smoothly and handled well, thanks to its front-wheel drive. It was an impressive automobile. The crankcase held fifteen quarts of oil and the bumpers seemed to be made of solid chrome. Two persons could sleep quite comfortably on the back seat. In this ancient but elegant vehicle, the Carters began touring the towns and cathedrals of the Île-de-France and Burgundy, and exploring Belgium and Holland.

Carter remained in Europe after separating from the Army early in 1964. He had sold the Citroën, since he could not afford to ship it back to the States. He and his wife spent the rest of the year hitch-hiking through the Lowlands, France, Italy, Greece, Spain, England, and Scotland. During that time Carter carried with him a much smaller portable Olympia typewriter he had bought at the PX. He kept a journal, and at night, in the youth hostels, he would type up the day's events.

Perhaps the best interval of the summer was the ten days the couple spent on the island of Ios, the next-to-last stop in the chain of the Cyclades, before the steamer finally arrives at Santorini. In those days Ios was undeveloped; it had no cars, motorbikes, roads, discos, campers, or tourist facilities. The only electricity came from a generator that provided illumination at night for the single café in the harbor.

Ios has traditionally been associated with Homer, who is alleged to have been buried there. The Carters found it to be an island of rocky ridges and crags and an occasional herd of goats foraging along the beach, their small bells tinkling. The yellow-sand beaches were hundreds of feet wide and, except for the goatherd and the goats, completely uninhabited. The Carters stayed in a white- washed room on a terrace halfway up the path to the old town. At night they read by lantern-light. On a good day they could look out across the Aegean and see the faint outlines of the other islands in the chain.

Publishing Days

By early 1965 they had returned to the States. Carter had continued to write while in Europe and had come to admire the works of Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and William Faulkner. All were Southern in origin; the last three, in particular, had chosen to remain in or near the places of their birth, presumably in order to stay close to the people and events they wrote about. Carter decided to follow their example.

Back in his home town of Elwood, he got a job clerking in a drugstore. His wife attended a nearby university, where she received an M.A. degree in Latin. They both spent a summer working for a state-sponsored program designed to provide assistance for migrant farm laborers. Carter kept writing, but he knew that sooner or later he would need a college diploma. In 1967, drawing on his G.I. Bill benefits, he signed up for a non-resident program at Goddard College, in Plainfield, Vermont. He received a B.A. degree in 1969.

In January of that same year a daughter was born. A month later, Carter and his wife moved to Indianapolis, where he found work as an editor with the College Division of the Bobbs-Merrill Publishing Company. Bobbs-Merrill was an old-line house that traced its beginnings back to 1838. It billed itself as the first publishing house west of the Alleghenies.

Over the years, it had published a profitable list of authors that included James Whitcomb Riley, L. Frank Baum, Johnny Gruelle, Gaston Leroux, Julia Peterkin, Richard Halliburton, Talbot Mundy, Ayn Rand, and William Styron, but its biggest moneymaker, and the source of half of its revenues, was Rombauer and Becker's The Joy of Cooking.

The company's list of alumni—editors and artists who had once worked out of its offices in Indianapolis and New York—was also impressive, and included David Laurance Chambers, Hiram Haydn, Louis Simpson, Bill Hackett, Joe Ascherl, and the person about whom the most outrageous stories were told, Edward Gorey.

Bobbs-Merrill was also going through a period of considerable internal upheaval. Shortly before Carter's arrival, the firm had been acquired, through a series of mergers, by the international conglomerate ITT. There was trouble ahead; after additional mergers and deals in the 80s, the Bobbs-Merrill imprint simply ceased to exist. But Carter knew none of this. He was a rookie. He was immediately urged to become a "traveler," a book salesman, and promised a territory in Canada. But he had a small child at home, and his marriage was not going well; he was reluctant to go off to another country for weeks at a time.

Instead, he chose the humbler alternative of staying in the publishing house and learning about the myriad steps—editorial querying, copyediting, proofreading, interior design, paper, type, cover mechanicals, printing, binding—that eventually, over a period of months or years, would turn a raw manuscript into ten or twenty thousand copies of a finished book.

