Lit: A Memoir. Mary Karr

no real word, Beverly said, leaning back on both hands, legs crossed.

      I studied a volleyball arcing white across the gym ceiling and willed it to smash into Beverly’s freakishly round head.

      It’s squashing together luscious and lush and delicious, and all of it applied to spring mud. It’s poetic license, I said.

      I think it’s real smart how you learn every word so they come out any time you please, Kitty said.

      Beverly snorted. I get mud all over Bobby’s truck flaps, and believe you me, delicious don’t figure in.

      As insults go, it was weak, but Beverly’s facial expression—like she was smelling something—told me to put poetry right back where I’d drug it out from.

      Shortly after this, my junior high principal had actually warned me that any girl aiming to be a poet was doomed to become—I shit you not—no more than a common prostitute. And so the fantasy went underground, though in high school I’d still hitchhiked two hours to Houston to buy (coincidentally) Bill Knott’s first book, which gave me the dim hope that somewhere, a solitary madman knew just how I felt.

      Sitting before a living, nose-blowing Bill Knott made all my writer heroes real. It shot voltage through my own poetic leanings, and inside me, some image of myself as a black-turtleneck-clad poet came creaking back to life. The festival must’ve had fifty or sixty podiums, and behind every one stood a poet with a teaching job and a book to offload. They were real, and their ranks looked open.

      But how to get there? The small U-shaped bar I tended started to feel like a locked corral I needed to jump out of, but which way other than just not here.

      At the same conference, an unlikely first teacher showed up—a rusty-handed Mississippian named Etheridge Knight, whose debut book had been written in the pen. He was lumbering and black, with a scraggly mustache and a soul patch under his chin. His jaw was lumpy and uneven, with patches of white skin edged in pink—ragged and tear-shaped, as if acid flung in his face had eaten away his color. He spoke of poetry as an oral art (this was pre-poetry-slam America). Without pages, he half-sang the folk tale of Shine, a porter on the Titanic strong enough to swim to safety.

      the banker’s daughter ran naked on the deck

      with her pink tits trembling and her pants roun her neck

      screaming Shine Shine save poor me

      and I’ll give you all the pussy a black boy needs—

      how Shine said now pussy is good and that’s no jive

      but you got to swim not fuck to stay alive—

      And Shine swam on Shine swam on—

      This language both rocked me back and echoed how Daddy talked. I mean, if he thought I was persisting in something I couldn’t get done, he’d say, You keep trying to thread a noodle up that wildcat’s ass; if he thought somebody was poor, He couldn’t buy a piss ant a wrestling jacket.

      Back in Minneapolis, I took the low-tipping day shift just so I could rathole my notebook by the beer spout and scribble.

      Crazed to see my name in print, which would prove poethood, I mailed to hapless editors work bad enough that—in retrospect—I’m surprised the rejections didn’t come with a cyanide pill. One snotty bastard commented solely on my failure to hit the space bar after periods and commas. If you could bring yourself to use standard spacing after punctuation, we would find it most helpful.

      Two nights a week, Etheridge held a private poetry workshop at his house, charging young writers like me a pitiful hundred bucks to sit for four months in his living room while he conducted our discussions from the sagging trough of a chenille armchair.

      The green and imploding house he shared with his poet-wife, Mary, and their two kids (adopted from Africa back when it was odd) stood out amid the tidy tract houses. Everything about Etheridge’s place was off-kilter. The roof sagged. One gutter was untethered. The front screen door hung from a single hinge. Inside, the wood floors buckled as if frozen mid-earthquake. Add a few cypress trees, a front-porch glider, and a hound dog, and the entire tableau could have been picked up by tweezers and used as a set for Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

      Mary, a smart, curvy blonde from Oklahoma, drew paychecks as a social worker plus writing and fighting against apartheid, but even if she’d cleaned from dawn till dusk, I believe that from whatever spot Etheridge occupied, chaos would’ve spread out like kudzu vines, for he was an addict of the first caliber. Allegedly sober, Etheridge ran his own beer- and marijuana-maintenance program. While he spouted lines from Dickinson, he kept a forty-ounce of Colt malt liquor between his knobby knees.

      Back then, in magazines like The New Yorker, stories were mostly about ex-Yalies wearing deck shoes. (Ray Carver was about to change all that.) By contrast, Etheridge lectured wearing a string T-shirt and dark pants of a stiff material that I swear to God looked prison issue. He turned his plaid house shoes into slip-ons by stepping on their backs. The Free People’s Poetry Workshop, he called us.

      What I wrote was mostly unintelligible, except for one bit about a suicidal dog. The first line went, alliteratively enough, Don’t do it, dog. The stuff I was fighting to avoid sometimes slipped out in vague disguise: a kid raped, a lost father, a woman on the shock treatment table. But because I refused to use sentences—just strung phrases willy-nilly—nobody understood it anyway. The word cerulean, I believe, was used.

      It’s experimental, I argued to the baffled readers arrayed on Etheridge’s furniture.

      It’s in-fucking-comprehensible, he shot back.

      Still, the first poems of mine that ever saw print were sent out under Etheridge’s aegis, in envelopes he paid postage on. Thrilled to see my name in type, I told my pal John, who’d wallpapered his bathroom with high-class New Yorker rejections. His response? Just as there’s a woman for every man, no matter how ugly, there’s a magazine for every poem.

      Etheridge’s blessing also helped me to snag a job as a poet-in-residence for the city of Minneapolis, the most dubious post I ever held. The city had scrounged up some grants to promote the arts. Some fifty or sixty poets and painters and dancers—hell, we even had a mime, the Mime Laureate of Minneapolis!—got hired to do … well, what?

      We weren’t sure. It was the seventies. Enrich the outer landscape.

      Why they hired me, I can’t fathom. Age twenty-two, I maybe lied that I had a degree, and I did boast in the interview about three community teaching jobs, two of which were fibs: I’d filled in for a pal working with seniors at the Jewish community center. There I’d befriended a stately holocaust survivor who showed me you could live like an intellectual whether you were in school or not. He loaned me a translation of Dante’s Inferno, which I left on a bus one drunken night, baldly lying it was stolen—what mugger says, Hand over the Dante!

      Walt and his wife also hooked me up running a weekly class for severely disturbed kids, but I couldn’t handle it. A few months in, I’d had to restrain a psychotic girl in my lap, making my body a living straitjacket, crossing her arms across her chest and wrapping my legs outside hers. Ten and bird-boned, she was. I never went back.

      My real teaching job involved a group home for fairly functional retarded women. Once per week after their factory piecework, I showed up with a canvas tote bag of poesie. Only a few could read a little; others just signed their names—the vast majority, not even. They spoke their poems while the staff and I wrote them out. At the end I’d read a handful, then type them all up to copy and pass out the next week.

      To say the women changed my life may be a stretch, but only just. I’d been worrying the bone of whether to go back to school for poetry. Or what? Sell kisses at the train depot? Some days all I did to be poetic was wander the public library in black clothes and muddy lipstick. Hell, I’d even moved to England for a spell, tramping around the hills looking at sheep and daffodils. How to go forward was otherwise foggy.

      Maybe