Thank you to those in my reading/writing community who recommended Mary Karr’s Lit. I gobbled it. I’m putting down a few of the lines that drenched me awake because I want to share them with you and also because I want to hold on to them long after the book is returned to the library.
Some lines from Lit by Mary Karr…
On youth
What hurts so bad about youth isn’t the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It’s the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.
On love of language
Words warranted my devotion–not drugs, not boys. That’s why I clung to the myth that poetry could somehow magically still my scrambled innards.
On writing
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, I could write myself into an existence that included the company of sacred misfit poets whose pages had kept me company as a kid.
On learning
I 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, badly lying that it was stolen–what mugger says, Hand over the Dante!
On learning to write
[Etheridge Knight] 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?
On courtship
Warren counters with “Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness…” Watching his unkissed mouth shaping those plush syllables is the libidinal equivalent of a studly crooner mouthing a love song.
On attraction
Occasionally, deliciously, my foot brushes his muscled calf, which makes me go all creamy in my center like a stuffed chocolate.
On survival
Build a wall around the day and don’t look over it.
On procrastination
What happened to the poems I was going to set the world weeping with? Tomorrow!
On drinking
I took the whiskey, planning a courtesy sip. But the aroma stopped me just as my tongue touched the glass mouth. The warm silk flowered in my mouth and down my gullet, after which a little blue flame of pleasure roared back up my spine. A poof of sequins went sparkling through my middle.
On drinking in a hotel room
And why a mini-bar when a maxi-bar is clearly what’s called for?
On accepting help from someone
You’re not gonna pay me back, he said. It’s not that linear.
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So many lines, sharp as arrows, to choose from. These are just a measly handful to whet your appetite for this galloping book, this galloping life. Even though she and I share more differences than similarities, reading Lit made me feel (as Karr herself writes in the memoir about work she adores) somebody out there knew who I was even if we’d never met–or would never meet. Reading this book also made me feel, for a thimbleful of a second, that I might want to believe in prayer again. The feeling didn’t last long, but still, it counts for something.
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Today’s Poem: (click on link to read entire poem)
Morning Poem by Mary Oliver
Every morning
the world
is created…
