more on poetry and prayer from mary karr

…if you’re in a frame of mind gloomy enough to refuse prayer, despite its having worked bona fide miracles for you before, nothing satisfies like a dark poem.  Maybe wrestling with gnarly language occupies the loud and simian chatter of a dismayed mind, but for me the relief comes to some extent from a hookup to another creature.  The compassion innate in having someone–however remote–verbalize your despair or lend a form to it can salve the jibbering psyche.

from the afterword to Sinners Welcome by Mary Karr, p.74

sinners welcome

“Sinners Welcome” by Mary Karr

I opened up my shirt to show this man
the flaming heart he lit in me, and I was scooped up
like a lamb and carried to the dim warm.
I who should have been kneeling
was knelt to by one whose face
should be emblazoned on every coin and diadem:
no bare-chested boy, but Ulysses
with arms thick from the hard-hauled ropes.

He’d sailed past then clay gods

and the singing girls who might have made of him

a swine. That the world could arrive at me
with him in it, after so much longing—
impossible. He enters me and joy
sprouts from us as from a split seed.

…from an interview with Mary Karr about her volume of poems, Sinners Welcome and this poem in particular:

Your work demonstrates that appeal of the carnal–some of your poems are sexual metaphors for faith.
Yes, “Sinners Welcome,” the title poem, certainly is. Everybody thinks it’s about having sex, but it’s about taking communion. Being entered by the God. I said, “He enters me and joy sprouts…” In any Christian church, communion is supposed to be about someone’s passion. Someone lends you their passion, someone suffers for you. You take someone’s suffering into your body, and you’re transformed by it. It’s such a great idea.

Why did you choose the title “Sinners Welcome” for your book?
At the church that I went to in Syracuse, there’s a banner outside that says “Sinners Welcome” It’s in the poorest part of Syracuse, where all half-way houses are, so about 20 to 30% of the parish is disabled, either physically or mentally. I always loved walking in under that banner. I used to think you had to be good to go to church.  You can go even if you haven’t been to confession, if you haven’t been absolved. Who needs it more than a sinner?

mary karr on poetry and prayer

In this state–what Dickinson called “sumptuous destitution”–prayer was a slow spin on a hot spit, but poetry could still draw me out of myself, easing my loneliness as it had since earliest kidhood.  Poets were my first priests, and poetry itself my first altar.  It was a lot of other firsts too, of course: first classroom/chatroom/confessional.  But it was most crucially the first source of awe for me, partly because of how it could ease my sense of isolation: it was a line thrown from seemingly glorious Others to my drear-minded self.

From a very early age, when I read a poem, it was as if the poet’s burning taper touched some charred filament in my chest to light me up.  The transformation could extend from me outward.  Lifting my face from the page, I often faced my fellow creatures with less dread.  Maybe buried in one of them was an ache or tenderness similar to the one I’d just been warmed by.  Thus, poetry rarely failed to create for me some semblance of community, even if the poet reaching me was some poor wretch even more abject than myself.  Poetry never left me stranded, and as an atheist most of my life, I presumed its comforts were a highbrow, intellectual version of what religion did for those more gullible believers in my midst–dumb bunnies to a one, the faithful seemed to me, till I became one.

from the afterword to Sinners Welcome by Mary Karr, p.70-71

my favorite maya angelou poem

Our Grandmothers

by Maya Angelou
She lay, skin down in the moist dirt,
the canebrake rustling
with the whispers of leaves, and
loud longing of hounds and
the ransack of hunters crackling the near
branches.

She muttered, lifting her head a nod toward
freedom,
I shall not, I shall not be moved.

She gathered her babies,
their tears slick as oil on black faces,
their young eyes canvassing mornings of madness.

Momma, is Master going to sell you
from us tomorrow?

Yes.

Unless you keep walking more

and talking less.

Yes.

Unless the keeper of our lives
releases me from all commandments.

Yes.

And your lives,
never mine to live,
will be executed upon the killing floor of
innocents.

Unless you match my heart and words,
saying with me,
I shall not be moved.

