This article was first published at The
Master’s Artist.
Mary
Karr is one those rare individuals in poetry – a success. She’s won a
Guggenheim Fellowship; Pushcart prizes; and a number of prominent awards and
recognitions. She’s written two bestselling memoirs (The Liar’s Club and Cherry), and her poetry is often featured in The New Yorker. She’s currently a
professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
Karr
is also a Roman Catholic, a practicing Roman Catholic, and she came to faith
late, she says, after spending the first 40 years as an agnostic. And she
explores and discusses her faith in her poetry and her essays.
In
its essential grittiness, her poetry and non-fiction work can be compared to the
writing of Anne Lamott. But it is distinctive, with its own voice, and that
distinctiveness, marked by a keen self-awareness, approachability and often
outright humor, can be seen in her 2006 collection Sinners Welcome: Poems. Consider this
account of the birth and life of Christ in “Descending Theology: Christ Human:”
Such a short voyage for a god,
and
you arrived in animal form so as not
to scorch us with your glory.
Your
mask was an infant’s head on a limp stalk,
sticky eyes smeared blind,
limbs
rendered useless in swaddle.
You came among beasts
as
one, came into our care or its lack, came crying
as
we all do, because the human frame
is
a crucifix, each skeleton borne a lifetime.
Any wanting soul lain
prostrate
on a floor to receive a pouring of sunlight
might – if still enough,
feel
your cross buried in the flesh.
One has only to surrender,
you
preached, open both arms to the inner,
the ever-present hold,
out-reaching
every want. It’s in the form
embedded, love adamant as bone.
In
a breath, we can bloom and almost be you.
In
an essay for Poetry (included in Sinners Welcome), Karr described how
poetry, from a very early age, may have anticipated her eventual found faith.”Poets
were my first priests,” she writes, “and poetry itself my first altar. It was a
lot of other firsts, too, of course: first classroom/chatroom/confessional. But
it was most crucially the first source of awe for me, partly because of how it
could ease my sense of isolation: it was a line thrown from seemingly glorious
Others to my drear-minded self.”
She
goes on – the essay is fascinating – but it’s worthwhile to pause and ask what
it is about poetry that could inspire such a response in a young girl growing
up in a Texas oil town where “bookishness” was not exactly an advantage. Poetry
indeed suggests something higher – it moves out of the plane of narrative and
story into a plane of speech and memory.
Try
this experiment: read Karr’s poem above again, and then read it aloud.
Something happens in the speaking: we fall into a voice and cadence that is not
part of everyday conversation, and yet we recognize it. It is familiar. We know
this voice, this sound, even if it we’re not quite sure of its origin.
It
could be a faint echo, a very faint echo, of the voice that spoke creation into
being: “Let there be,” and there was. Order was brought out of chaos, and it
became recognizable, something that the best poets, and even very good poets,
do routinely.
It’s
no wonder that Karr refers to poets as her first priests.
