Women Poets – June 28, 2019

This event was for reading women poets.  Seven readers came together for an evening of wonderful poetry in which two new poets were introduced, never before read at KRG – Mary Karr and Andrée Chedid. 

Here are some pictures taken by Geetha and Priya.

Shoba, Devika, Kavita, Geetha, Thommo, Priya Pamela (seated)

Sugandhi birthday cake

Geetha & Pamela having the good stuff

Goodies to eat - bhel and gobi bhaji (from Arundhaty), chicken patties, carrot cake and coconut cookies (from Pamela)

Kavita all smiles with the eats

Geetha & Pamela together

Thommo

Adrienne Rich (1929 – 2012)

Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of 2nd half of the 20th century" and credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse."

Her first collection of poetry A Change of World was selected by poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Auden also wrote the introduction. She famously declined the National Medal of Arts, to register her protest of the vote by House Speaker Newt Gingrich to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Adrienne Rich’s father was chairman of pathology at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her mother, Helen, was a concert pianist and a composer. Her father was Jewish and her mother a Protestant from the South; She was raised as a Christian. Adrienne and her younger sister were home schooled by their mother; this lasted until Adrienne went to the 4th grade.

In 1953, Adrienne Rich married Alfred Haskell Conrad, a professor of economics at Harvard University whom she had met as an undergraduate. She said: "I married in part because I knew no better way to disconnect from my first family. I wanted what I saw as a full woman's life so far as possible.

They settled in Cambridge Massachusetts and had 3 sons - David, Pablo and Jacob.

In 1955, she published her second volume of poetry, The Diamond Cutters, a collection she wished later had not been published. That year she also received Ridgely Torrence Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

In 1976, Rich began her lesbian partnership with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff, which lasted until her death. In her controversial work Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Rich admitted that, for her, lesbianism was a political as well as a personal issue: "The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs."

Twenty-One Love Poems became a pamphlet which was inserted into Dream of a Common Language, and marked the first direct treatment of lesbian desire and sexuality in her writing.

Besides poems and novels, Rich also wrote wrote many nonfiction books that tackle feminist issues. Of Woman Born, Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Blood, Bread and Poetry, etc. Bread and Poetry contains her famous feminist essay entitled Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, and Feminism and Community. In that essay she remarks that the assumption of female heterosexuality is remarkable: “it is an enormous assumption to have glided so silently into the foundations of our thought.”

Further details of her career may be found at Adrienne Rich’s wiki entry on which this account relies.

(Poems)

What Kind of Times Are These

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass

grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread,

but don't be fooled

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but

here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the

woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it

disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything?

Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees.

Translations

You show me the poems of some woman

my age, or younger translated from your language

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow

enough to let me know she's a woman of my time

Obsessed with Love, our subject:

we've trained it like ivy to our walls

baked it like bread in our ovens

worn it like lead on our ankles

watched it through binoculars as if

it were a helicopter

bringing food to our famine

or the satellite of a hostile power

I begin to see that woman doing things: stirring rice

ironing a skirt

typing a manuscript till dawn

trying to make a call from a phone booth

The phone rings endlessly in a man's bedroom

she hears him telling someone else

Never mind. She'll get tired.

hears him telling her story to her sister

who becomes her enemy

and will in her own way

light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this way of grief is shared,

unnecessary and political

Pamela

Wisława Szymborska (1923 – 2012)

This account of Szymborska’s life is taken from an earlier reading by Joe of her poetry on May 10, 2013.

Wisława Szymborska was born in 1923 and lived right into the 21st century, She died in 2012 and was composing poems until the end. She lived her entire adult life in her native Krakow in Poland. Although she experienced the catastrophes of the WWII, and then the authoritarian rule of a Communist state, she seems to have escaped the worst. She started writing poems quite early and when someone asked her soon after she won the Nobel for Literature in 1996, why her work was so sparse (about 350 poems) she replied tartly it was because she kept a waste-basket by her desk.

Initially, she was a sympathiser of Communist rule and even wrote some poems to celebrate Lenin et al. It does not matter in her case, for, like Arundhati Roy, she mainly celebrates the small things, and occasionally where the small things intersect with the big things. Apolitical and non-religious, sceptical and ironic – all these adjectives would fit her. She writes herself out of her poems, and therefore it has a quality of universality.  Being from central Europe she was fortunate to escape the disease of unintelligibility that afflicted post-modernism in the West. If you pay attention, she keeps it quite simple and you won’t have to re-read if you read it slowly to get at what she is saying. I think you will like her words, as I did.

She won the highest honour of Poland in 1985, but while she was widely read as a poet in her own land, worldwide recognition came later. She published sixteen poems in The New Yorker between 1992 and 2006. Her translator of this volume (View with a Grain of Sand, a culling from several of her earlier volumes which has sold over 100,000 copies in America) is very good; he is Stanislaw Baranczak, himself a poet, aided by Clare Cavanagh.

(Poems)

Consolation

Darwin.

They say he read novels to relax,

But only certain kinds:

nothing that ended unhappily.

If anything like that turned up,

enraged, he flung the book into the fire.

True or not,

I’m ready to believe it.

Scanning in his mind so many times and places,

he’d had enough of dying species,

the triumphs of the strong over the weak,

the endless struggles to survive,

all doomed sooner or later.

He’d earned the right to happy endings,

at least in fiction

with its diminutions.

Hence the indispensable

silver lining,

the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,

the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,

fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,

stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,

good names restored, greed daunted,

old maids married off to worthy parsons,

troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,

forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,

seducers scurrying to the altar,

orphans sheltered, widows comforted,

pride humbled, wounds healed over,

prodigal sons summoned home,

cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean,

hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,

general merriment and celebration,

and the dog Fido,

gone astray in the first chapter,

turns up barking gladly

in the last.

(Translated by Clare Cavanaugh)

Shoba

Andrée Chedid (1920 – 2011)

Andrée Chedid was born of Egyptian Parents in Cairo in the year 1920. She has ancestral ties with Lebanon and Syria as well. She spent most of her childhood in Egypt and at an early age, was introduced to a variety of cultures. She studied journalism in Paris and married Louis Chedid who was a medical student at that time. They lived in Lebanon for a while, but later settled in Paris in 1946 where she lived until her death.

She was completely bilingual in French and English, but eventually adopted French as her preferred language. She has written novels and plays and two of her books have been made into films. She was successively the winner of two Prix Goncourt, Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle 1979 (short story), and Prix Goncourt de la Poésie 2002 (poetry).

Her son Louis, and grandson Matthieu, are singers, and Andrée has written lyrics for her grandson who is also a guitarist. Here he is singing the chanson Je dis aime (I say love) to a live audience, lyrics written by his grandmother. Andree died in 2011.

Her poem Visage a la fenetre (A face at the window), deals with the cycle of life and death and is told in four verses of four lines each. Here is an excerpt:

Behind the window pane

Someone’s face is no more

His suns have gone to join

the streams of centuries

Imprinting its features

On the brief shore of days

Behind the window pane

Another face appears.

(Poems)

Landscapes

Behind faces and gestures

We remain mute

And spoken words heavy

With what we ignore or keep silent

Betray us

I dare not speak for mankind

I know so little of myself

But the Landscape

I see as a reflection

Is also a lie stealing into

My words I speak without remorse

Of this image of myself

And mankind my unequaled torment

I speak of Desert without repose

Carved by relentless winds

Torn up from its bowels

Blinded by sands

Unsheltered solitary

Yellow as death

Wrinkled like parchment

Face turned to the sun.

I speak

Of men's passing

So rare in this arid land

That it is cherished like a refrain

Until the return

Of the jealous wind

And of the bird, so rare,

Whose fleeting shadow

Soothes the wounds made by the sun

And of the tree and the water

Named Oasis

For a woman's love

I speak of the voracious Sea

Reclaiming shells from beaches

Waves from children

The faceless Sea

Its hundreds of drowned faces

Wrapped in seaweed

Slippery and green

Like creatures of the deep

The reckless Sea, unfinished story,

Removed from anquish

Full of death tales

I speak of open valleys

Fertile at men's feet

Overgrown with flowers

Of captive summits

Of mountains, of clear skies

Devoured by untamed evergreens

And of trees that know

The welcome of lakes

Black earth

Errant pathways

Echoes of the faces

Haunting our days.

(Translated by Marci Vogel)

Certain Province

In our lives drifting away

With hearts injured

By smallness

We must love a reverie

The only certain province

Then the voyaging

Eternal & fragile

The breath unraveled

Gesture & flower will be our joy

of a dream set free.

(Translated by Marci Vogel)

Kavita

Elizabeth Bishop (1911 – 1979)

This account is taken from an earlier KRG reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry by Joe on Jan 30, 2009. You can wade gently into her work by listening to the online course on Modern Poetry by Prof Langdon Hammer of Yale at their Open Yale Course site:

https://oyc.yale.edu/NODE/126

Early Life

She was deprived of a normal childhood when her father died before she was one, and her mother went mad soon after. She was taken by her maternal grandparents to Nova Scotia where she enjoyed her time; but later her better-off paternal grandparents intervened and thought to give her a fine education. That didn't work out and she went to school in various places in Massachusetts. This and her later life of lecturing at Harvard and returning toward the end of her life to buy a house in Cambridge at 60 Brattle Street, merits classifying her as a New England poet (goodness, nearly all the notable women poets in America have come from that small corner of USA!).

Vassar

She went on to study at one of the Ivy League colleges for women, Vassar in Poughkeepsie, New York, and graduated in English. By that time she was writing verse and the novelist Mary McCarthy recalls her wit, in an early poem Bishop had composed at Vassar when she lived next door to the bathroom in her dormitory:

Ladies and Gents, Ladies and Gents,

flushing away your excrements.

I sit and hear beyond the wall

the sad continual waterfall….

Marianne Moore

Bishop came to know Marianne Moore in her last year of college and developed a strong relationship with her. Moore became mother-hen, critic and admired friend to Bishop. She generously gave of her time in fairly involved revisions of Bishop's manuscripts, and they exchanged a fair amount of correspondence. Bishop was apologetic on occasion for not conceding to all her revisions. A lovely bubbly poem in which she invites MM to come flying to New York city (Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore ) was generously acknowledged by her. Come she tells the older poet –

with a priceless set of vocabularies,

…

With dynasties of negative constructions

…

with grammar that suddenly turns and shines

like flocks of sandpipers flying,

…

Come like a light in the white mackerel sky,

come like a daytime comet

with a long unnebulous train of words

Robert Lowell

Her other strong relationship with a poet was a lifelong correspondence with Robert Lowell, by that time an established poet. They had the longest running and intricate letter-writing relationship ever (900 pages of correspondence) over three decades, during which they saw each other rarely. A recent book, Words in Air, (title taken from a poem of Bishop's) is a loving testament to the odd friendship – romance on one side (Lowell's) – that culminated in a lifelong friendship that continued even when Lowell went off his rocker toward the end of his life.

Friendship of Lowell and Bishop

All poets, it seems, have streaks of depression, mania, and a feeling of apartness that makes it difficult for them to communicate with humans who are near. But the lovely thing is they come alive with the pen, and we must feel thankful that some writers, who loved and admired each other, remained apart, and therefore had to write in order to exchange thoughts; we are their beneficiaries. Lowell and Bishop looked to each other’s letters for sustenance. When they were first introduced Bishop recalled, “It was the first time I had ever talked to someone about how one writes poetry.” Bishop wrote once to Lowell, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.” It was Bishop, in the end, who wrote Lowell’s poetic epitaph, the beautiful elegy “North Haven”.

Her Afflictions

Bishop suffered from allergies, and alcoholism at various stages of her life and was treated, but continued to relapse. Her time in Brazil during 15 years she spent their with her lover, Lota Soares, was a fertile one for her poetry and she returned only after Lota's death from suicide. Bishop had many lovers in her life. On October 6, 1979, just before she was to give a reading at Harvard's Sanders Theatre, Bishop died suddenly of a cerebral aneurysm. She was sixty-eight.

A Poet sui generis

Bishop was never a poet in the mould of someone else. She does not fit into the lineage of any other modern poets, even though she had strong relationships with Moore and Lowell, and admired Gerard Hopkins & George Herbert.

Modern poetry is intellectual, rather than sensual, cryptic rather than explicit in meaning, prosaic rather than musical. It does not manage to combine intellectual verve with sensual imagery. Emotion is absent, that’s the thing modern poets dread most. They want to be as understated as possible. But they are sometimes playful, with high intent. Bishop does have these trappings of modern poetry, such as the pattern of lines on the page, the enjambment, etc, but she does it her own way.

Precision

Bishop enjoyed in great measure the other modernist values. She has been called a “writer's writer's writer”, for the precision and particularity of her descriptions of things and natural phenomena. Perhaps the precision was an attempt to recover from the disorganization and ill-fortune that beset her life. She admired Vermeer’s painting for similar qualities; they were “precisely observed and rendered”, she said. “No poet ever saw the mysteries of the world more clearly”, says the poet and critic, Schwartz, who knew her over a period of years. She is very economical with her words. Bishop wrote, in an essay she never published, that the qualities she most admired in verse were Accuracy, Spontaneity, and Mystery.

She refused to be collected in women's anthologies, as she felt it took away from the totality of herself.

(Poems)

Song For The Rainy Season

Hidden, oh hidden

in the high fog

the house we live in,

beneath the magnetic rock,

rain-, rainbow-ridden,

where blood-black

bromelias, lichens,

owls, and the lint

of the waterfalls cling,

familiar, unbidden.

In a dim age

of water

the brook sings loud

from a rib cage

of giant fern; vapor

climbs up the thick growth

effortlessly, turns back,

holding them both,

house and rock,

in a private cloud.

At night, on the roof,

blind drops crawl

and the ordinary brown

owl gives us proof

he can count:

five times--always five--

he stamps and takes off

after the fat frogs that,

shrilling for love,

clamber and mount.

House, open house

to the white dew

and the milk-white sunrise

kind to the eyes,

to membership

of silver fish, mouse,

bookworms,

big moths; with a wall

for the mildew's

ignorant map;

darkened and tarnished

by the warm touch

of the warm breath,

maculate, cherished;

rejoice! For a later

era will differ.

(O difference that kills

or intimidates, much

of all our small shadowy

life!) Without water

the great rock will stare

unmagnetized, bare,

no longer wearing

rainbows or rain,

the forgiving air

and the high fog gone;

the owls will move on

and the several

waterfalls shrivel

in the steady sun.

Geetha

Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)

Emily Dickinson – the only authenticated photo after childhood, taken at Mount Holyoke college, December 1846 or early 1847

An entire post on the KRG blog is devoted to this great poet who lived most of her life in the small town of Amherst, Massachusetts.

Since then a well-recommended film came out in 2016 on the poet’s life, titled A Quiet Passion. You can read all about it in this New Yorker article.

But a more turbulent take on her life is depicted in a more recent movie called Wild Nights with Emily. The main thrust of this film, that Emily was a practicing lesbian, seems unsupported by the known particulars of her life. It is only mildly titillating in these times to read about lesbian love, and therefore the attempt to turn the poet’s life into a a sensational revelation about passionate lesbian attachment to her sister-in-law falls flat.

(Poems)

I'm Nobody! Who are you?

I'm Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there's a pair of us!

Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog –

To tell one's name – the livelong June –

To an admiring Bog!

Because I could not stop for Death –

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess – in the Ring –

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –

We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –

The Dews drew quivering and Chill –

For only Gossamer, my Gown –

My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground –

The Roof was scarcely visible –

The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity –

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

Devika

Sarojini Naidu (1879 – 1949)

Sarojini Naidu, 1964 India stamp

Please refer to a previous reading in 2011 by Sunil of Ms Naidu’s poems, and the poet’s biography attached to that piece.

(Poems)

Indian Weavers

WEAVERS, weaving at break of day,

Why do you weave a garment so gay? . . .

Blue as the wing of a halcyon wild,

We weave the robes of a new-born child.

Weavers, weaving at fall of night,

Why do you weave a garment so bright? . . .

Like the plumes of a peacock, purple and green,

We weave the marriage-veils of a queen.

Weavers, weaving solemn and still,

What do you weave in the moonlight chill? . . .

White as a feather and white as a cloud,

We weave a dead man's funeral shroud.

Nightfall In The City Of Hyderabad

SEE how the speckled sky burns like a pigeon's throat,

Jewelled with embers of opal and peridote.

See the white river that flashes and scintillates,

Curved like a tusk from the mouth of the city-gates.

Hark, from the minaret, how the muezzin's call

Floats like a battle-flag over the city wall.

From trellised balconies, languid and luminous

Faces gleam, veiled in a splendour voluminous.

Leisurely elephants wind through the winding lanes,

Swinging their silver bells hung from their silver chains.

Round the high Char Minar sounds of gay cavalcades

Blend with the music of cymbals and serenades.

Over the city bridge Night comes majestical,

Borne like a queen to a sumptuous festival.

Palanquin Bearers

Lightly, O lightly we bear her along,

She sways like a flower in the wind of our song;

She skims like a bird on the foam of a stream,

She floats like a laugh from the lips of a dream.

Gaily, O gaily we glide and we sing,

We bear her along like a pearl on a string.

Softly, O softly we bear her along,

She hangs like a star in the dew of our song;

She springs like a beam on the brow of the tide,

She falls like a tear from the eyes of a bride.

Lightly, O lightly we glide and we sing,

We bear her along like a pearl on a string.

Wandering Singers

WHERE the voice of the wind calls our wandering feet,

Through echoing forest and echoing street,

With lutes in our hands ever-singing we roam,

All men are our kindred, the world is our home.

Our lays are of cities whose lustre is shed,

The laughter and beauty of women long dead;

The sword of old battles, the crown of old kings,

And happy and simple and sorrowful things.

What hope shall we gather, what dreams shall we sow?

Where the wind calls our wandering footsteps we go.

No love bids us tarry, no joy bids us wait:

The voice of the wind is the voice of our fate.

Priya

Mary Karr (b. 1955)

Mary Karr had a tough life growing up, exposed to poverty, drugs and alcoholism. It is also a life of recovery and hope and then conversion to a religious Catholic life. She has written many books of poetry and a trilogy of memoirs. You can read about her at Poetry Foundation. Her first memoir, The Liars’ Club (1995), deals with tow years when she was aged seven and eight. Reviewing the memoir (‘an astonishing book’) in the NYTimes, Michiko Kakutani writes:

Ms. Karr's family emerges not only as a grand collection of eccentrics but also as a sad, troubled clan of misfits, cut off from one another's love by their secrets and resentments. There's Ms. Karr's mother's great-uncle, who used to dress up as a matador when he got drunk, and her paternal grandfather, who used to climb up on ladders all the time so he could "get closer to the Lord." Her father's uncle didn't speak to his wife for 40 years; instead of getting a divorce, they simply split their house in half and lived in proximity and silence for the rest of their lives. Perhaps oddest (not to mention, meanest) of them all is Ms. Karr's maternal grandmother, a fierce old woman who carried a hacksaw in her purse and who once sent away for a detective training kit so she could spy on her relatives and friends. Her long and painful convalescence from an amputated leg left Ms. Karr with a lasting, terrifying sense of death.

About Lit her third memoir in 2009 the same reviewer writes:

Ms. Karr … has written a book that lassos you, hogties your emotions and won’t let you go. It’s a memoir that traces the author’s descent into alcoholism and her conflicted, piecemeal return from that numb hell — a memoir that explores the subjectivity of memory even as it chronicles with searching intelligence, humor and grace the author’s slow, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes painful discovery of her vocation and her voice as a poet and writer.

In this interview she talks about memoirs and how she comes to the right balance. In another talk she says “It was poetry that saved may life.” She quotes Philip Larkin as saying, “You put the penny of your attention in the poem, you pull the handle, and a feeling comes out.” It is a good talk on the discoveries underlying the writing of a memoir, and reconciling opposing voice that talk inside you as a memoirist trying to get to the bottom of things. Sh recites a poem by Archilochus, a Greek lyric poet, who was promised in marriage to a friend’s daughter, Neobulé, but when it was discovered that his mother was a slave the engagement was called off, and she was married to a fancier person. The poem is called Liar:

Swept overboard and helpless in the breakers

strangled with seaweed, may you wake up in a gelid

surf, your teeth, already cracked into the shingle,

set rattling by the wind while on all fours

helpless as a poisoned cur, on all fours you puke

brine reeking of dead fish. May those you meet,

barbarians as ugly as their souls are hateful,

treat you to the moldy wooden bread of slaves.

And may you, with your split teeth sunk in that,

smile, then, the way you did when speaking as my friend.

To end here is a poem by Mary Karr about her son’s first time driving off from home after getting a license. It is called 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,
not a 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’d 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. Case 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.

Mary Karr’s latest poetry is Tropic of Squalor (2018). She is a Professor of English at Syracuse University, where she also teaches in the MFA program. She has collaborated with the singer Rodney Crowell in an album of songs called Kin from which you can hear the number Anything but Tame played at this Youtube site.

Lastly in a dialogue on her Catholic faith (from 7:55 to 20:20 of the video) she tells how she found her calling as a poet very early, and then became an unlikely Catholic from Bible-belt of East Texas. She talks about the ‘Ignatian Exercises’ of St Ignatius, founder of the Jesuit Order, and her mantra. She also talks of The Daily Examen, ‘a technique of prayerful reflection on the events of the day in order to detect God’s presence and discern his direction for us.’ She’s been practicing it for fifteen years, reliving each day, and notes that it’s changed her life as an ‘undistinguished professor.’

(Poems)

The Burning GirlWhile the tennis ball went back and forth in time

A girl was burning. While the tonic took its greeny

Acid lime, a girl was burning. While the ruby sun fell

From a cloud’s bent claws and Wimbledon was won

And lost, we sprawled along the shore in chairs,

We breathed the azure airs alongside

A girl with the thinnest arms all scarred and scored

With marks she’d made herself —

She sat with us in flames

That not all saw or saw but couldn’t say at risk

Of seeming impolite. And later we’d all think

Of the monk who’d doused himself with gas,

Lit a match, then sat unmoving and alert amid

Devouring light. She didn’t speak. She touched

No aspect of our silly selves.

I was the awkward guest everybody hardly knew.

She was an almost ghost her mother saw

Erasing the edges of herself each day

Smudging the lines like charcoal while her parents

Redrew her secretly into being over and

Again each night and dawn and sleepless

All years long. Having seen that mother’s love,

I testify: It was ocean endless. One drop could’ve

Brought to life the deadest Christ, and she

Emptied herself into that blazing child with all her might

And stared a hundred million miles into

The girl’s slender, dwindling shape.

Her father was the devoted king of helicopter pad

And putting green. His baby burned as we

All watched in disbelief.

I was the facile friend of friends insisting on a hug

Who hadn’t been along for years of doctors, wards,

And protocols. I forced her sadness close. I said

C’mon let’s hug it out. Her arms were white

Birch twigs that scissored stiffly at my neck till she

Slid on. That night we watched

Some fireworks on the dewy lawn for it was

Independence Day. Soon after, she was gone.

She was the flaming tower we all dared

To jump from. So she burned.

A Perfect Mess

I read somewhere

that if pedestrians didn’t break traffic laws to cross

Times Square whenever and by whatever means possible,

the whole city

would stop, it would stop.

Cars would back up to Rhode Island,

an epic gridlock not even a cat

could thread through. It’s not law but the sprawl

of our separate wills that keeps us all flowing. Today I loved

the unprecedented gall

of the piano movers, shoving a roped-up baby grand

up Ninth Avenue before a thunderstorm.

They were a grim and hefty pair, cynical

as any day laborers. They knew what was coming,

the instrument white lacquered, the sky bulging black

as a bad water balloon and in one pinprick instant

it burst. A downpour like a fire hose.

For a few heartbeats, the whole city stalled,

paused, a heart thump, then it all went staccato.

And it was my pleasure to witness a not

insignificant miracle: in one instant every black

umbrella in Hell’s Kitchen opened on cue, everyone

still moving. It was a scene from an unwritten opera,

the sails of some vast armada.

And four old ladies interrupted their own slow progress

to accompany the piano movers.

each holding what might have once been

lace parasols over the grunting men. I passed next

the crowd of pastel ballerinas huddled

under the corner awning,

in line for an open call — stork-limbed, ankles

zigzagged with ribbon, a few passing a lit cigarette

around. The city feeds on beauty, starves

for it, breeds it. Coming home after midnight,

to my deserted block with its famously high

subway-rat count, I heard a tenor exhale pure

longing down the brick canyons, the steaming moon

opened its mouth to drink from on high ...