Meira Nagel
December 10, 2015
Read/Write/Blog Poetry
Professor Miller
The Devil’s Tour: A ResponseAfter reading Mary Karr’s memoir, I was immediately taken by her style of writing, which led me to her works of poetry. It is clear that both her poetry and prose, while including tragic autobiographical elements, remain beautifully unsentimental and unexaggerated. Mary Karr’s collection of poetry encompassed in The Devil’s Tour consist mainly of traditional subjects and forms of poetry-- most are narrative poems, some are homages to mentors, some love poems and confessions, some elegies for friends, and other more morbid topics. She has a very controlled technique and it is clear that every word written was chosen purposefully; her poems are all succinct but remain powerfully descriptive.
A quality of Karr’s work that I really connected to was her command of pace in her poetry. Her poems generally have clipped stanzas and crisply enjambed lines, adding just the right amount of tension to the flow of her poems. Lines like “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” (“Coleman”) speed up and slow down as necessary, making the picture she is painting that much more clear.
As previously stated, one of my favorite aspects of Karr’s poetry is her ability to focus on darker subjects without sliding into a melodramatic or sentimental tone— she sticks with her delicate and meticulous control of detail. Her technique in doing so is twofold: firstly, she avoids abstractions, which helps paint a clearer image of what she is trying to convey. Secondly, a lot of her poems have a strong sense of humor even while addressing tragic events. In both her memoir and her poetry, it is clear the humor works as a coping mechanism for tragedies. In “Her One Bad Eye” Karr describes her mother’s impending blindness by inserting a detail “My toddler son thought it funny/to lead her unexpectedly/off curbs or into low shrubs.” This dichotomy between something this humorous moment and something so sad— “we are dead to each other/that way, though she opened/her body to let me shine/weeping into this world” is another aspect of what makes Karr’s poems so human and so relatable.
Loving attention to seemingly insignificant details is another thing that makes Karr’s poetry great--in “Soft Mask”, Karr is describing seeing her child on the ultrasound, watching the arrow used to measure his heart. The poem is her meditating on this moment, lingering on the details-- but she amazingly does not slip into a sentimental or mushy tone—“That soft mask, not yet hardened in autumn wind/would hold a thumbprint if I touched him. I hesitated/to touch him.” Not only can Karr handle this kind of subject matter without sentimentality, but technically speaking, she is also accomplished at achieving a natural-sounding formal meter: “When he stands to cough the syrup from his lungs/arrive to sponge him cool, and he cries no/ and no and no, the only syllable” (“Croup”).
Her use of metaphor is exquisite in its simple poignancy— lines like “his eyes/are burn holes in his face” (“Etching of the Plague Years”) or “voice raspy as flies' wings" (Don Giovanni’s Confessor”) paint such a vivid image, regardless of their simplicity. More words would just be clutter, and Karr knows it.
While a lot of Karr's poetry is undoubtedly self-involved, it remains unpretentious and raw. These poems are all understandable and relatable right off the bat; they do not require an academic explication in order to be understood. However, while the jacket blurb also claims that Karr writes for “everyday readers,” these are in fact complex, intellectual poems. The seemingly simple poems of life, death, a sick mother, a lunch meeting, an affair—all serve as a reminder that if we wish to deduct meaning out of fairly ordinary happenstances, we can.
These poems all reflect the inner workings of the human experience, and manage to do so in a dazzlingly simple way. The title for this collection of poetry is mentioned in the first line of her poem “All This and More,” a poem which describes her spiral down into addiction and escape. Karr says regarding this book of poetry: “This is a book of poems about standing in the dark, about trying to memorize the bad news. The tour is a tour of the skull. I am thinking of Satan in Paradise Lost: ‘The mind is its own place and it can make a hell of heav’n or a heav’n of hell…I myself am hell.’”[1] What is interesting about the title poem and several others in this collection of poetry is her use of second-person language:
“…So your head became a tv hull,
a gargoyle mirror. Your doppelganger
sloppy at the mouth
and swollen at the joints
enacted your days in sinuous
slow motion, your lines delivered
with a mocking sneer. Sometimes
the frame froze, reversed, began
again: the red eyes of a friend
you cursed, your girl child cowered
behind the drapes, parents alive again
and puzzled by this new form. That’s why
you clawed your way back to this life.”
The use of second-person language both makes it seem like the author is being introspective and confessional, as well as drawing the reader in further and gaining more relatability.
On another technical note, Karr occasionally moves beyond her confessional, in-her-head style and moves to a third-person narrative. In Don Giovanni’s Confessor, one of my favorites in this volume, the ashamed sinner confesses to his priest, who is then thrust into his own appalled recollection. Karr skillfully weaves intricate, multi-layered stories, but keeps it straightforward and understandable.
Overall, I think the things I’ve been trying to hone in my poetry are all things Mary Karr does so extraordinarily well—namely, perfectly chosen words, succinctness, and the ability to discuss emotional moments with a strict avoidance of sentimentality. Reading her book of poetry inspired me immensely and I hope to continue reading her works. Karr states about her work: “My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It’s morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your hard bigger; it’s emotionally and spiritually empowering.”[2]
[1]
http://www.marykarr.com/bookinfo_thedevilstour.php [2]
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/mary-karr
