Mary Karr & the Poetics of Conversion

Mary Karr & the Poetics of Conversion By Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

ary Karr is not your average religious poet. In the

midst of a moderately successful career as a poet and

a wildly successfully career as a memoirist, Karr was asked

by the editor of Poetry magazine to write an essay about her

mid-life conversion to Catholicism after what she describes

as "a lifetime of undiluted agnosticism." Karr agreed,

though reluctantly:

To confess my unlikely Catholicism in Poetry—the journal that

first published some of the godless twentieth-century

disillusionaries of J. Alfred Prufrock and his pals, feels

like an act of perversion kinkier than any dildo-wielding

dominatrix could manage on HBO's Real Sex Extra. ("Facing

Altars : Poetry & Prayer," 69)

The resulting essay, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer," the

opening lines of which appear above, was published in the

November 2005 issue of the magazine, demonstrating Karr's

own sense of herself as atypical. Though originally

springing from the same source—the human need to imagine the

ineffable and express the unknowable through language and

metaphor—poetry and religion have been unlikely bedfellows

for most of the previous century and all of the current one.

Poets, philosophers, and literary critics spent much of the

20th century dismantling religious orthodoxies, so much so

it was understood that anyone who subscribed to such

outmoded structures of belief was unsophisticated, at best,

and unintelligent, at worst. In the midst of this cultural

POET DATA

Mary Karr

Years: 1955- Birthplace:

USA

Language(s):

English

Forms: Open form, nonce forms, variations on received forms

Subjects: Faith, Love, Sexuality, Violence

Entry By: Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

and intellectual milieu, Karr was baptized in 1996 into the

Catholic Church, a choice that prompted a friend to send her

a postcard that read, "'Not you on the Pope's team. Say it

ain't so!'" ("Facing Altars," 69). In the eras of Dante,

John Donne, John Milton, and, to some extent, Gerard Manley

Hopkins, the religious poet was practically an

inevitability; in the present era, she seems a walking

contradiction.

In some ways, Karr's very public conversion is a

manifestation of her own instinctive sense of the ancient

affinity between poetry and religion: "Poets were my first

priests, and poetry itself my first altar" ("Facing Altars,"

70). Nonetheless, Mary Karr is well aware of the tensions

inherent in being out of step with one's time, and it is

precisely these tensions that lend her work its energy, its

authority, and its authenticity. The winner of multiple

prestigious awards for her writing, including Guggenheim and

NEA fellowships and several Pushcart prizes, Karr has

achieved something rare: recognition of the value of her

work by the literary establishment as well as by readers

(many of whom are not poetry lovers) in search of a voice

that can articulate the challenges of enacting belief in a

culture of unbelief.

Life

Born in 1955 in Groves, Texas, a gulf town dominated by oil

refineries and chemical plants, Mary Karr was the daughter

of an oil worker and an amateur artist. Her unlovely

childhood is portrayed in appalling, yet compelling, detail

QUICK NAV

in her best-selling memoir, The Liar's Club (1995). This, the

first of her trilogy of memoirs, focuses on the events that

took place between 1961 and 1963. She and her sister, Lecia,

were raised by ill-matched, difficult parents, their

childhood shaped by alcoholism, mental illness, substance

abuse, and neglect. They were also shaped, however, by a

passion for art and a reverence for colorful language. The

title of her memoir is drawn from this period of her life:

her father, "a black-belt barroom storyteller," would gather

with a group of men in the back room of the local bar to

swap tall tales—a group aptly nicknamed by some of the local

women as "The Liar's Club" ("Facing Altars," 73). Young Mary

absorbed her father's gift for story-telling, extravagant

language, and the artful use of local idiom—all elements

clearly visible and audible in her poetry and prose. From

her mother, an avid reader of serious literature, Karr

inherited a love of poetry. "In my godless household, poems

were the closest we came to sacred speech… I remember Mother

bringing me Eliot's poems from the library, and she not only

swooned over them, she swooned over my swooning over them,

which felt close as she came to swooning over me" ("Facing

Altars," 71). From an early age, Karr learned that language

was a means and method of arresting attention, engendering

love, and reshaping a life consisting of human suffering and

failures into powerful story and song. In the shadow of the

refinery towers, against the backdrop of dysfunctional

family drama (which included a psychotic episode wherein

Karr's mother nearly killed her two daughters), she

memorized Shakespeare and scribbled poems in her diary. She

also wrote in those pages at age eleven her plans for her

future career—"to write ½ poetry and ½ autobiography"—a

description that has proven both prophetic and eerily

accurate (Cherry, 25).

