Mary Karr

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Mary Karr (1955 - ) is an American poet, essayist and memoirist.

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 over 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 Southeast Texas. Her follow-up, Cherry (2000), about her late adolescence and early womanhood, garnered more praise and was also a bestseller. 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 (admiringlish) as "a scrappy little beast" in Salon magazine[1] in 1997, Karr remains 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. In this essay Karr took a stand in favor of content over poetic style. She argued 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 "showy" (both non-germane and overused), metaphors over-shadow expected meaning, and techniques of language (polysyllables, archaic words, intricate syntax, "yards of adjectives") only "slow a reader"'s understanding. 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). Karr favors controlled elegance to create transcendent poetic meaning out of not-quite-ordinary moments, presenting James Merrill's "Charles on Fire" as a successful example.

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 notes 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 argument. As a result of this 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". In this essay Karr argues that 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 own childhood family, prepared her for accepting one religion's view 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.

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. The childhood Karr describes in her books occurs mainly in Groves, Texas. She attended Port Neches-Groves High School. She resides presently in New York City's "Hell's Kitchen" area.

She has one child, a son named Devereux Milburn, who currently (2007) attends NYU.