by Mary Karr
church
lift its hand, only once, just once, for me….
Prayer has yielded comfort and direction—all well and good. But imagine my horror when I began to have experiences of joy.
“You were not meant for pleasure, you were meant for joy,” Thomas Merton wrote. I’m still a great acolyte of pleasure—the perfect plate of stinging-nettle tagliatelle; the taxicab kiss; the oiled heel of the masseur’s hand sloping off my lower back, leaving a wake of release. For me, joy arrives in the body (where else would it find us?), yet doesn’t originate there. Nature never drew me into joy as it does others, but my fellow creatures (God’s crown of creation) often spark joy in me: kids on a Little League diamond in full summer—even idly tossing their mitts into the air; the visual burst of a painted Basquiat angel in Everlast boxing shorts at the Brooklyn Museum last week (can’t stop thinking about it).
Add love of someone into the interaction, and the transformation has the weight of animal history behind it. My seventeen years’ son at night in a winter blizzard buries our kitten in a shoebox so I don’t have to see her run over—his snow-flushed face later breaking the news to me—my grief countered by radical joy at his kindness.
In the right mind-set, the faces that come at me on the New York street are like Pound’s apparitions, “petals on a wet, black bough.” For me, joy always involves breaking out of myself toward someone else. Every year my students lend me sufficient awe to let me fall in love with poetry as if for the first time. Only empathy wakes me from the plodding doldrums I’m inclined to. There’s always joy in seeing how others see, even when it also entails a stab of pain. I’m thinking of the dude who sometimes sleeps in my doorway wearing a Hefty garbage bag tied around his neck—like a superhero’s cape! Excuse me, he says, carefully rearranging himself as I step over him. My admiration for this courtliness brings an odd joy with it.
But nothing can maim a poet’s practice like joy. As Henry de Montherlant noted, “Happiness writes white.” Few poets—in this century or any other—have founded an opus on joy. We can all drum up a few ecstatic poems here and there, but poetry has often spread the virus of morbidity. It’s been shared comfort for the dispossessed. Yes, we have Whitman opening his arms to “the blab of the pave.” We have James Wright breaking into blossom, but he has to step out of his body to do so. We have the revelatory moments of Tranströmer and the guilty pleasure and religious striving of Milosz. W.H. Auden captured the ethos when he wrote, “The purpose of poetry is disenchantment.” Poetry in the recent past hasn’t allowed us much joy. My own efforts to lighten this otherwise dour new collection seem pale. The poems about Christ salted through the book spend way more time on crucifixion than resurrection. I’ve written elegies galore, love poems bitter as those of Catullus. I’ve written from scorched-earth terror, and longing out the wazoo. My new aesthetic struggle is to accommodate joy as part of my literary enterprise, but I still tend to be a gloomy and serotonin-challenged bitch.
Shortly after the attacks on 9/11, I was asked to read for The New Yorker’s benefit and struggled with whether or not to include Holocaust survivor Paul Celan’s agonized poem about the digging in mass graves. It moved from heavy resignation to fury at a God whose universe contained the graves’ possibility:
There was earth inside them, and
they dug.
They dug and they dug, so their day
went by for them, their night.
And they did not praise God, who, so they heard,
wanted all this,
who, so they heard, knew all this.
They dug and heard nothing more;
they did not grow wise, invented no song,
thought up for themselves no language.
They dug.
(translated from German by Michael Hamburger)
The cadence of the poem drummed out the relentless dirge of a people’s grief, but was it perhaps too dark? The digging at Ground Zero was only blocks away, and perhaps the poem would fall on the audience like another blow. Celan wound up a suicide, after all.
A pal ultimately convinced me to read it. He reminded me that its conclusion suggests not just digging toward the lost, but also a collective digging into history, how one person in despair and loneliness digs toward the salvation of someone else—even if the other is only saved through memory. The poem concludes with a moment of awakening, the sound of a ring striking metal as one human being reaches another. Celan shifts his longing to a bittersweet nursery rhyme cadence that follows the German: O einer, o keiner, o niemand, o du.
On one, o none, o no one, o you:
Where did the way lead when it led nowhere?
you dig, and I dig, and I dig towards you,
and on our finger the ring awakes.
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. It’s a ring that’s struck on “our finger” (actually it looks like “the finger” in the German)—everyone’s finger. We are married to each other, even in (especially in?) death, the poem tells us.
