Lit: A Memoir. Mary Karr

of hooey, fawned over by whining fops of the most stick-up-the-ass variety.

      The way an uncertain believer might stumble onto proof of God, the women at the group home fully converted me to the Church of Poetry.

      That first day I stood at the window of a dayroom looking down as the bus disgorged them. Shedding their coats and the clasped-on mittens that flapped from their coat sleeves, the women bumbled out. They dropped hats or pencils or keys or lunch boxes. One trying to find the end of her scarf turned around in a circle like a slow-motion cat chasing its tail. This halted the women behind her, a few of whom bumped into her and each other.

      As staff people herded them in, I felt my armpits grow damp. The faster ladies spilled into the room around me like kids lining up for a pony ride. A flat-faced woman with the severe and snaggled underbite of a bulldog stood introducing herself with a handshake before she sat. I’m Marion Pinski, she said. P like Polack Pinski. She wore a brown beret flat atop her head like nothing so much as a cow pie.

      Alongside her squeezed other women, whose heads seemed small as dolls’. Under narrow shoulders, their bodies went mountainously soft. And they were mushroom-pale, as if they’d been grown underground. It’s a shocking thing to face all at once so many kecked-up, genetically disadvantaged humans. In a country that values power and ease and symmetry, velocity and cunning, kinks in their genetic code had robbed them of currency.

      Somebody touched my foot. Looking down, I found a sandy-haired woman tugging on my boot buckle. Katie Butke, she introduced herself as. Katie was solid as a fireplug and clean as a boiled peanut, affable but unimpressed by the likes of me. Looking at her, I felt smart all of a sudden, also lucky. You could talk these women out of their bus tokens. Still, glad I’d dodged the bullet they’d caught almost implicated me in their handicap. (At the time I saw only their difficulties. Now I also marvel that they could with verve hug an individual they’d just gotten off the bus with, and that total strangers shampooed Katie’s red hair and rubbed lotion on her freckled arms.)

      I started off with Pablo Neruda and a thinly disguised Neruda imitator. Good poem vs. cliché. The staff people had warned me the ladies could get distracted and bored, but the Neruda snapped them to attention. Walking Around begins, It so happens I am sick of being a man … I am sick of my hair and my eyes and my teeth and my shadows … At one point he says,

      Still it would be marvelous

      to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,

      or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.

      Kill a nun! Katie Butke called out—whether in outrage or enthusiasm, I couldn’t tell. The poem ends with wash on the line from which slow dirty tears are falling.

      Once I stopped, there was a collective sigh, like the pneumatic sound of an engine giving up. A big silence held us. Then applause broke out. Feet were stomped. A few ladies got up to hug each other again. If there’d been pillows, they’d have all started whacking each other.

      What did the guy feel who wrote it? I asked. Every hand shot up, but Katie Butke slapped the side of my boot. I pointed to her.

      Happy? she said. A few ladies agreed. But a forest of white hands kept flapping.

      The recalcitrant Marion Pinski crossed her short white arms across her front, but I called on her anyway.

      The shirts, she said in a murmur. The shirts are crying. Sad. The shirts are dirty. The shirts didn’t get washed right. The shirts are crying. The man doesn’t want Monday.

      We broke into small groups, and as I copied down their words, they marveled at my pen’s passage across the lines. That’s me? a lady named Dawn asked, touching the letters. That’s my name?

      I kept a copy of the poem Katie Butke wrote that day. It’s called Monkey Face. Every poem Katie wrote was called Monkey Face—a phrase no doubt imprinted on her in ways I hate to think about.

      Far away St. Paul

      People like robots

      Wash their tables

      Scrub the floor

      Bored things

      Washrags on the window

      Put it away now

      Look at your leg

      Tie your shoe. Look

      At yourself. A monkey.

      One line of Marion Pinski’s still pricks me with fresh envy: I get to dance with the deep boys and the day boys. (A Buddhist friend would later tell me that Marion was a bodhisattva sent to show me how comical my artistic pretentions were.)

      When I gave a local poetry reading—in addition to the Minks and a few local writers—the women came on a bus, and Katie Butke leaped up, shouting with a gospel singer’s conviction, You a monkey face. (To date, my truest review.) They clapped wildly after every poem. Katie Butke even stood up a few times, taking an operatic from-the-hip bow.

      The unchecked emotion they embodied was exactly what Etheridge was trying to drag out of me for my poser’s pages. It drove him crazy how I’d stick in fancy names and references I thought sounded clever.

      Etheridge used a pen to poke the fedora back on his head. Looking at me with bloodshot eyes, he asked with frank curiosity, Now, why is a little girl from Bumfuck, Texas, dragging Friedrich Nietzsche—kicking and screaming—into this poem? Like you’re gonna preach. You ain’t no preacher, Mary Karr. You’re a singer.

      When I bristled that I’d been a philosophy major in college, he said, And that’s all you’re telling anybody. What you took in college. You’re pointing right back at your own head, telling everybody how smart it is. Write what you know.

      But according to you, I don’t know squat.

      Your heart, Mary Karr, he’d say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don’t. Or won’t.

      He wanted me to picture a woman climbing five flights in a Harlem apartment building in summer heat, then having to go back down with armloads of garbage. He said, If you’re standing on the corner of 116th Street poeticizing, what could you possibly say to help her climb back up?

      This prospect of actual readers flattered me less than it scared me. He kept pushing me to go back to school. Also, long before seeing shrinks helped me to reconcile my warring insides, Etheridge fought to import Daddy onto my page. In one poem, he picked out some feeble old guy whose hands shook as he tried to bait a hook and said, Your old man’s knocking on your door, and you won’t let him in.

      Etheridge spoke to the pool-shooting, catfish-gutting, crawfish-sucking homegirl I was trying to squelch.

      Such an unlikely savior. Etheridge sometimes banged on my apartment door at three a.m., trying to mooch money for dope. Mary once caught him in the bathroom—with his kids in the next room—a hypodermic in his jugular.

      He talked to me about this new kind of graduate writers’ program in Vermont—low-residency, they called it. You show up a few weeks at a pop, twice per year, for lectures, readings, workshops, intense tutoring. A poet tailors a curriculum with you, and for six months you mail manuscripts and papers he or she works over. What did I think? It was either bogus, or I’d never get in.

      Meanwhile, I cobbled up an experiment with the ladies to see whether the poems I brought had sunk in at all, for the scene was part spelling bee, part revival meeting. Each week, I’d pit two poems against each other, a great poem and a crummy one. With an accuracy that rocked me back, they’d boo the crap stuff, then hallelujah the Yeats. Walt talked me into keeping a running tally to see how consistent they were, which I did on an index card taped to my closet door. Over two years, some 80 percent of their choices were as good as most book critics’. Even hard pieces by Stevens and Apollinaire, they’d go crazy for. The sole exceptions? If both poems were average or okay, or if one poem was plain speech and one ornate—in those cases, no predicting what they’d go for.