In Virginia tobacco fields,
leaning into the curve
of Steinway
pianos, along Arkansas roads,
in the red hills of Georgia,
into the palms of her chained hands, she
cried against calamity,

You have tried to destroy me
and though I perish daily,
I shall not be moved.

Her universe, often
summarized into one black body
falling finally from the tree to her feet,
made her cry each time into a new voice.

All my past hastens to defeat,
and strangers claim the glory of my love,
Iniquity has bound me to his bed.
yet, I must not be moved.

She heard the names,
swirling ribbons in the wind of history:
nigger, nigger bitch, heifer,
mammy, property, creature, ape, baboon,
whore, hot tail, thing, it.

She said, But my description cannot
fit your tongue, for
I have a certain way of being in this world,
and I shall not, I shall not be moved.

No angel stretched protecting wings
above the heads of her children,
fluttering and urging the winds of reason
into the confusions of their lives.
The sprouted like young weeds,
but she could not shield their growth
from the grinding blades of ignorance, nor
shape them into symbolic topiaries.

She sent them away,
underground, overland, in coaches and
shoeless.

When you learn, teach.
When you get, give.

As for me,
I shall not be moved.

She stood in midocean, seeking dry land.

She searched God’s face.
Assured,
she placed her fire of service
on the altar, and though
clothed in the finery of faith,
when she appeared at the temple door,
no sign welcomed
Black Grandmother, Enter here.

Into the crashing sound,
into wickedness, she cried,
No one, no, nor no one million
ones dare deny me God, I go forth
along, and stand as ten thousand.

The Divine upon my right
impels me to pull forever
at the latch on Freedom’s gate.

The Holy Spirit upon my left leads my
feet without ceasing into the camp of the
righteous and into the tents of the free.

These momma faces, lemon-yellow, plum-purple,
honey-brown, have grimaced and twisted
down a pyramid for years.

She is Sheba the Sojourner,
Harriet and Zora,
Mary Bethune and Angela,
Annie to Zenobia.

She stands
before the abortion clinic,
confounded by the lack of choices.

In the Welfare line,
reduced to the pity of handouts.
Ordained in the pulpit, shielded
by the mysteries.

In the operating room,
husbanding life.
In the choir loft,
holding God in her throat.

On lonely street corners,
hawking her body.

In the classroom, loving the
children to understanding.

Centered on the world’s stage,
she sings to her loves and beloveds,
to her foes and detractors:

However I am perceived and deceived,
however my ignorance and conceits,
lay aside your fears that I will be undone,
for I shall not be moved.

drug addiction

I am in a silent war against an enemy as pernicious and omnipresent as evil.  Evil?  I don’t believe in evil any more than I believe in God.  But at the same time I know this: only Satan himself could have designed a disease that has self-deception as a symptom, so that its victims deny they are afflicted, and will not seek treatment, and will vilify those on the outside who see what’s happening.

David Sheff from Beautiful Boy

homesick

The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence.  But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring.  The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy.  I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home.

G.K. Chesterton

Orthodoxy p. 80

dogma

An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another.  Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth.  You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays.  You mights as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half past three, but not suitable to half-past four.

G.K. Chesterton

Orthodoxy

revolution

For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it.  We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent.  We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.

No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on.  Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing?  Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence?  Can he look up at its colloasal evil without once feeling despair?  Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanactical optimist?  Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it?

G. K. Chesterton

Orthodoxy p. 71

neighborhood love

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing-say Pimlico.  If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and teh arbitrary.  It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea.  Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful.  The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason.  If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved.  For decoration is not given to hide horrible things: but to decorate things already adorable.  A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it.  A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck.  If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fancier than Florence.  Some readers will say this is a mere fantasy.  I answer that this is the actual history of mankind.  This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great.  Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well.  People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it.  Men did not love Rome because she was great.  She was great because they had loved her.

G. K. Chesterton

Orthodoxy p.66

on fairy tales

I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.

The fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness.

If Cinderella says, “How is it that I must leave the ball at twelve?” her godmother might answer, “How is it that you are going there till twelve?”

I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a storyteller.

Stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not ony a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege.

I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have someone to mean it.  There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently.

In some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin.  Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck.

G.K. Chesterton

Orthodoxy