Carter became a house editor, a person with a blue pencil in one hand and a pica ruler in the other. The essential reference work of the copyeditor's profession was the Chicago Manual of Style, then in its twelfth revised edition, with its detailed prescriptions for punctuation and the distinctive treatment of words. Carter also wrote dust-jacket copy, prepared reports on manuscripts, and attended sales conferences. But his main task was to shepherd the editing and production of a variety of books, including three anthologies of contemporary poetry. The requirements of editing biographical sketches and collecting suitable photographs for these volumes brought him into contact with a number of prominent American poets.

Breaking Away

During the mid-70s Carter became managing editor of the College Division, but he resigned in 1976 to work as a freelance editor and book designer. Meanwhile, his marriage was in trouble, and his own attempts to write and publish had gone nowhere. Nor was it a particularly propitious moment in the nation's history. The war in Vietnam had run its course, an economic recession had set in, and Watergate was about to take center stage. Carter himself went through a number of changes. He and his first wife were divorced in 1974. He would continue to spend time with his daughter on weekends, and during part of each summer, for the next several years.

Seeking a change of scene, and perhaps a new beginning, Carter moved to Woodruff Place, an historic neighborhood on the east side of Indianapolis that dated from the 1870s. Among its Victorian homes and tree-lined avenues, its ornate fountains and cast-iron statues, he began to make new friends, and to sort things out. In a high-ceilinged room that had once been an architect's studio, he began to write again, but this time with a different approach. During the 1960s he had attempted to write fiction, but had met with little success. Now, in the mid-1970s, he decided to concentrate on poetry. His poems soon began to appear in small-press magazines around the country.

During that same period he began to participate in open-mike readings. At the Hummingbird Cafe in Indianapolis, he met Etheridge Knight, James L. White, and other writers and poets, with both local and national reputations, who encouraged his writing. Later, in the early 80s, while on vacation in the Traverse City area of northern Michigan, he practiced reciting poems from memory with a group known as the Stone Circle poets.

In the mid-70s he met Diane Haston, a high-school English teacher. Originally from Carmel, Indiana, with degrees from Ball State University, she had returned to her home state after spending several years in northern California. She and Carter were married on the summer solstice in 1979.

Carter continued to do freelance editorial work, while taking on any other jobs he could find. He was writer-in-residence in a high school; he taught in a prison; he worked as a field interviewer for an ethnomusicology project; he taught in a performing arts school; he wrote for a couple of small newspapers; and he spent one summer playing piano on Saturday nights in a tavern in another town. He also kept writing and sending out poems.

Work, for the Night Is Coming

In the spring of 1980 he and his wife were living in one of two "fixer-upper" houses they had purchased on the east side of Indianapolis, in an area north of Woodruff Place. In April they received a telephone call from the director of the Academy of American Poets. Carter's manuscript of poems had won the Walt Whitman Award for 1980.

Work, for the Night Is Coming was published by Macmillan in 1981, when Carter was forty-two years old. The reviews were good and the book led to many new opportunities during the next several years. He was invited to give readings at numerous location throughout the country, from New Orleans to Minneapolis and from Boston to Kansas City. Friends arranged for him to travel to West Germany and to Brazil to read his poems.

Several awards and fellowships came his way, including a Guggenheim and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1985 he was given the Indiana Governor's Arts Award. During the mid-1980s he served on several advisory committees convened by the Literature Panel of the NEA. In the spring of 1983, and again in 1986, he was invited to be writer-in-residence at Purdue University's main campus in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Throughout the 1980s Carter worked to assemble a second book of poems. That volume, entitled After the Rain, was published in 1993 by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Two years later the book received the Poets' Prize for 1995. Cleveland State reprinted Work, for the Night Is Coming in 1995, and brought out Carter's third collection, Les Barricades Mystérieuses, in 1999.