After graduating from high school, Karr left her hometown

(for good, as it turned out), and traveled with friends to

California where she became part of the drug-and-alcohol-

laden surfer/hippie counterculture. Karr recounts these

adolescent years in some detail in the sequel to her first

memoir, Cherry (2000). Yet even as she rolls joints on the

beach, trips on hallucinogens, and wakes up beside strange

boys, Karr manages, miraculously, not to lose track of her

literary calling. "Humming through me like a third rail was

poetry," she writes, "the myth that if I could shuffle the

right words into the right order, I could get my story

straight …." (Lit, 48). Later that year, she enrolled in

Macalester College in Minneapolis; there she would begin the

serious work of writing.

Karr proved to be an erratic student. After a leave of

absence on the heels of her sophomore year, wherein she

returned to her native Texas (though not her hometown) to

work for a few months, Karr came back to Minneapolis,

tending bar at night and writing poetry during the day.

During this period, Karr attended a poetry conference and

made the acquaintance of a number of poets she admired,

among them outspoken African-American poet Etheridge Knight:

He spoke of poetry as an oral art (this was pre-poetry-slam

America). Without pages, he half-sang the folk tale of

Shine, a porter on the Titanic strong enough to swim to

safety … This language both rocked me back and echoed how

Daddy talked. (Lit, 51-52)

Karr then joined a private poetry workshop Knight held at

his house. The sessions were challenging and

confrontational, well fueled by marijuana and alcohol, but

the young poet honed her craft: "[T]he first poems of mine

that ever saw print were sent out under Etheridge's aegis,

in envelopes he paid postage on" (Lit, 53). In addition, her

mentor helped her to land a job as poet-in-residence for the

city of Minneapolis at the age of 22. Karr also lucked into

her first teaching job, a poetry class in a group home for

"fairly functional retarded women," an experience that

confirmed her sense of the central role poetry would play in

her life:

The way an uncertain believer might stumble onto proof of

God, the women at the group home fully converted me to the

Church of Poetry … Such a small, pure object a poem could

be, made of nothing but air, a tiny string of letters, maybe

small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could

blow everybody's head off. (Lit, 54, 59)

Encouraged by Knight, as well as by one of her Macalester

professors who recognized her talent, Walter Mink, Karr

finished her BA and entered a low-residency MFA program at

Goddard College in Vermont, where she earned her MFA in

1979.

Karr recounts the years of her life from college through to

the present in her third and final memoir to date, Lit

(2009), the title of which suggests both her full engagement

in a literary life and her struggle with alcoholism.

Graduate school brought Karr into further contact with

mentors who recognized and encouraged her talent, including

Robert Bly, Robert Hass, and, perhaps most significantly,

Tobias Wolff. Writer of extraordinary prose, including his

celebrated memoir, This Boy's Life (1989), Wolff would serve as a

model and a source of inspiration for Karr, both in literary

terms and also in religious terms. Wolff was a Catholic, and

would eventually serve as her sponsor at her baptism.

It was also in graduate school that Karr met Michael

Milburn, a bright young poet from an aristocratic family who

had studied with Robert Lowell at Harvard. They would marry

in 1983 and produce a son, Dev (short for Devereux), but the

marriage would end in divorce in 1991. Balancing a demanding

work life (Karr and Milburn taught college writing courses),

raising a child, and maintaining dual writing careers would

prove difficult for the couple. They also endured the

poverty of itinerant young professors, as Milburn's wealthy

family did not believe in handouts. Karr began to take

solace in drinking and soon found herself thoroughly in the

grip of the alcoholism that had marred her childhood. After

a number of household mishaps and an automobile accident,

Karr became acutely aware of the dangers her drinking posed,

for herself and, especially, her child. She joined

Alcoholics Anonymous to get sober.

