Book World: Poet's Choice

Poetry, Writing and 'The Liars' Club'

Memoirist, poet and Book World contributor Mary Karr was online Tuesday, June 17 to discuss her Poet's Choice column, her best-selling 1995 memoir The Liars' Club, and the joys, seductions and struggles of the writing life.

Karr is the Jesse Truesdale Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University. She is the author of two memoirs, The Liars' Club and Cherry, and four volumes of poetry, most recently Sinners Welcome. She joined Book World as Poet's Choice columnist in March 2008.

A BLESSING FROM MY SIXTEEN YEARS SON

I have this son who assembled inside me
during Hurricane Gloria. In a flash, he appeared,
in a heartbeat. Outside, pines toppled.

Phone lines snapped and hissed like cobras.
Inside, he was a raw pearl: microscopic, luminous.
Look at the muscled obelisk of him now

pawing through the icebox for more grapes.
Sixteen years and not a bone broken,
nor single stitch. By his age,

I was marked more ways, and small.
He's a slouching six-foot, three,
with implausible blue eyes, which settle

on the pages of Emerson's "Self Reliance"
with profound belligerence.
A girl with a navel ring

could make his cell phone go brr,
or an Afro'ed boy leaning on a mop at Taco Bell --
creatures strange as dragons or eels.

Balanced on a kitchen stool, each gives counsel
arcane as any oracle's. Bruce claims school
is harshing my mellow. Joe longs to date

a tattooed girl, because he wants a woman
willing to do stuff she'll regret.
They've come to lead my son

into his broadening spiral.
Someday soon, the tether
will snap. I birthed my own mom

into oblivion. The night my son smashed
the car fender then rode home
in the rain-streaked cop car, he asked, Did you

and Dad screw up so much?
He'd let me tuck him in,
my grandmother's wedding quilt

from 1912 drawn to his goateed chin. Don't
blame us, I said. You're your own
idiot now. At which he grinned.

The cop said the girl in the crimped Chevy
took it hard. He'd found my son
awkwardly holding her in the canted headlights,

where he'd draped his own coat
over her shaking shoulders. My fault,
he'd confessed right off.

Nice kid, said the cop.

-- From Mary Karr's latest volume of poetry, Sinners Welcome

A transcript follows.

Join Book World Live each Tuesday at 3 p.m. ET for a discussion based on a story or review in each Sunday's Book World section.

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Mary Karr: Before the WASHINGTON POST started POET'S CHOICE, no major paper had trusted either poetry or the American public enough to devote space to their intersecting. Starting with my mentor Robert Hass, they've had extraordinary columnists, and I've felt slightly daunted putting my size 7 feet into their big shoes. From Hass to Rita Dove, Ed Hirsch, and Robert Pinsky. But it's the luckiest piece of cultural jury duty I ever snagged, for it allows me to enter public conversation about the poems closest to me heart

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Washington, D.C.: I know this is a poet's question (in what isn't supposed to be a poetry-based chat), but maybe you'll answer it anyway --

How do you see your use of form in your poetry? Is is something you strive for or does it just come naturally? How does it help (or hinder) your writing and revision process?

Thanks,

Billy

washingtonpost.com: It is certainly a poetry-based chat - Mary is taking questions on all kinds of writing. Poets are very welcome here!!

Mary Karr: I always have a noise in my head, and if I'm trying to use a pattern, I look at somebody who did the pattern better than I did--if it's a sonnet, say, Shakespeare or John Donne. If it's a certain kind of dactylic hexameter, say, some of Ezra Pound. The pattern usually comes after the first few lines. I read so much poetry I have the noise in my head. Thnx, MK

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Arlington, Va.: I don't have a question, I just want to tell you that The Liars' Club is one of my favorite books. It is so real and so beautifully written.

Mary Karr: Thnx for the pat on the head. One never tires of hearing nice things about one's lit'rary efforts.

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Shreveport, La.: How much do you enjoy discussing your faith in Q-and-A things like this? How do you rate the poetical books of the Bible and how much of it do you believe is true?