Rewind to last winter: my spiritual wasteland, when I received a request from Poetry to write about my faith. It was the third such request I’d gotten in a little more than a week, and it came from an editor I felt I owed in some ways. How many times did Peter deny knowing Christ?
I know, I know, my skeptical reader. It’s only my naive faith that makes such a simple request (times three) seem like a tap on the shoulder from the Almighty, but for one whose experience of joy has come in middle age on the rent and tattered wings of depression and disbelief, it suffices. Having devoted the first half of my life to the dark, I feel obliged to locate any pinpoint of light now. And writing this essay did fling open a window so some column of sun shone down on me again. When I hit my knees again during Lent, I felt God’s sturdy presence, and I knew right off it wasn’t God who’d checked out in the first place.
Milosz, who dubbed himself the “least normal person in Father Chomski’s class,” describes the sense of alert presence prayer can yield in “Late Ripeness”—a lit-up poem of the type I aspire to write:
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.
One after another my former lives were departing
like ships together with their sorrow.
And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than before.
I was not separated from people, grief and pity joined us.
We forget—I kept saying—that we are all children of
the King….
That’s why I pray and poetize: to be able to see my brothers and sisters despite my own (often petty) agonies, to partake of the majesty that’s every sinner’s birthright.
HELL’S KITCHEN
JULY 2005
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Ongoing gratitude to Brooks Haxton for his example, his hatchet, and his pool shark’s eye.
My editor, Courtney Hodell, never fails at trim and gusset, cross-stich or love knot.
Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Edward Hirsch, and Stuart Dybek all tried to keep my butcher’s thumb off the scale. Rodney Crowell and Awadagin Pratt provided the music.
Thanks to Dean Catherine Newton and William Safire for helping to carve a home for me at Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation also funded me after eighteen applications.
Some of these poems appeared in the following newspapers or magazines:
The New Yorker: “Pathetic Fallacy,” “The Choice,” “Orphanage,” “A Blessing from My Sixteen Years’ Son,” “Last Love,” “Still Memory,” “Hurt Hospital’s Best Suicide Jokes.”
The Atlantic Monthly: “Sinners Welcome,” “Who the Meek Are Not,” “Meditatio.”<
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Poetry: “Métaphysique du Mal,” “Revelations in the Key of K,” “A Tapestry Figure Escapes for Occupancy in the Real World, Which Includes the Death of Her Mother,” “Disgraceland.” From the Descending Theology series: “Christ Human,” “The Resurrection.”
Parnassus: “A Major.” From the Descending Theology series: “The Nativity,” “The Crucifixion,” “Coat Hanger Bent into Halo,” “Reference for Ex-Man’s Next.”
Ploughshares: “Elegy for a Rain Salesman.”
The Kenyon Review: “This Lesson You’ve Got,” “Requiem.”
Cincinnati Review: “For a Dying Tomcat Who’s Abandoned His Former Hissing and Predatory Nature.”
Corresponding Voices: “The Ice Fisherman,” “Pluck,” “Winter Term’s End,” “The First Step.”
Best American Poetry 2005: “A Blessing from My Sixteen Years’ Son.”
Washington Post Book World: “Descending Theology: The Crucifixion.”
The Paris Review: “Delinquent Missive,” “Miss Flame, Apartment Bound, as Undiscovered Porn Star.”
Other anthologies also ran poems: The Poet’s Choice, Sweet Jesus, The Norton Introduction to Poetry. Some poems were anthologized on radio cassettes and CDs: Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, and All Things Considered.
For spiritual aid and sacred hilarity, Patti Macmillan’s hand has been on my shoulder thirteen lucky years. My other Virgil was Paul Stephen Goggi, Jr. My physical trainer was Steve Friedman.
Also my presumed thesis students, Sarah Harwell and Courtney Queeney, taught me way more than I did them. Praise them and their sister Laments for crucial instruction in lake-effect weeping.
About the Author
MARY KARR was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry in 2005 and has won Pushcart prizes for both her poetry and her essays. She has also published two bestselling memoirs: The Liars‘ Club, which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and Cherry. She has received the Whiting Award and the Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe College. Her poetry appears frequently in the New Yorker. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
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Copyright
SINNERS WELCOME. Copyright © 2006 by Mary Karr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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