Even her successful kicking of her drinking habit could not

cure her ailing marriage. In 1990, Karr accepted a teaching

position at Syracuse University, and the family moved

upstate. A few months later, she and Milburn would separate

amicably, leaving Karr a single mother. During this period,

Karr received a call from editor James Laughlin from New

Directions inquiring whether she had a second collection of

poems ready for publication. (Karr's first collection,

Abacus, had been published in 1987 as part of the Wesleyan

University Press New Poets Series). Once Karr sent off the

manuscript of the book that would be published as The Devil's

Tour (1993), she felt free to begin writing the memoir she

had been planning—in part for artistic purposes, but mostly

in order to produce a book that (unlike poetry collections)

would earn much-needed income. The book that resulted, Liar's

Club, would become a New York Times best-seller, would be

named one of the best books of the year, and would be a

finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award as well

as winner of prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of

Letters.

In 1995, with the publication of her first memoir—and for

the first time in her adult life—Mary Karr enjoyed job

security, financial stability, a reputation as a serious

writer, and a clear sense of her path as an artist. In due

time, she would be given an academic chair, becoming the

Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University. She

would go on to write two additional memoirs and publish two

additional collections of poems, Viper Rum (2001) and Sinners

Welcome (2006), all of which would be greeted with great

acclaim. Though Karr would probably not have predicted this,

she would also go on to become a lyricist, partnering with

Grammy Award winning singer-songwriter, Rodney Crowell, on

Kin (2012), an album of songs inspired by the hardscrabble

East Texas childhoods they shared. More recently, Karr's

last memoir, Lit, has been scheduled to become an HBO series.

Over the years, Karr has garnered numerous honors and awards

for her work; in addition to those already mentioned

( fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the

National Endowment for the Arts, Pushcart Prizes, and the

PEN/Martha Albrand Award), she was awarded a Bunting

Fellowship from Radcliffe College and a Whiting Writer's

Award. All of this success coming before Karr's 60th year

suggests the hopeful prospect that more work—and more

accolades—are likely to follow.

Conversion

As with her memoirs, Karr's poetry is highly

autobiographical, so much so that it is nearly impossible to

separate her life from her work. Her religious conversion is

an integral part of her biography, but because of its

consequences for her writing, it merits special attention.

In her essays, her poems, and in Lit, she narrates the

gradual nature of her conversion (a word that derives from

the Latin "convertere" meaning "to turn," suggesting that

the process is inherently gradual and accomplished by

increments). Upon joining A.A., Karr found herself faced

with the challenge of her life. Unable to stop drinking

through sheer act of will, she was urged by friends to pray

for help: "'But I don't believe in God,'" Karr objected.

Nonetheless, in her desperation, Karr prayed for thirty

days, and, to her amazement, she managed to stay sober:

Ergo, I prayed—not with the misty-eyed glee I'd seen on Song

of Bernadette, nor with the butch conviction of Charlton

Heston playing Moses in Ten Commandments. I prayed with

belligerence, at least once with a middle finger aimed at

the light fixture—my own small unloaded bazooka pointed at

the Almighty. I said Keep me sober, in the morning. I said,

Thanks, at night. ("Facing Altars," 79)

After Karr got her alcoholism under control, her prayer life

continued to develop as she encountered crises of various

kinds, particularly the dissolution of her marriage. A

friend gave her a prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi

(that famed poet-saint), an incantation that begins, "Lord,

make me an instrument of Thy peace," which she recited

nightly with her five-year-old son. Karr credits the prayer—

its patterned language powerful as any poem—with enabling

her to strive to "become an instrument of love and pardon

rather than wallowing in self-pity." About a year later, her

son made what then seemed a strange request: "He wanted to

go to church 'to see if God's there' … Thus we embarked on

God-a-rama—a year spent visiting any temple, mosque, church

or zendo a friend would haul us to" ("Facing Altars," 85).