Mary Karr: I can't not discuss the faith so central to how I try to live. (Not that the Catholic Church would vote me a worthy spokesperson.) I love the poetic books of the Bible--probably read the psalms several times per week, and the Song of Solomon. They're right up there with Shakespeare. I think the prophets who wrote them were divinely inspired and telling the greatest truths they knew. I've read a lot about what's historically verifiable, and for the Greek Bible so much is--There are multiple sources that the Lord's Prayer, for instance, was spoken by Jesus--also for the facts of the crucifixion and the trial of Jesus. But I also believe that UNOFFICiAL facts are relevant. I mean, they're pretty sure the Nativity didn't happen as written, because people wouldn't have traveled to their birth places to pay taxes. But while my weight on my driver's license is OFFICIAL, I trust as more true somebody who glanced me on the street and noticed I could use a few pounds. Thanks for this provocative line of questions

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Minneapolis, Minn.: Thank you for taking questions today. I admire and enjoy your work.

Are there any recent memoirs (that are at least somewhat ambitious in literary terms) that you especially like or dislike and why?

Also: You have had a fairly public conversion to the Catholic church. Do you feel any need to confront or come to terms with the various controversies associated with the church (governance, place of women, contraception, evolution, etc. etc.)?

Mary Karr: Thx, Hmm--lotta bad memoirs. I get blamed for them, but I swear it's not my fault. They don't blame Don DeLillo or Toni Morrison for crappy novels! Good ones: Michael Herr's DISPATCHES, Richard Wright's BLACK BOY, Nabokov's SPEAK, MEMORY, Mary McCarthy's CATHOLIC GIRLHOOD...I don't actively lobby the Church hierarchy. I'm afraid, like many American Catholics, I just talk to me fellows and grumble, But there are many of us grumbling about there not being a place for women in the priesthood with Magdalen and Mary had such an active role in Jesus's ministry--don't seem right. I do talk to priests about it, and they talk to me. I also practice contraception when I'm lucky enough to get to

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Phoenix, Arizona: Mary Karr has such a searing facility with the language. How does she select the poets she profiles in her column each Sunday? The range is more eclectic than just dead/living, male/female. She moves her rapier intellect from Dickinson to Milburn and leaves the reader wishing for more column inches every time. Bravo, Maestra

Mary Karr: How kind for Phoenix to weigh in. My most favorite sister conceivable lives there with her darling hubby. I read a lot, but I don't select from my reading. I select instead from my rereading. If something has held up over time for me, if it's something with lines I innately remember, it seems a good prospect. I don't pay much attention to gender or nationality or race. I assume that will all level out. Like, after the Obama win, I did four columns on African American poets--not on purpose, I think, just because his seminal speech on race inspired me to reread some poets I adore. Glad you w ish for more column inches. You're welcome to contribute them. Thanx for your kind words

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Arlington, Virginia: I am still haunted by The Liars' Club where you wrote those incredibly damning words about the teenage boy who raped you when you were a small child. Did anything ever come of this?

Mary Karr: What came of it that's most moving was a neighbor girl who came forward who'd been raped by the same boy repeatedly starting when she was, like, 7. She and I had some talks that were healing for me and I hope for her. Forgiveness is part of my faith, so I forgive him, while I don't ignore that the act was horrific and traumatic

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Kingston Springs, Tenn.: What do you think is the best thing about contemporary American poetry?

What do you think is the worst thing about contemporary American poetry?

Mary Karr: The best thing? The variety of voices! You can have a line that sounds like Shakespeare, then--if you help the reader with transitions--you can shift to street idiom. Nothing is forbidden. The worst thing? This openness can breed a lack of discipline--a sense that the newest thing is--inherently--the best. So you have people with no sense of history about the various noises and forms teaching people who think poetry didn't exist before, say, 1980.

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Houston, Texas: You seem to have a love/hate relationship with the city you grew up. I've noticed that it is often a character in itself in your books. I would love to hear you discuss this relationship further.

Mary Karr: I did grow up near you in Houston, and my town was way swampier and uglier with way worse pollution and few bookstores. Plus no Neimans. But I feel about it the way certain veterans must feel about Vietnam. To survive in that place, you had to develop a way of speaking and viewing the world that accommodates suffering but also strives to make sense of it. I love the idiom I grew up with--the people and the language, the spicy gumbo and the cherry snowcones. They are a marvel, and I'm richer for having lived among them.

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Rockville, Md.: What is the most effective way to get better as a poet/improve one's work over time?

Mary Karr: Read, read and read and read, and try to learn to read back in history, which I found boring at first, because everything sounded so old-fashioned. So I'd find a contemporary poet I liked, then find out who her influences were and read that, and so on until I was reading Homer. Also, rewrite. I rewrite extensively, obsessively, and I'm told I'm v. good at taking critiques. if I can make a poem clearer for the reader, that's more important than protecting my initial impulse. Without the reader, the poem is dead.

