Matt Cook reminds me of Raymond Carver

I've always felt that Raymond Carver's (wiki) fiction was as close to being poetry as any fiction could have been. I picked up a book of Raymond Carver's short stories last week and read again some of my favorites. Each one stopped me in my path, just as a poem would. Now here comes Matt Cook in the Writer's Almanac this week and he reminds me of Raymond Carver, and I can't say why and I suppose many would disagree with me and I'm no literary scholar and I know Matt Cook is no Raymond Carver, but not in the Lloyd-Bensten-I-knew-Jack-Kennedy sense, but in the he's just wonderful in his own right way.

The Waitresses

The waitresses
At the restaurant
Have to keep reminding
The schizophrenic man
That if he keeps acting
Like a schizophrenic man
They'll have to ask him to leave the restaurant.
But he keeps forgetting that he's a schizophrenic man,
So they have to keep reminding him.


Poem: "The Waitresses." by Matt Cook from Evesdrop Soup © Manic D Press, 2005.