Karr engaged in this ritual reluctantly at first; despite

her reliance on prayer, she had inherited a deep-seated

cynicism about organized religion from her agnostic parents,

a cynicism which was further shored up by her reading of

existentialist philosophers, including Nietzsche and Sartre,

at a young and impressionable age. In addition, she found

the Catholic Church, in particular, repugnant to her

feminist sensibility. It seemed the last church she would

join, but gradually she relented:

[T]he church's carnality, which seemed crude at the outset—

people lighting candles and talking to dolls—worked its

voodoo on me. The very word incarnation derives from the

Latin in carne: in meat. There is a body on the cross in my

church … [T]hrough the simple physical motions I followed

during the Mass, our bodies standing and sitting and

kneeling in concert, I often felt my mind go quiet, and my

surface difference from others began to be obliterated. …The

exercises during Mass that may rankle a lapsed Catholic as

"empty rituals" made me feel like part of a tribe, in a way,

and the effect carried over in me even after church.

Karr's attraction to Catholicism betrays her deep-seated

preoccupations as a poet with the body, with suffering (and

the possibility of redemption), with the healing power of

ritual, and with the sacramental quality of language.

Engaging in prayer and the sacraments seemed to be another

means of practicing her art: "Poetry had consoled me in the

same way, with Eucharistic qualities … In memorizing the

poems I loved, I 'ate' them, in a way. I breathed as the

poet breathed to recite the words: Someone else's suffering

and passion entered my body to change me, partly by joining

me to others in a saving circle." ("Facing Altars," 86-87).

In practicing this new religion, Karr found herself on

familiar ground.

The Poetics of Conversion

Karr's conversion to Catholicism might be seen as the

logical (if unexpected) consequence for a poet with her

particular interests. Looking back at her first two

collections, Abacus (1987) and The Devil's Tour (1993),

containing poems written well before her baptism in 1996,

one can see quiet but clear adumbrations of what would later

become her characteristic preoccupation with the central

story of Christianity: sin, suffering, and the search for

redemption.

In the opening poem of The Devil's Tour, a book whose title

suggests the Inferno-like terrain poet and reader will

navigate on their Dantesque pilgrimage through these poems,

Karr combines her autobiographical impulse with her concern

for matters of the soul. Set in her hometown, "Coleman"

tells the story of an African-American boy Karr loved who

became a victim of that region's horrific racial violence—a

story which she manages to tell with great poignancy, but

not a whiff of sentimentality. All of its grief and outrage

is implied, conveyed by the clear-eyed narrator through her

exact evocations of the world they inhabited and the ways in

which Karr and Coleman defied the place that sought to claim

and chain them:

Coleman

To while away the mosquito-humming night,

we crawled beneath the oil field fence,

and you straddled the pump as it bucked

a slow-motion rodeo. Fifteen and drunk

on apple wine, hiding in your Afro's shadow,

you wore the bruised imprint

of your father's palm with quiet chivalry.

I loved you inconsolably, though we never

touched: a boy from the docks, a cracker girl

preoccupied with books. We sealed ourselves

behind your van's curved windshield

like figures in a paperweight, played chess

by the dashboard's eerie light, dawn breaking

in chemical-pink sky, refinery towers looming

like giants from a fairy tale.

Once a swarm of boys we'd swapped insults with

since nursery school reared into view,

flung bricks and bottles we hotrodded

just beyond—my hair streaming

against the glass, your a capella song.

And in the book the vigilantes keep

in some back room of some bait shop,

they marked you from then on,

beat knots across your skull,

until your sawtooth smile said you knew

a spray of buckshot already loosed

was flying towards your eyes like stars in negative.

You made the papers as a hunting accident.

And your mom, answering the torn screen door

in the palest flowered dress, claimed God

had shaped you for an early grave.

When I finally caught a Greyhound north,

I wanted only to escape

the brutal limits of that town,

its square chained yards, pumps

that bowed so mindlessly to earth,

the raging pistons of that falling

dynasty. Coleman, you rode that ghost horse

hard and recklessly against the dark,

but could not break it. White pawn

to black knight. I travel always

towards your missing face.

