Writing It Out

 Poet, memoirist and truth-telling Mary Karr has a new book out called Lit: A Memoir where she chronicles her time getting over a lot of things-- a husband, alcohol abuse, her crazy childhood. Many people know Karr from her previous two memoirs, The Liar’s Club (1995) and Cherry (2000). She was encouraged by write Liar’s Club by her friend and fellow author Tobias Wolf, and it spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. But her life is so much more interesting the more she writes and does interviews. 

This complex woman has been a poet first and foremost-- she referrs to mentor Poet Lauret Robert Hass as "Bob,"--Mary Karr gets more interesting to me as she ages and the more she writes but I’ve been very intrigued by her ability to talk openly in interviews about her life and her art and the way in which she makes sense of everything with such an amazing sense of humor. After hearing several of her latest interviews promoting her book, I’ve decided she may be one of my favorite working poets.

Today Treegap honors Mary Karr, not posthumously, but for her ability to survive, then live and create. This tough and hardy Texan has a long life to live.  I couldn’t decide between two poems of Karr's to highlight, so let’s enjoy both.

All This and More

by Mary Karr

The Devil’s tour of hell did not include
a factory line where molten lead
spilled into mouths held wide,

no electric drill spiraling screws
into hands and feet, nor giant pliers
to lower you into simmering vats.

Instead, a circle of light
opened on your stuffed armchair,
whose chintz orchids did not boil and change,

and the Devil adjusted
your new spiked antennae
almost delicately, with claws curled

and lacquered black, before he spread
his leather wings to leap
into the acid-green sky.

So your head became a tv hull,
a gargoyle mirror. Your doppelganger
sloppy at the mouth

and swollen at the joints
enacted your days in sinuous
slow motion, your lines delivered

with a mocking sneer. Sometimes
the frame froze, reversed, began
again: the red eyes of a friend

you cursed, your girl child cowered
behind the drapes, parents alive again
and puzzled by this new form. That’s why

you clawed your way back to this life.

And one more:

Limbo: Altered States
by Mary Karr

No sooner does the plane angle up

than I cork off to dream a bomb blast:
A fireball roiling through the cabin in slo-mo,
seat blown loose from its bolts,
I hang weightless a nanosecond
     in blue space

then jerk awake to ordered rows.

And there’s the silver liquor cart jangling
its thousand bells, the perfect doses
of juniper gin and oak-flavored scotch
     held by a rose-nailed hand.

I don’t miss drinking, don’t miss

driving into shit with more molecular density
than myself, nor the Mission Impossible
reruns I sat before, nor the dead
space inside only alcohol could fill and then
     not even.  But I miss

the aftermath, the pure simplicity:

mouth parched, head hissing static.
How little I asked of myself then—to suck
the next breath, suffer the next heave, live
till cocktail hour when I could miss
     the next sickness.

I locked the bathroom door, sat

on the closed commode, shirtless,
in filmy underpants telling myself that death
could fit my grasp and be staved off
while in the smeary shaving glass,
I practiced the stillness of a soul
     awaiting birth.

For the real that swarmed beyond the door

I was pure scorn, dead center of my stone and starless
universe, orbited by no one. Novitiate obliterate, Saint
Absence, Duchess of Naught . . .
A stinging ether folded me in mist.

Sometimes landing the head's pressure’s enormous.

When my plane tilts down, houses grow large, streets
lose their clear geometry. The leafy earth soon fills my portal,
and in the gray graveyard of cars, a stick figure
becomes my son in royal blue cap flapping his arms
as if to rise. Thank god for our place
in this forest of forms, for the gravitas
that draws me back to him, and for how lightly

lightly I touch down.