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From Texas: I hope you wouldn't mind answering my burning question. Leechfield is fictional, correct? What is the real name of the town you grew up in?

Mary Karr: I never say the name of the real town, because too many people I wasn't in touch with who didn't get a chance to cut themselves (the fire chief, school principal, swimming pool manager) never got the chance to confirm or deny how I remembered them. My close friends and family agreed to be written about, but those poor individuals deserve someone more loving doing their portraits. it would be like, maybe, publishing a bad or blurry photo you took of somebody at your family barbeque. You wouldn't publish it in PEOPLE. GOOD QUESTION

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Houston, Texas: Your place of birth is such an integral part of your writing. Its almost as if its a character in and of itself. Would you mind elaborating on your relationship with "Leechfield"?

Thanks so much!

Mary Karr: THNX. I just wrote about how pivotal the idiom of speech, the food and culture, and the oral tradition are. When you grow up in a place that ugly, you have to develop a personality to stay amused. So I found the world's most amazing people there -- many still my best friends -- from Cherry, John Cleary and Doonie and Stacey, plus my sister. Stacey just e-mailed me last night asking if I remembered trying to get them to do Albert Camus's CALIGULA -- a violent horrible play -- as the school play in 11th grade. I love those people down there. Plus good gumbo

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Round Rock, Texas: To me, the Bible is like poetry. What do you you think?

Mary Karr: Absolutely. I love the gospel of John particular in the New Testament, also Corinthians, also Revelations. But the greatest poetry in the world may be the psalms or The Song of Solomon. Thanks for letting people in on our poetic secret

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Reston, Va.: None of my high school daughter's English teachers include poetry in their class selections, so she knows nothing beyond a few Shakespearean sonnets and Dr. Seuss. Any poetry collections you'd recommend for teens?

Mary Karr: This is such a good question. I loved ee cummings in high school, and the TS Eliot of J Alfred Prufrock. There aren't many good anthologies anymore, because everybody is afraid of leaving somebody out and making them mad. Many of the contemporary poets I've been picking have good books--young Terrance Hayes, for one, Yusef Komunyakaa, Robert Hass, Louise Gluck, Heather McHugh, Ed Hirsch....Maybe the columns will give you some ideas. Charles Simic also

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Your poem: The poem about your son on this page is marvelous! Can you tell us some more about it - and what did your son think of it?

Mary Karr: My son heard me read that at the White House a few years back, and he was surprised, but he couldn't stop grinning. I warned him in advance I was planning to read it. But he remains sadly disinterested in my literary endeavors. He's interested in me as a supplier of funds and a maker of waffles. Me as a poet? Puts him to sleep.

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Phoenix, Arizona: Memoir has to be the most brutal art form on earth. It requires that you offend every single human unit who ever crossed your celestial path, or lie like a dog. Where does a diminutive beauty like Karr find the courage for such a contact sport? And how did she execute it with such aplomb that she remains so beloved by family and friends?

Mary Karr: My sister always says when I started publishing memoir, I also stopped calling home collect! SO generating income--however it offends your circumspect relatives and friends--tickled them all. Also, I do two things: a) notify people before a book is begun and sort of clear material that might be sensitive for them--give them a chance to veto it in advance, b) never let them see it while I'm working on it, c) give them finished pages to agree to or alter. They're so generous. I also write more out of love than venom. Other than my grandmother and a few pedophiles, I mostly don't write about anybody who isn't, in some ways, a hero of mine

Mary Karr: I said I did two things, then listed three. My mind is made of corn mush

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Dallas, Texas: Does the "place" of poetry differ significantly from than that of memoir? In other words, is the impetus for both forms of writing somehow similar? And, also, since your memoirs emerge from a painful place, both geographically and psychologically, doesn't it make for a hard life? I guess I'm suggesting that you don't have the luxury of exiting old territory but are forced to stick with it to "mine" it for meaning. I'm a huge fan, btw.

Mary Karr: EXCELLENT QUESTION! I think we're doomed to our genres rather than choosing them. Poetry privileges music and language, and prose of all kinds privileges information. I think my life is easier every year, partly because of the love of my family and friends and the work of teaching. The writing seems painful, but it's sort of all I know how to do for a living. I'm like an old football player with a bad knee. I just keep getting out there and feel it's wrong to complain about being hit. Thnx

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washingtonpost.com: Mary - this is Elizabeth, the chat producer - for the parent looking for poetry for a high schooler, former Poet Laureate Billy Collins did an anthology called Poetry 180 that is geared toward high school students - they are meant to be read one a day during the school year. More info at the Poetry 180 website.