Against the backdrop of the spoiled landscape, refinery

towers and chemical-pink dawns, a world of brutal limits

that draws a clear line of division between black people and

white, the protagonists in the poem enjoy a doomed freedom.

Karr expertly controls the pacing of the poem, allowing the

narrative to unfold in its own good time. Through careful

enjambment and strategically placed caesurae, the first five

tercets of the poem move quickly, capturing the energy and

jeu d'esprit of their illicit friendship. Together in their

little self-made world, (seemingly) safe from the giants who

ruled the realm of day, they have carved out a space for

themselves that seems timeless, private, and inviolable. The

image of the black boy and white girl playing chess inside a

glass paper weight is deeply resonant, setting up the

powerful conclusion of the poem of "white pawn" Karr in

eternal search for her absent "black knight."

In stanzas six through nine, the real world breaks in,

shattering their fragile shelter; at first, in the

relatively innocuous form of the boys who throw rocks and

bottles, material versions of the insults they used to hurl

in nursery school. Still defiant, the protagonists escape,

hair flying in the wind, singing, the tercets still moving

lightly as the characters they describe. Innocent of the

vigilantes who will be soon be gunning for Coleman and the

violence which will overtake them before they can escape,

their joy is poignant. The momentum of the poem is suddenly

stopped dead with the only unenjambed, fully end-stopped

line in the poem: "You made the papers as a hunting

accident." The line, ringing like a death-knell, brings the

narrative to a standstill. Then, gradually, the pace picks

up again with the subsequent lines, beginning with "and,"

recounting the subsequent developments in the story that add

insult to injury. Coleman's own mother doesn't defend her

son: instead of righteous anger, she responds with a

fatalistic capitulation to The Way of the World, acquiescing

to its murderous racism, going so far as to suggest her

son's death was the will of God. This is a god—and a world—

Karr wants no part of, signified by her escape from her

hellhole life via Greyhound bus in the subsequent line.

Yet God is implicit—one might say incarnate—in the poem, in

the figure of Coleman. Coleman is a sacrificial victim, the

bruise he bore "with quiet chivalry" and the "knots across

[his] skull" reminiscent of Christ's beating and crown of

thorns, his identification from the very first line of the

poem with a knight on horseback suggesting Coleman's role in

her life as savior and chevalier. The image of Coleman with

the "sawtooth smile," whose eyes will be put out by the

"negative stars" of buckshot, and whose face will, by the

end of the poem, be "missing," in every grim sense of that

word, is the image of ecce homo, The Man of Sorrows. With

seemingly prophetic foresight, Karr, the future Christian

convert, confesses, "I travel always / towards your missing

face."

The focus of The Devil's Tour is Evil and the multiple forms it

takes. "Don Giovanni's Confessor" must listen to the famous

seducer's loathsome catalogue of paltry behavior, bored and

horrified at the relentlessness of our human appetite and

our capacity for cruelty. The young girl in "Rounds" waits

in the hospital, on suicide watch, reliving in her memory

the sexual abuse she endured at her father's hands. In

"Memoirs of a Child Evangelist," an itinerant preacher takes

advantage of one his young converts to the Lord, forcing

himself "into her quietest place." Karr's poems nearly

always shed light on deep darkness and often give voice to

the despised and neglected, the poems themselves offered as

small but powerful engines of redemption. Implicit in Karr's

moral imagination is the instinctive belief that every human

being matters, no matter how depraved or seemingly

insignificant.

Stylistically, Karr's poetry is remarkable for its

vividness, clarity, and accessibility. Her poems are

grounded in real life (mostly hers), and as such, possess a

concreteness that places the reader squarely within the

world they evoke. Karr's language is both learned and local,

reflecting her broad reading in literature and philosophy

and the slangy/tangy idiom of her East Texas childhood. As a

result, she has created a voice that is unmistakably her

own. The poetic principles behind that voice are most

evident in Karr's celebrated essay, "Against Decoration."

