Poetry Quotes: Mary Karr

Welcome to Poetry Quotes.......today's featured poet is Mary Karr. Karr's first book of poetry, Viper Rum, knocked me out with its direct verse and her essay on poetics. Though she considers herself first and foremost a poet, it was Karr's tragicomic memoirs, The Liar's Club and Cherry, that first made her name. I think you'll enjoy her take on the poetry of today......




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"Mary Karr cautions her students against a few "evils" that threaten poetry's growth: a lack of clarity and a lack of unity. If she were to write a follow-up to her 1991 essay "Against Decoration," published and originally in Parnassus and again in Viper Rum, Karr says she'd call it "Against the Fragment."

"People publish poems now and if there's one to six lines in a poem they like, they consider it a successful poem," she says. "What about a poem that has an actual shape? I mean, not necessarily rhythmical, formal--a sonnet or a villanelle--but what about having a poem that advances instead of just being a stream of consciousness or a series of moments completely tied around some theme.

"There are so many people that say, "I love this book!" And I'll say, "Show me the poem that's great in this book." And they'll say, "Well, these six lines." Six lines? What about having a whole poem? What about [Yeats'] 'The Second Coming'? What about 'The Fish,' by Elizabeth Bishop? What about 'Black Stone Lying on a White Stone,' by Cesar Vallejo? What about all these poems in which every single line is great and the poem advances in some way so that the end of it is completely differen and new and fresh from the beginning? You have the sense of a whole work of art as opposed to a handful of interesting lines.

"There's still an astonishing lack of clarity," she adds. "I don't understand how people can publish poems other people don't understand. I mean, what's the point? I don't get it. It's a wicked mistake." Karr attributes some of this fragmentation and obfuscation to poets being afraid of using the autobiographical I.

"There's a way where, in order to avoid using the autobiographical I, people just bring in references to the stuff they've read. And they assume that, because they're just referring to things they've read instead of events that actually happened to them, they have some kind of intellectual cachet that pays the freight. "As though," she laughs, "what you've read is not part of your autobiographical experience...."

--from an interview by Lauren Mosko in 2009 Poet's Market, by the Editors of Writer's Digest

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Mary Karr is the author of four books of poetry and two memoirs, with a third memoir, Lit, forthcoming from Viking. She is also working on another collection of poetry. Karr has won numerous awards for her poetry, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Pen/Martha Albrand Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and more.