New Technologies

Carter first encountered word-processing while teaching at Purdue in 1983. Until that time he had composed directly on a typewriter, but he was eager to shift to the new technology. With money saved from his salary at Purdue, he bought a Kaypro II personal computer for $1,500. The Kaypro, fondly remembered by early computer enthusiasts for its short-term memory capacity of an astonishing 64 Kbs, lasted him well into the 1990s.

The Kaypro was boxy and industrial-looking and even heavier and clunkier than Carter's original Olympia typewriter. It was alleged to be portable. "Yes," one early Kaypro fan has noted, "a portable computer which was just slightly smaller and lighter than a bank safe." But it worked. It had a flexible operating system known as CP/M, and it wrote to large floppy disks with Perfect Writer. For a printer, Carter hooked it up to a Swintec 1146 CM typewriter. The entire package was well-suited to his writing needs. Eventually it crashed and could not be resuscitated, and he moved on to the state- of-the-art PC on which he now does all of his writing.

After that first semester at Purdue, Carter also bought a secondhand Steinway studio piano. It still occupies a corner of his study. An amateur pianist, he had played in a Dixieland band during high school, and later developed an interest in American ragtime piano music. He helped to found the Indiana Ragtime Society in the early 1980s. A single recording he made in 1981 may be heard on the two-CD set, Indiana Ragtime, recently reissued by the Indiana Historical Society Press.

Carter's wife, Diane, is the first reader—and best critic—of his poems. For many years she has taught classes in English composition, speech, and technical communications at IUPUI—the combined campus of Indiana University and Purdue University at Indianapolis. In the mid-1980s, she began to specialize in the teaching of English as a Second Language. Currently she gives lectures and conducts workshops in ESL.

An Old House

The Carters live in the Windsor Park neighborhood on the near-eastside of Indianapolis. Their house dates from the last third of the nineteenth century and was probably one of the original farmhouses in the area. Carter continues to work on the house and to make improvements. He gets a lot of help from friends in Windsor Park and adjoining neighborhoods.

Carter and these same friends often take time out to investigate a variety of historical structures and mechanical devices they hear about or run across in their immediate environment —water cisterns and abandoned wells, old houses, basements and attics, crawl spaces, church belfries, underground tunnels, brick walkways and railroad trestles. This curiosity about things that others sometimes take for granted—this searching and sifting through the physical evidence of the past—is also characteristic of Carter's poetry.

George Cleveland, a critic based in New Orleans, has mentioned that while reading Carter's second book, "I felt I heard a voice out of the last century." He notes that Carter's poems

are filled with old-timey bric-a-brac: medicine show "panoramas" of historical and Biblical subjects; old photographs and photographic paraphernalia. . . old barns and lightning rods with "glass eyes". . . Often the words themselves carry a whiff of patina: "scryer," "gleaning," "rushlight," "isinglass," "queen posts," and the wonderful "galleynipper."

Emanating from these forgotten objects and antiquated words, and the stories that surround them, is a particular presence that Cleveland identifies as

a kind of simultaneity . . . a sense of living at the end of a long chain of lives. Carter's poems show that to me over and over. At a time when poetic and critical fashion insists on our cultural isolation and fragmentation, Carter's poems demonstrate the past working on our present, even the past that has disappeared.

As one of Faulkner's characters points out, the past is "not even past." To evoke this past that is still branching out into the present has been one of Carter's primary concerns. It is an undertaking that connects him with many of his predecessors.

Fred Whitehead, the cultural historian and political observer, who writes from Kansas City, Kansas, puts it this way:

Carter is a poet like those of old—Lindsay, Sandburg, Whittier—a man who is at home in the world. . . . [He] is emotional, but never sentimental; respectful of the past, but not a mossback conservative; a regionalist, but not provincial.

It was Whitehead who, many years ago, pointed out to Carter a comment by the Wobbly folksinger, Utah Phillips, a remark that Carter is still fond of quoting: "The most dangerous force in America today is a long memory."

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