Originally published in Parnassus in 1991, Karr reprinted the

essay in her third collection of poems, Viper Rum (2001), as

an afterword. Like "Facing Altars" in Sinners Welcome,

"Against Decoration" serves as a poetic manifesto, only in

this case the essay establishes the aesthetic, rather than

the theological, grounding of her work. Karr's method of

procedure is typically confrontational. She wrote the essay

in attempt to return poetry to its primary purpose—"to stir

emotion," and to do so in a direct and visceral way without

the distractions of dense idiom or syntax, self-conscious

allusion, or linguistic tricks. She goes about this by

castigating what she perceives to be an overvaluing in

contemporary poetry of ornamentation. Karr names names,

listing the worst offenders (to her mind); these include Amy

Clampitt, James Merrill, John Ashbery, and any number of

poets participating in the neo-formalist movement:

Sadly, the only thing that is news about neo-formalism is

bad news. Rarely before has form been championed as a virtue

in and of itself, and poems judged formally good that lack

any relevance to human experience. Many of the poems … seem

like the husks of poems, forms with the life bled out, the

assumption being that impeccably rhymed and metered verse

will be good regardless of poetic content, or lack thereof.

This new passion for prettiness opposes, I think, the huge

body of formal work that values form only as a relative

quality. ("Against Decoration,"67)

In contrast to the excesses of neo-formalism, the "over-

baroque" surface poetry "that's heavily allusive and

unconcerned with communication," "the glib meaninglessness"

of post-Deconstruction poetics, Karr champions (drawing on

Aristotle) the employment of "everyday words," the judicious

use of metaphor as "seasoning of the meat" rather than

mistaking it for the meat itself, and (drawing on Coleridge)

the balancing of formal concerns (meter, rhyme, and sound)

with concerns for content ("Against Decoration," 51, 61).

These virtues are clearly manifest in her poems, both early

and late. Karr's passion for these aesthetic principles is

on par with the passion she demonstrates in connection with

her theological principles, suggesting that she pursues both

with a kind of religious devotion.

In Karr's most recent collection, Sinners Welcome (2006), the

theological undertones that were implicit in her earlier

work become more explicit. Even as her conversion reified

Karr's long-standing preoccupation with sin, forgiveness and

redemption, it also signaled a new direction in her work.

The title, consisting of a phrase she borrowed from the

banner hung outside of her parish church in Syracuse,

indicates a new openness to specifically religious language

and to direct engagement of theological concepts and images.

In the spirit of "H.C.E.," an acronym often construed to

mean "Here Comes Everybody," the unofficial slogan of the

Catholic church, Karr invites everyone into the parade of

human personalities that march across the pages of her book.

The catalogue includes rapists, murderers, serial killers,

suicides, porn queens, addicts and psychotics. In the

economy of salvation Karr professes, every life is sacred,

no matter how profane.

True to form, these poems are also autobiographical, rooted

in the real life of the poet, and are largely narrative in

impulse. One of the poems, "Delinquent Missive," tells the

tragic story of David Ricardo, a boy Karr once tutored, who

"stabbed his daddy / sixteen times with a fork—Once / for

every year of my fuckwad life." The poem describes in

telling detail his lonely and impoverished childhood, the

neglect he endured, not only by his family and schoolmates,

but also by Karr herself. In a poignant series of lines that

read like a confession, she thanks him for ignoring "when I

saw you wave at lunch—/my flinch." There is no doubting that

David's actions are evil, but he isn't the only sinner in

the poem. Everyone has played some small role in allowing

him to become the sociopath he is and do the dreadful deed

he does, and all are in need of mercy. In the closing lines

of the poem, the narrator ponders David's fate:

… Maybe by now you're ectoplasm,

Or the zillionth winner of the Texas

death penalty sweepstakes. Or you occupy

a locked room with a small

round window held fast by rivets, through which

you are watched. But I hope

some organism drew your care—orchid

or cockroach even, some inmate

in a wheelchair whose steak you had to cut

since he lacked hands.

In this way, the unbudgeable stone

that plugged the tomb hole

in your chest could roll back, and in your sad

slit eyes could blaze

that star adored by its maker.

