Kafka's Watch, a poem by Raymond Carver

This is from the Best American Poetry Site:   http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2008/07/what-would-kafk.html

JULY 11, 2008

What Would Kafka Do?

On October 21, 1985, The New Yorker published this poem by Raymond Carver:

Kafka’s Watch

I have a job with a tiny salary of 80 crowns, and

an infinite eight to nine hours of work.

I devour the time outside of the office like a wild beast.

Someday I hope to sit in a chair in another

country, looking out the window at fields of sugarcane

or Mohammedan cemeteries.

I don’t complain about the work so much as about

the sluggishness of swampy time.  The office hours

cannot be divided up!  I feel the pressure

of the full eight or nine hours even in the last

half hour of the day.  It’s like a train ride

lasting night and day.  In the end you’re totally

crushed.  You no longer thing about the straining

of the engine, or about the hills or

flat country, but ascribe all that’s happening

to your watch alone.  The watch which you continually hold

in the palm of your hand.  Then shake.  And bring slowly

to your ear in disbelief. 

            To a devoted Carver fan, the poem seemed uncharacteristic: more lush than the spare style that tagged Carver as “minimalist.”   I loved the poem, clipped it, and committed it to memory.

            Ten years later while reading Kafka’s letters, I came across this passage, written in October 1907, when Kafka was 24 and had begun work for the Italian insurance company Assicuraziono Generali:

             My life is completely chaotic now.  At any rate, I have a job with a tiny salary of 80 crowns and an immense eight to nine hours of work; but I devour the hours outside the office like a wild beast.  Since I was not previously accustomed to limiting my private life to six hours, and since I am also studying Italian and want to spend the evenings of these lovely days out of doors, I emerge from the crowdedness of my leisure hours scarcely rested . . .

            I am in the Assicurazioni Generali and have some hopes of someday sitting in chairs in faraway countries, looking out of the office windows at fields of sugar cane or Mohammedan cemeteries; and the whole world of insurance itself interests me greatly, but my present work is dreary.

            I don’t complain about the work so much as about the sluggisheness of swampy time.  The office hours, you see, cannot be divided up; even in the last half hour I feel the pressure of the eight hours just as much as in the first.  Often it is like a train ride lasting night and day, until in the end you’re totally crushed; you no longer think about the straining of the engine, or about the hilly or flat countryside but ascribe all that’s happening to your watch alone, which you continually hold in your palm . . . 

My immediate reaction was dismay. Although I'm well acquainted with collage techniques and the practice of "sampling" -- as Eliot remarked, "immature poets imitate, mature poets steal" -- I wondered about the propriety of what RC had done. Did he take too many liberties? Does the title indicate that this is a “found” poem? When Carver later publishedKafka’s Watch in a collection, he added the epigraph “from a letter.” Does that addition make it right?

Would Kafka approve?  Do you? 

-- sdh