Mary Karr
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Mary Karr (1955 - ) is an American poet.
Karr has received acclaim for her literary work from Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and San Francisco Chronicle. Her memoir, The Liars' Club, published in 1995, was a New York Times bestseller for more than a year, and was named one of the year's best books. It delves vividly and often humorously into her deeply troubled 1960s childhood, most of which was spent in a gritty, industrial section of East Texas. Her follow-up, Cherry(2000), about her late adolescence and early womanhood, garnered more praise. She is currently writing a third memoir entitled Lit.
Karr has published four volumes of poetry: Abacus (Wesleyan University Press, CT, 1987, in its New Poets series), The Devil's Tour (New Directions NY, 1993, an original TPB), Viper Rum (New Directions NY, 1998, an original TPB), and her new volume Sinners Welcome (HarperCollins, NY 2006). Her poems have appeared in major literary magazines such as Poetry, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly.
Described (admiringly) as "a scrappy little beast" in Salon magazine[1] in 1997, Karr is a controversial figure in the American poetry "establishment," thanks to her Pushcart-award winning essay, "Against Decoration," which was originally published in the quarterly review Parnassus(1991) and later reprinted in Viper Rum. Given how Karr has rewritten some few parts of "Facing Altars" (see below), a comparison between the magazine and book texts of this essay might prove interesting. But in the "Viper Rum" text, Karr names names, provides examples and takes no prisoners. Whether in her own poetry she "walks the walk" is for you, the reader, to decide.
In the Parnassus essay Karr called for contemporary poets to use less ornamentation in style and add more real content. Emotions need to be directly expressed, and clarity should be a watch-word: characters are too obscure, the presented physical world is often "foggy" (that is imprecise), references are both non-germane and overused, metaphors cast shadows over expected meaning, and techniques of language (polysyllables, archaic words, intricate syntax, "yards of adjectives") will only "slow a reader". For examples, Karr directly criticized well-known, well-connected, and award-winning poets such as James Merrill, Amy Clampitt, and Rosanna Warren (daughter of Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Penn Warren).
In fairness, Karr does use a Merrill poem, "Charles on Fire", to show how controlled elegance can create transcendent meaning out of a not-quite-ordinary moment by re-creating the moment as experienced. Seamus Heaney's Third Sonnet from "Clearances" in his The Haw Lantern is also used to demonstrate the effects that Karr believes make good poems: just peeling potatoes with your mother becomes "I remembered her head bent towards my head, / Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives-- / Never closer the whole rest of our lives." While some ornamentations Karr rails against are due to shifting taste, she believes much is due to the revolt against formalism which substituted sheer ornamentation for the discipline of meter. Karr points out that Randall Jarrell said much the same thing, albeit more decorously, nearly fifty years ago. Her essay is meant to provide the technical detail to Jarrell's schema. As a result of her essay Karr earned a reputation for being both courageous and combative, a matured version of the BB-gun toting little hellion limned in The Liars' Club.
Another essay, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer", was originally published in Poetry (2005). Karr tells of moving from agnostic alcoholic to baptized Catholic of the decidedly "cafeteria" kind, yet one who prays twice daily with loud fervor from her "foxhole". Karr's commitment to prayer as the concrete expression of her faith has even lead her to undertake the The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of The Jesuits, devoting eight months to working through the prescribed "four weeks".
For Karr, poetry and prayer arise from the same sources within us. She believes the sacramental quality of poetry in and of itself, and as experienced being read aloud, as she did within her family, prepared her for accepting the trueness of sacraments and the reality of God's incarnation. Yet her own carnality in these new poems remains strong, flesh speaking to flesh, laughter breaking out of seriousness. Interestingly, Karr has made a thematically stunning one-word change in this essay. In the essay's very last sentence, she had originally written "That's why I pray and poetize: ..., to partake of the majesty that's every Judas's birthright." As published in Sinners Welcome, "Judas" has become the less personal "sinner", a too-soft generality of a word for the impact intended, which is that daily we re-enact the betrayal that moves us away from God.
Mary Karr is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University. In 2004 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, and was previously a Radcliffe College Bunting Fellow. In the 1990s, she briefly taught poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. She resides presently in New York City's "Hell's Kitchen" area.
She has one child, a son named Devereux Milburn, who currently attends NYU.
[edit] Bibliography
- The Liars' Club, Penguin (Non-Classics) (1998) ISBN 0-14-017983-6
- Cherry: A Memoir, Penguin Books; Reissue edition (2001) ISBN 0-14-100207-7