Here we see Karr's characteristic control, the blend of dark

humor and pathos that keeps the speaker from indulging in

sentimentality, the unswerving look at the brutal facts of

Ricardo's existence. But the speaker also articulates her

"hope," one of the three Christian virtues (along with faith

and love). There is no sin that cannot be forgiven, no

action so horrific it cannot be redeemed. That redemption

she hopes for is described in explicitly biblical images,

the "stone" rolled back from the "tomb hole" an allusion to

Christ's resurrection, the forerunner of the resurrection

she imagines for Ricardo. She even goes so far as to imagine

the "star" that might blaze in "those mudhole eyes" she used

to stare into while tutoring him. What the boy-turned-

patricide lacked in life was love, a love his fellow human

beings were too weak or too greedy to give him, but that his

"maker" is not.

Confrontational as she is, Karr is unafraid to wear her

religion on her sleeve, even at the risk of challenging and

alienating readers who may not share her faith. By the same

token—and true to her calling as a poet—Karr is unafraid to

write religious poetry that challenges and interrogates the

conventions of her adopted religion. Her "Descending

Theology" poems, a series of five poems spread throughout

the volume that are about Christ—specifically addressing the

Nativity, the Incarnation, the Agony in the Garden, the

Crucifixion, and the Resurrection—portray Jesus and his

mother as ordinary, deeply human figures who find themselves

in painful circumstances. Rooted in the Spiritual Exercises

of St. Ignatius Loyola, a vigorous program of prayer and

meditation Karr underwent after her conversion which require

the exercitant to imaginatively participate in key moments

in the life of Christ, Karr's richly imagined scenarios and

fresh, evocative language enable her readers to see these

familiar scenes as they have never been seen before. She

manages to create poems that are strange amalgams of the

outrageous and the reverent, the humorous and the tragic,

the mundane and the transcendent. (Such seeming

contradictions are reminiscent of another gifted Southern

Catholic writer, Flannery O'Connor, whose stories bear these

same qualities.) Nowhere are these qualities more evident

than in Karr's reimagining of the central event of

Christianity, the crucifixion.

Descending Theology: The Crucifixion

To be crucified is first to lie down

on a shaved tree, and then to have oafs stretch you out

on a crossbar as if for flight; then thick spikes

fix you into place.

Once the cross props up and the pole stob

sinks vertically in an earth hole, perhaps

at an awkward list, what then can you blame for hurt

but your own self's burden?

You're not the figurehead on a ship. You're not

flying anywhere, and no one's coming to hug you.

You hang like that, a sack of flesh with the hard

trinity of nails holding you into place.

Thus hung, your rib cage struggles up

to breathe until you suffocate. If God

permits this, one wonders if some less

than loving watcher

watches us. The man on the cross

under massed thunderheads feels

his soul leak away, then surge. Some wind

sucks him into the light stream

in the rent sky, and he's snatched back, held close.

Karr effectively defamiliarizes what is perhaps the most

familiar scene in Western art and Christian mythos in a

number of ways. First, she structures the poem as a basic

primer in the nasty business of crucifixion, complete with

step-by-step instructions. The reader is further distanced

from the horror of what is taking place by the casual

language the speaker uses to describe the scene. The

torturers are not torturers but "oafs," the foot of the

cross is a "pole stob," and the cross does not stand

straight and true but leans "at an awkward list." The event

is not well-executed, but, instead, is a botched job. In

addition, the figure on the cross is not a dramatic one,

noble in its suffering. Instead, the crucified is just "a

sack of flesh," made to seem ridiculous by the descriptions

of what he is not—"a figurehead on a ship," arms

outstretched as if to fly away or to receive a hug.

Yet even as the reader is detached from the experience, she

is simultaneously brought into the center of it though

Karr's ingenious use of the pronoun "you." The victim in the

poem is not Christ, it is us—all of humanity, doomed as we

are to suffer, one by one, and die our lonely, outrageous

deaths. What might seem at first to be merely a tactic to

enable the reader to see the scene anew on closer inspection

emerges as a brilliant means of making a familiar

theological point: in submitting to the incarnation, to life

on earth as a human being and death on the cross, Christ

took on all deaths, all sufferings—only she makes the point

in reverse, putting the reader in Christ's place.

