The best way to read an author is start to finish. Grab a good biography (or two), dig up his letters if you can, collect all of his works and even toss in a few critical essays. Then start at the beginning of his life and read through to the end.

Reading this way is a much different experience. It adds depth and value to works you may otherwise skip or not enjoy. In many ways, reading this way is less about the prose than the writer. Sure, this biographical and historical approach may skew your interpretations of the work — and the author may wish you hadn’t — but there’s much to be gained.

Last night, I finally finished Raymond Carver’s collected poems, All of Us. With 300+ poems over the final decade of his life, the book feels like this start-to-finish approach in microcosm. The period encompasses his recovery after near death from alcoholism to his actual death from lung cancer at 50 years old. During that time, he sobered up, fell in love with (and married) the poet Tess Gallagher and found peace with his past and himself via his writing.

The story is so sad. Still, Carver resists the urge to complain or blame. He is clearly scared and grieving, but he finds comfort in his work, in his writing. Many of his poems are about writing. Writing as a form of meditation, a method for experiencing and interpreting one’s life. And in that a way to fully engage with one’s life even when the picture isn’t pretty.

For example:

Sunday Night

Make use of the things around you.
This light rain
Outside the window, for one.
This cigarette between my fingers,
These feet on the couch.
The faint sound of rock-and-roll,
The red Ferrari in my head.
The woman bumping
Drunkenly around the kitchen…
Put it all in,
Make use

Finished with All of Us, I felt the urge to return to Coleman Barks’ translations of Jelaluddin Rumi’s poems. Rumi has always helped me deepen my own experience and interpretation of life. I opened The Essential Rumi at random and found this poem:

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Put it all in. Make use.

Thank you, Ray.