Mary Karr: That's one anthology. I've gotta say, none of them seems perfect, so I'm bad about reading them, because I'm loath to promise somebody all great poems then have some saggy ones slipped in. I can't say that about Billy's anthology, because I haven't read it

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Ft. Myers, Florida: Your views on age having an effect on writing -- Do you feel one gets better with age? Just finished "The Road" by Cormac Mc Carthy and was stunned that in his 70's he is getting even better.

Mary Karr: Cormac McCarthy is THE BOMB. We have the same agent, and about every three or four years, I get a chance to meet him, but every time, something has diverted it. I hope I get better as a writer, though I'm getting dumber, I'm afraid to say. (My 22 yr old son can attest to my inability to recall anything and my tendency to say the same thing a zillion time). Here's hoping

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Washington, D.C.: Is it true, as I read somewhere, that you are working on another memoir? I hope so - and if true, what does it cover?

Mary Karr: I am working about 12-14 hours each day to finish my third (and please!) last memoir, which will be called LIT. It covers my descent into being a drunk, and my climb into becoming a Catholic, which for me improved my life inordinately. it's also about raising a kid when you didn't have much maternal input of your own. It'll be out next fall, I think. Thnx for asking

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Chevy Chase, Md.: Ms. Karr,

Thanks for doing this chat.

The poems of yours that I like best effectively marry both the religious and secular (or profane) worlds, allowing each to inform the other. I'm wondering if you could write a bit about how your Catholicism has influenced and provided material for your writing.

Mary Karr: The world was muddy and dark for me before my conversion. Beyond simple depression, which I took medication for and would again, I just MISSED a lot because I was so inward. I feel like I live in technicolor. Also, it's a strange thing to say, but spiritual and religious people who impress me most have a REALISTIC quality. They seem to see things as they actually are and strive to be better inside certain realities. All religions have this, I think, among their best worshippers. Thanks for the deep question

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New Brunswick, N.J.: It has been a few years, but for some reason (perhaps I identified) I recalled the vivid descriptions of alcoholic adults and corporal punishments and the frightening world as seen from the eyes of a child. You wrote a great reflection of these sentiments. How painful or difficult was it writing such descriptions?

Mary Karr: Writing the descriptions was way easier than living the event,. I promise, but still hard. Some days after writing, I'd collapse in a heap and sleep as if I'd driven cross country. but I'd had a lot of therapy. My mother was sober then, my daddy passed away. It was a time of psychic peace, or I could never have done it. Thanks

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Rockville, Md.: Who are the poets that you enjoy reading now?

Mary Karr: I read a lot of old stuff. I read the psalms in the Bible, and the Book of Job, plus John in the New Testament. I love Hopkins and Donne for religious feeling. I love Dickinson. The stuff I'm drawn to reread I'm more certain about praising. Thanks for the question

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Mary Karr: I'm curious how many of you are writers yourself--even if you do it privately--just wondering. And what kind of stuff do you write?

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Trenton, N.J.: Do you have a preference for writing poetry or prose, or might it be that your mood changes over time and you might prefer one at some times and the other at other times? What causes you to decide which to write?

Mary Karr: It's sad to say that I currently write the memoirs because they pay me. It's otherwise too hard to do. If I were less venal, I wouldn't write them. It's a form I love to read but not write. I adore doing the columns for this paper--that feels like luck. The poetry is hard, but it's more absorbing technically. I get wrapped up in the noise and music, and in the writing process that can soften the discomfort of hard subject matter. Thanks.

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Atlantic City, N.J.: You told one interviewer you'd rather get a whupping than do another interview. How does online discussion compare to a whupping?

Mary Karr: I like online discussion more than I thought I would. The difference is that I feel I'm talking to one person (a stupid illusion, I know). Before today, I never even did instant messaging. I'm always interested in other humans, and this feels like I'm learning about other people's thoughts and concerns. In other media, I feel like an employee of my former self, or like some lying Bible salesman. I don't know why. it just feels too conspicuous and shameful. I also hate having my picture taken and am--you'd never guess this--shy in some ways

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Mary Karr: Just want to thank everybody for reading POET'S CHOICE. Without readers: no column, then I'd slip into lassitude. Plus the questions today made this easy. MK

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