All of Karr's "Descending Theology" poems, as the title

would suggest, achieve the effect of retelling the story of

Christianity in explicitly human terms, through close and

careful evocation of the flesh-and-blood embodiment Christ

shares with human beings. In "Descending Theology: The

Nativity," Mary is a woman who "bore no more than other

women bore." She lies in labor in a stable where "she

writhed and heard / beasts stomp in their stalls, / their

tails sweeping side to side." Her baby emerges from her body

"a sticky grub, flailing / the load of his own limbs." In

"Descending Theology: Christ Human," the God of the universe

wears a disguise, absurd in its sweetness and weakness, "an

infant's head on a limp stalk, / sticky eyes smeared

blind, / limbs rendered useless in a swaddle." In

"Descending Theology: The Garden," Christ weeps, begging for

reprieve from his death sentence, "grieving on his rock

under olive trees, / his companions asleep / on the hard

ground around him / wrapped in old hides." And in

"Descending Theology: The Resurrection," Christ's "hung

flesh" is empty: "Lonely in that void / even for pain, he

missed his splintered feet" having come to love the human

form he inhabited, aching "for two hands made of meat / he

could reach to the end of." Karr further humanizes the

figure of Christ by integrating these poems amidst the

autobiographical ones based on the lives of the ordinary,

flawed humans (herself included) whose stories need to be

told. All is of a piece, Karr implies—the human bound up

with the divine, the sinner bound up with the saint, the

sacred bound up with the secular, the transcendent bound up

with the mundane. Through the miraculous power of language,

the poet is able to bring these seeming contraries into

right relationship with one another and create a vision that

is equally grounded in hard realities and deep mysteries.

Conclusion

Karr's essay, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer," appears as

an Afterword in Sinners Welcome, enabling the reader to locate

these poems in the context of her conversion. In some ways,

the essay serves the same purpose that her memoirs do,

allowing the reader to see her poems as arresting, luminous

moments, still frames or isolated outtakes from the moving

footage of her life. Through this artful combination of

poetry and prose—" ½ poetry and ½ autobiography"—Karr has

created her own mythos, a narrative of her earthly sojourn

that follows the archetypal pattern of sin, suffering, and

redemption. Her extraordinary talent has earned her a vast

readership, consisting mainly of similarly suffering souls

glad and grateful to accompany her along the journey.

"Poetry and prayer alike offer such instantaneous connection

—one person groping from a dark place to meet with another

in an instant that strikes fire" ("Facing Altars," 92). It

is this communion with other human beings that Karr aims for

as a writer, and, fortunately for her readers, achieves.

Works Cited

Mary Karr, "Against Decoration," in Viper Rum (New York:

Penguin, 2001), pp. 49-72.

-------, Cherry (New York: Penguin, 2000).

-------, "Coleman," in The Devil's Tour (New York: New Directions,

1986), pp. 1-2.

-------, "Don Giovanni's Confessor," in The Devil's Tour (New York:

New Directions, 1986), p 3.

-------, "Delinquent Missive," in Sinners Welcome (New York:

HarperCollins, 2006), p. 11.

-------, "Descending Theology: Christ Human," in Sinners Welcome

(New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 31.

-------, "Descending Theology: The Crucifixion," in Sinners

Welcome (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 52.

-------, "Descending Theology: The Garden," in Sinners Welcome

(New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p 38

-------, "Descending Theology: The Nativity," in Sinners Welcome

(New York: HarperCollins, 2006), pp. 9-10.

-------, "Descending Theology: The Resurrection," in Sinners

Welcome (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 61.

-------, "Facing Altars: Poetry & Prayer," in Sinners Welcome

(New York: HarperCollins, 2006), pp. 69-93.

-------, The Liars' Club (New York: Penguin, 1995).

-------, Lit (HarperCollins, 2009).

-------, "Memoirs of a Child Evangelist," in The Devil's Tour (New

York: New Directions, 1986), pp. 24-25.

-------, "Rounds," in The Devil's Tour (New York: New Directions,

1986), pp. 10-11.