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3. “Descending Theology”: The Poetry of Mary Karr
- The Catholic University of America Press
- Chapter
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50 Poems from The Devil’s Tour, copyright 1993 by Mary Karr, are reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Poems from Viper Rum, copyright 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998 by Mary Karr, are reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Poems from Abacus are reprinted by permission of Mary Karr. Poems from Sinners Welcome, copyright 2006 by Mary Karr, are reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Chapter 3 Descending Theology” The Poetry of Mary Karr Robert P. Lewis Mary Karr’s most recent volume of poems, Sinners Welcome (2006), confirms the depth at which her conversion to Catholicism in 1996 has taken imaginative root. Karr’s first two volumes of poetry, Abacus (1987) and The Devil’s Tour (1993), assess, even more intimately than her bestselling memoirs of childhood and adolescence in southeast Texas The Liars’ Club (1995) and Cherry (2000), the emotional toll her volatile family environment took on her and the imprudent intensities the poet courted to fill the affective void. Her 1998 collection of poetry, Viper Rum, alludes to the alcoholism that precipitated Karr’s resort to prayer and to her subsequent religious conversion . Sinners Welcome translates much of the familiar material of Karr’s earlier poems into an altogether new key. These later poems express an unwonted joy in the person of Christ, who has claimed the poet in the very depths of her bodily desiring. Finally, five poetic reflections on Christ’s birth, passion, death, and resurrection, each bearing the title of “Descending Theology” and each alluding to a deeper moment in Christ’s entry into the human condition , make explicit the strategy of descent into her own and her contemporaries ’ lives by which Karr appropriates the Christian mystery. The Liars’ Club and Cherry recreate the hardscrabble youth of Mary Karr in Leechfield, Texas, the small town where she was born in 1954. Her mother , Charlie Marie Karr, was beautiful and talented but ill-matched to Pete Karr, a refinery worker, or to the cultural stultification of Leechfield. In part, alcohol and pills insulated Karr’s mother against this stolid, intolerant, red- “ 51 “Descending Theology”: The Poetry of Mary Karr neck world. In even greater part, the stimulants, like the men in her multiple marriages, anaesthetized her guilt at having lost custody of two children in an early marriage. The volatile atmosphere of family life made it difficult for Mary Karr to trust either her world or herself. Two acts of violation haunt her memories of early childhood: a rape by an older neighborhood boy, and her near murder by her knife-wielding, drunk, and deranged mother. “The fact that my house was Not Right,” Karr writes, “metastasized into the notion that I myself was Not Right.”1 This primal insecurity expressed itself, during her adolescence and early maturity, in a defensive posture of “undiluted agnosticism.”2 Cherry details Karr’s troubled pilgrimage through the landscape of adolescence in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like St. Augustine, an inspiration for her own forays into memoir, she found herself enslaved by vacuous pleasure for lack of an adequate “vocabulary for wanting.”3 After graduation from high school, Karr briefly worked in a factory in California before entering Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. She spent two years there majoring in philosophy before succumbing again to wanderlust and departing for travel in England. In a later poem called “The Choice,” she describes from this period a serendipitous outing to Wordsworth’s cottage after a night of pub drinking, when her callous persona as bohemian and “bimbo” was transformed to “reverence” by the sight of the poet’s manuscripts.4 The experience influenced her return to graduate school for serious literary study, and she completed an M.F.A. program at Goddard College in Vermont. In 1983 Karr, then a member of a writing group in Cambridge, married fellow poet Michael Milburn. Three years later, their son Dev was born. Three years after this, the couple divorced. Without a car or furniture or a steady source of income, and trying to raise a small child while battling the demon of alcoholism , Karr hit bottom. A Whiting writer’s grant of $25,000 enabled her to finish The Devil’s Tour, her second volume of poems. The prospect of reenacting her mother’s dereliction with her children may have lent greater urgency to Karr’s search for that missing “vocabulary of wanting.” Consequently, she adopted an ex–heroin addict’s advice to get down on...