Читать книгу Lit: A Memoir - Mary Karr - Страница 13

People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.

— a letter by Wallace Stevens

In the dim realm of that horseshoe bar, I was boss, credibly lying to wives and business partners who phoned in that my patrons were not in fact sitting before me hours on end, imbibing. Such lies kept my tip jar stuffed. Plus compared to those guys—with their car wrecks and one-night stands, their lost families and jobs—my occasional blackout or sidewalk pukefest was bush league.

Binge drinking disagreed with me in no way. The hangovers that haunted the other restaurant folk tended to spare me. Or the ones that did knock me out gave me an excuse to bail from ordinary commerce and loll around feeling resplendently poetic. I drank less steadily than some kids my age (twenty-one), but now I had an appetite for drink, a taste for it, a talent. Maybe it fostered in me a creeping ambition-deficit disorder, but it could ease an ache. So anything worth doing could be undertaken later. Paint the apartment, write a book, quit booze, sure: tomorrow.

Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings—sorrow, fury, joy—I had their junior counterparts—anxiety, irritation, excitement.

But humming through me like a third rail was poetry, the myth that if I could shuffle the right words into the right order, I could get my story straight, write myself into an existence that included the company of sacred misfit poets whose pages had kept me company as a kid. Showing up at a normal job was too hard.

Who knows, maybe I’d still be straining martinis from a silver shaker—it was a nice joint—had I not bought a ticket to a midwestern poetry festival so debauched that it couldn’t survive even the extremely low bar of acceptable behavior back in the 1970s. Down the dorm hallways, marijuana smoke hazed lazily. At readings, bottles of syrupy wine were passed around. A poetic Woodstock, I told Mother it was on my call home, regaling her with the circuslike atmosphere she’d have been inspired by.

I actually saw living, breathing poets. Back in high school, I’d fallen in love with the visionary antiwar work of Bill Knott, who’d become a cult figure partly through a suicide hoax. After collecting rejection slips, he’d wound up sending a mimeographed note to America’s poetry editors, saying something like, Bill Knott died an orphan and a virgin. The allegedly posthumous poems came out under the pen name St. Geraud, a character in an eighteenth-century porno novel who ran an orphanage and sodomized his charges. The grotesque humor of the endeavor won me over, particularly when Knott came out from behind his mask with his second book, Auto-Necrophilia, which—it took me a while to puzzle out—referred to masturbation after death.

Knott lumped up to the stage, a hulking bubble of a guy in sweatshirt and pants he might have rifled from a dumpster. His heavy black glasses—worn in a wire-rim age—were lopsidedly held together in the center by bandaids. His fair hair hung in unwashed strings. He drew a poem from a wrinkly paper bag stuffed with pages, and after reading a few lines, he said in a disgusted voice, That’s such shit, stupid moron Knott, asshole. People laughed nervously, looking around. He wadded up the page and tossed it. The room roared.

That’s pretty much how the reading went, one balled-up page after another, mingled with lyric poems of great finish and hilarity. The audience hooted in wild and rolling waves. Guys in the front row started throwing the paper balls back, which made Knott hump even deeper in his oversize clothes as if dodging hurled tomatoes.

At the end, a guy in a tie next to me said, I used to think poets shouldn’t get public grants, but this guy really can’t do anything else.

When Knott left the stage, people hollered for him to come back.

I sat on the hard floor almost aquiver. Writers had heretofore been mythical to me as griffins—winged, otherworldly creatures you had to conjure from the hard-to-find pages they left behind. That was partly why I’d not tried too hard to become one: it was like deciding to be a cowgirl or a maenad.

In our town, the only bookstores sold gold-rimmed Bibles big as coffee tables and plastic dashboard figurines of Jesus—flaming heart all day-glo orange. Yet I’d believed—through grade school—Mother’s lie that poetry was a viable profession.

As a toddler, Mother’s slate-blue volume of Shakespeare served as my booster seat, and in grade school, I memorized speeches she’d read aloud, to distract or engage her. Picture a bedridden woman with an ice pack balanced on her throbbing head while a girl—age seven, draped in a bedsheet and wearing a cardboard crown—recites Macbeth as Lady M. scrubs blood off: Out, out, damn spot …

Then social mores had intervened. A distinct scene from junior high flushes vividly back.

Girls sitting out of rotation volleyball in gym class stared at me all gap-mouthed when—of a rainy spring day—I spouted e. e. cummings. Through open green gym doors, sheets of rain erased the parking lot we normally stood staring at as if it were a refrigerator about to manifest food. The poem started:

in Just-:

spring when the world is mudluscious …

As I went on, Kitty Stanley sat cross-legged in black gym shorts and white blouse, peeling fuchsia polish off her thumbnail with a watchmaker’s precision. She was a mouth breather, Kitty, whose blond bouffant hairdo featured above her bangs a yarn bow the color of a kumquat.

That it? Beverly said. Her black-lined gaze looked like an old-timey bandit mask.

Indeed, I said. (This was my assholish T. S. Eliot stage circa ninth grade, when I peppered my speech with words I thought sounded British like indeed.)

Is that a word, muddy delicious? Kitty said.

Mud-luscious, I said.

Not 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 the girls in my gym class had been right all along, and poetry was a trick on smart people—a bunch 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.

At the symphony one night when Shirley couldn’t go, Walt pressed on flaws in my method, asking, Any way you’re swaying them?

You mean I’m unintentionally signaling them somehow? I said. Maybe intoning the gorgeous ones in some hyper-approving way?

The violins were tuning up, the different bows trying to find the same note. It was that instant before a concert when I always wanted to bolt, because what if I didn’t like Beethoven, which I’d never heard? Maybe I should beg off and say I’m feeling sick. At home, I could make a hoagie and turn on the tube, rather than stay captive in an overheated hall in a seat that made your legs sweaty with a stranger on one side hogging your armrest.

Walt’s face had that expectant air, though, he maybe knew the music was so magnificent that even a plebe like me could hear it. He said, Let’s say the women do have some innate taste, despite lacking any analytical tools they could articulate. What’s that mean, you think?

I can’t remember how I said it—and we both knew I cared too much about the outcome for my little test to pass as science. I told him I wanted to believe in quality the way I had as a kid, when a great poem could flood me with certainty that there was something good in the world. Or somebody out there knew who I was even if we’d never met—or never would meet. Which made poetry one of the sole spiritual acts in our mostly godless household. Just because the ladies never went to school didn’t mean they couldn’t tell the difference between Beethoven and The Hokey-Pokey. Awe was okay with them, possibly their natural state. No really crap teachers had ruined their native taste by preaching what they were supposed to like.

Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air, a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody’s head off.

Which was what the symphony did that night for the first time, me sitting alongside Walt while the soft timpani mallets with the dandelion-puff heads banged loud enough for the dead, deaf composer to rouse from the distant German dirt.

Afterward, Walt and I didn’t say much, just walked through the parking lot exhaling steam with the crowd, everybody’s eyes glancing in opposing vectors, brushing off each other but meeting, too, with that soft recognition you have after being drenched awhile by the same orderly chaos. We were like swimmers walking out of the sea. Every ten paces or so, headlights flipping on would turn shadow figures into full-fledged human units. Unlocking the car, Walt brought up my half-assed experiment again, saying, How’re you sure you know which poem’s best?

I slid inside, saying, I just do.

Which—ignorant though I knew I was—the ladies had proved to me in some way. And the next day, at Walt’s urging, I sent away for that graduate application.