Mary Karr*

Mary Karr has just released her fifth poetry collection Tropic of Squalor from HarperCollins. This is her first book of poetry since Sinners Welcome (2006). Despite her passion for poetry, she is best known for her trilogy of memoirs, the most-recent of which is Lit (2009). She has also written The Art of Memoir (2015), a book about how to write memoirs. Karr is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University, where she's taught for more than 25 years.

She is one of the poets celebrated in my anthology The Turning Aside: The Kingdom Poets Book of Contemporary Christian Poetry — (available here) and through Amazon.

The following poem first appeared in Commonweal, and is from Tropic of Squalor.

The Devil's Delusion

I lie on my back in the lawnchair to study
the trees claw up toward heaven.
They have all the sap I lack.
It’s doubt I send rivering cloudways
in great boiling torrents, as if all creation
were a bad stage set I could wave
-----------------------------------------------way away,
then I could cast my dark spells in a blink
and a flaming fingersnap—and
a universe de Mare pops up
so I win the everlasting argument against all
that was or will or tiredly is.
As if my soul would not in that blink
be obliterate. As if, as kids say.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Mary Karr: first post

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Mary Karr

Mary Karr disrupted the poetry scene, with her 1991 essay “Against Decoration”, by insisting that content is more important than poetic style. She is known for her essays and memoirs — particularly the best-selling The Liar’s Club — but still sees herself primarily as a poet. After years as an agnostic alcoholic, she came to embrace Catholic Christianity; although she admits to having a cafeteria approach, she seeks to follow the spiritual exercises of Ignatius.

Her 2010 address at the Festival of Faith & Writing (Grand Rapids, Michigan) was entitled, “Spiritual Revelations from a Black-Belt Sinner”; there she encouraged her audience in the discipline of prayer, and seeking God’s presence through gratitude. Two years earlier, at the same conference, she shared a stage with her friend Franz Wright. The two poets have followed a similar path, turning from alcoholism and depression, to faith in Christ. They each read a favourite poem from each other’s work.

The following poem is from her 2006 collection Sinners Welcome.

For a Dying Tomcat Who's Relinquished
His Former Hissing and Predatory Nature

I remember the long orange carp you once scooped
from the neighbor’s pond, bounding beyond
her swung broom, across summer lawns

to lay the fish on my stoop. Thanks
for that. I’m not one to whom offerings
often get made. You let me feel

how Christ might when I kneel,
weeping in the dark
over the usual maladies: love and its lack.

Only in tears do I speak
directly to him and with such
conviction. And only once you grew frail

did you finally slacken into me,
dozing against my ribs like a child.
You gave up the predatory flinch

that snapped the necks of so many
birds and slow-moving rodents.
Now your once powerful jaw

is malformed by black malignancies.
It hurts to eat. So you surrender in the way
I pray for: Lord, before my own death,

let me learn from this animal’s deep release
into my arms. Let me cease to fear
the embrace that seeks to still me.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Mary Karr: second post

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca