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Translations
Mary Karr.
Sinners Welcome. HarperCollins Publishers, 2006. Cloth, $22.95
Review by Tom Pynn
The task of the poet is
to make clear to himself, and thereby to others, the
temporal and eternal questions.
--Henrik Ibsen
Only within this web of
ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once
ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves.
--James
Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel”
Excavating the depths of one’s own life and history is
precisely what Americans fear, and it is for this reason we are as ignorant of
our history as we are of ourselves. “There are too many things,”
Mary Karr is a poet who is unafraid
of sounding the depths of her own darkness, her “morbid bent.” A case in point
is the poem “Coat Hangar Bent Into Halo” in which the
poet comes upon “the coathanger that almost aborted
me, / or so I dub it.” Or take the poem
“Oratorio for the Unbecoming” in which the poet recalls her pre-linguistic childhood:
“my tongue a small stub jabbering wants.” Yet for all the self-abasement in
many of these poems, they often end in either the possibility of redemption or
an outright expression of hope. Though
the poem “Coat Hangar Bent into a Halo” begins as it does, it ends with a
prayer: “May I twist from this black wire / a halo to crown my son’s
head.” Though the poem “Oratorio for the
Unbecoming” represents a desperate desire on the part of the remembered child
“to reenter the body” in order to escape “the miasma that mothered me,” it ends
with a blessing for “the air / I breathe these words with” and an expression of
wonder. There is alchemy in these poems
in which dark is being transmuted into light, suffering into joy.
As an alchemist
seeks to change the form of one thing into another, so does Karr long to free
the self from a self-abused body: “a strong bone in the crypt of flesh I am.” Poetry, like alchemy, reveals the ground of
things, an inward process in which the soul/self is liberated from appearances,
from death into life. In the poems’
narrative of self-uncovering, the poet begins by depicting a child “caged . . .
/ in a metal desk” who, through the discordances of early experience must learn
“how to mean, how/ in the mean world to be.”
The poet’s childhood is both the origin of alienation and the
potentiality of communion. While alienation is the negative aspect of
uniqueness, one’s own otherness is potentially the fulfilling of individuation
in communion: “Born, I eventually grew hind legs/ to rear back on, and learned
I was other/ than the miasma that mothered me.” Remembrance of things past
quickly turns from childhood to adolescence where, “Eventually, I lurched out
to kiss the wrong mouths, / get stewed, and sulk around.” Young adulthood intensifies the isolation, a
strange mix of distance and proximity—distance from one’s self, but
proximity to other poets. Distance is
often bridged tin these poems hrough the shared
experience of poetic composition as well as the pathos edged camaraderie of
drunks: “We listened in wonder, / leaning together like cartoon drunks. There
was/ a rectangle of sparkled sky you pointed out—beauty’s tattered flag.” In “Requiem: Professor Walt Mink (1927-1996)”
isolation is transmuted into reflective longing, a precondition for awakening,
when “Thinking of him/ I long for hands imbued/ with grace to shape me.” The
“hands” turn out to be God’s.
The turning toward God in prayer
shifts the poet’s consciousness away from the self’s preoccupation with the
lower planes of consciousness and toward the higher planes of consciousness.
For Karr, the moment of turning away from the external and toward the internal,
what Plato termed anabasis, is an experience of the heart opening. Sri Aurobindo has pointed out that the heart center is a double
center; it is both the emotional and psychic center, a doorway from the lower
vital planes to the higher vital of the emotional, aesthetic, intellectual and telestic. Early in the volume, “Oratorio for the
Unbecoming,” Karr writes of having a sense of the heart’s potential in early
childhood:
The heart is a mirror also, and in my chest I felt
This tight bud of petals held a face:
God, with his stare of a zillion suns.
In
Roman Catholic iconography, the heart is primarily associated with the
Immaculate Heart or Sacred Heart of Mary. It is Mary who is begotten without
sin and is thus able to bear the Son of Man into the world. In “Winter Term’s
End” a student shows up in the poet’s office with “a plastic charm/ of Our
Lady’s sacred heart to her sleeve.” In
“Delinquent Missive” the poet depicts the parricide David Ricardo and hopes for
his transformation from one who takes life to one who cares for the living:
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
the star adored by its maker.
The longing and hope for transformation expressed in many of
these poems reveals one of “the temporal and eternal questions” haunting this
volume: What is the relation between poetry and prayer? As the title of the essay included as the
book’s “Afterword” suggests, both poetry and prayer
have their roots in silence: “It’s said/ when the mystery finally speaks, / you
hear the void you’ve spoken// every longing into, silence articulate.” The poet turns her gaze toward each as if she
were before an altar, the sacred space upon which the supplicant sacrifices
something of value for a deeper relation to one’s self, others, and world. Therefore, it seems to me that the centerpiece
of this collection is a series of five poems with the recurring prefix
“Descending Theology.” The poems suggest
an incarnational theology in which God descends into
the world by an act of self-delimitation in order to redeem all living
things. Such a descent implies that all
living things are inherently valuable and deserving of love. The series traces,
from nativity (birth into death) to resurrection (death into life) the journey
each soul makes as it comes into the world, experiences suffering and then is
liberated from that suffering.
The opening poem’s end prefigures the poems’ ending: “the
first draught/ of death, the one he’d wake from/ (as we all do)
screaming.” The parenthetical explicitly
states the humanistic concern of the incarnation: the Son of God is the
Son of Man; Jesus shares our own experience of embodied consciousness. The
series’ second poem extends the necessary link between human and divine: “the
human frame/ is a crucifix.” For all its
hopefulness the theology remains stolidly conventional: “In an
breath, we can bloom and almost be you” (my emphasis). While it is considered blasphemy according to
orthodox Catholicism to suggest that one can become Christ, esoteric
Christianity (mysticism) suggests the radical theology that we can
become Christ that we can “put on the mantle of Christ.” The question I have for Karr, then, is
whether she thinks that her implied distance between the human and the divine
is a devotional intentionality or a metaphysical axiom.
Whichever the case may be, the metaphysical question remains:
How might one bridge the distance between human and divine? In “Descending Theology: The Garden” we catch
a glimpse of the way: “In the green center, Jesus prayed for the pardon/ of
Judas, who was approaching/ with soldiers.”
The practice of forgiveness supplants the old way of vengeance; The Law
of Love replaces the blood code. The
“kiss on his brother” exemplifies human consciousness turning away from the
lower planes where existence is acted out as a war of all against all, toward
creative fidelity where “sinners” are “welcome” rather than cast out, shunned, scapegoated, or subjected to genocide. The analogy between the human trajectory and
the god’s journey is further developed in the series’ penultimate poem when the
poet asks, “what then can you blame for hurt/ but your own self’s burden?” What
must be crucified is not the other as an enemy, terrorist, or demon—see the
poem “Easter at Al Qaeda Bodega” where “may pal in
white apron . . . announces, / You’re killing my people”--, but our own
self-interest, our own inner demon. Shifting the battleground inward results in
the experience of the heart’s center opening into “the green center” of the
garden where
Now
It’s your limbs he longs to flow into—
From the sunflower center in your chest
Outward—as warm water
Shatters at birth, rivering
every way.
As
the initial poem in the sequence announces the birth of the godman
into a life of death, so now resurrection heralds a birth through death into
life.
Sinners Welcome is a poignant
and ultimately personal collection of poems; although, it is often hard to
sympathize with a poet who seems “bent” on having us believe she is a “gloomy
and serotonin-challenged bitch.” The dangers in such a profoundly personal poetry
are myriad. In her essay “Origins of the
Poem,” Levertov explains that “poetry is not
subject-seeking,” but “asking oneself the questions, internalizing them.” In grappling with unanswerable questions the
poem becomes a “testament” having both “moral and technical reference.” The
danger is when the poet abandons the “internal evidence,” and turns to the
external. The poem’s inevitable fate
from externalization is to be a record of “the superficialities resulting from overadaptation to the external and from miasmic
subjectivities.” In Karr’s poem “A
Major,” there is a moment when the experience of hearing the pianist Awadagin Pratt perform leads the poet to write, “I’ve seen/
a death with order; meant but no way mean.”
This is not only the counterpoint to an earlier childhood realization,
but it also alludes to the task of the poet indicated by Cid Corman: “not
experience thrown as a personal problem on others but experience as an order
that will sing to others.”
Karr’s reflective essay “Facing
Altars: Poetry and Prayer,” originally composed for Poetry, gives one an
explicit sense of the themes, and their weaknesses, in this volume. In the
poetry there is often the naïve enthusiasm of the newly converted: references
to worn out medieval mythologizing (“I clung/ to doubt as Satan spider-like
stalked/ the orb of dark surrounding Eden/ for a wormhole into paradise”),
religious imagery that falls flat (“Christ always stood/ to one side with a
glass of water”), and pseudo-problems like the problem of evil (“If God/
permits this, one wonders if some less/ than loving watcher// watches
us”). Even in the essay where one has
the luxury of prose to develop ideas, Karr’s theological pronouncements are
often at an undergraduate’s level of comprehension: agnosticism and atheism are
conflated and the predictable bugaboo “secular humanism” conceived of as
“kindness as social necessity.” To be
fair, Karr admits that, “it’s only my naïve 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.”
While there are weaknesses that some
might find a little disconcerting, there are many more glimpses into the depths
of human experience in which poetry and prayer are devotional utterances of the
fathomless. One important theme in the
poetry that is also elucidated in the essay is that poetry and prayer share the
function of self-understanding: “poetry could still draw me out of myself,” and
that “the first source of awe for me [was poetry], partly because of how it
could ease my sense of isolation.” It
may be the case that people come to poetry like religious practice “through
suffering and terror, need and fear,” but it is also the case that some people
stay engaged with poetic and/or religious practice because it has become an
authentic way of life. For Karr,
community is an outgrowth of poetry: “poetry rarely failed to create for me some
semblance of community.” Note the use of the word “semblance.” Poetry isn’t identical with community, but
the outward appearance of community.
Karr suggests that real community, the kind that can alleviate
discordance, seems to arise as joy from “a hookup to another creature” or
“breaking out of myself toward someone else,” and from silence: “I often felt
[at mass] my mind grow quiet, and my surface difference from others began to be
obliterated.” Toward the end of the
essay Karr writes of the link between poetry and prayer: “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.” Paradoxically, while we can experience such a
connection, we cannot “storm heaven” as it were. Instead, the best she can do is to “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.” In order to effect such a transformation,
surrender is the first step. In writing
about “a dying tomcat,” Karr acknowledges her own need for surrender
So you surrender in
the way
I
pray for: Lord, before my own death,
let me learn from this animal’s deep release
into my arms. Let me
cease to fear
the embrace that seeks to still me.
VOX