Mary Karr (born January 16, 1955 in
Groves, TexasGroves is a city in Jefferson County, Texas, United States. The population was 15,733 at the 2000 census. It is part of the Beaumont–Port Arthur Metropolitan Statistical Area.-Geography:Groves is located at ....
) is an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
poetA poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir
The Liars' ClubThe Liars' Club is the childhood memoir of American author Mary Karr. Published in 1995 and a New York Times bestseller for over a year it tells the story of Mary Karr's childhood in the 1960s in a small industrial town in Southeast Texas...
. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
Her
memoirAs a literary genre, a memoir , forms a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable in modern parlance. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir, as listed here...
,
The Liars' ClubThe Liars' Club is the childhood memoir of American author Mary Karr. Published in 1995 and a New York Times bestseller for over a year it tells the story of Mary Karr's childhood in the 1960s in a small industrial town in Southeast Texas...
, published in 1995, was a
New York Times bestseller for over a year, and was named one of the year's best books. It delves vividly and often humorously into her deeply troubled childhood, most of which was spent in a gritty, industrial section of Southeast Texas in the 1960s.
Mary Karr (born January 16, 1955 in
Groves, TexasGroves is a city in Jefferson County, Texas, United States. The population was 15,733 at the 2000 census. It is part of the Beaumont–Port Arthur Metropolitan Statistical Area.-Geography:Groves is located at ....
) is an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
poetA poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir
The Liars' ClubThe Liars' Club is the childhood memoir of American author Mary Karr. Published in 1995 and a New York Times bestseller for over a year it tells the story of Mary Karr's childhood in the 1960s in a small industrial town in Southeast Texas...
. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
The Liars' Club
Her
memoirAs a literary genre, a memoir , forms a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable in modern parlance. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir, as listed here...
,
The Liars' ClubThe Liars' Club is the childhood memoir of American author Mary Karr. Published in 1995 and a New York Times bestseller for over a year it tells the story of Mary Karr's childhood in the 1960s in a small industrial town in Southeast Texas...
, published in 1995, was a
New York Times bestseller for over a year, and was named one of the year's best books. It delves vividly and often humorously into her deeply troubled childhood, most of which was spent in a gritty, industrial section of Southeast Texas in the 1960s. She was encouraged to write her personal history by her friend, author
Tobias WolffTobias Jonathan von Ansell-Wolff, III is an American author.He is best known for his short stories and his memoirs, although he has written two novels .-Teaching:...
, but has said she only took up the project when her marriage fell apart.
She followed the book with another memoir,
Cherry (2000), about her late adolescence and early womanhood. A third memoir,
Lit: A Memoir, which she says details "my journey from blackbelt sinner and lifelong agnostic to unlikely Catholic," is due out in November 2009.
Poetry
Karr thinks of herself first and foremost as a poet. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry in 2005 and has won Pushcart prizes for both her poetry and her essays. Karr has published four volumes of poetry:
Abacus (Wesleyan University Press, CT, 1987, in its New Poets series),
The Devil's Tour (New Directions NY, 1993, an original TPB),
Viper Rum (New Directions NY, 1998, an original TPB), and her new volume
Sinners Welcome (
HarperCollinsHarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company. The worldwide CEO of HarperCollins is Brian Murray...
, NY 2006). Her poems have appeared in major literary magazines such as
PoetryPoetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
,
The New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry published by Condé Nast Publications...
, and
The Atlantic MonthlyThe Atlantic is an American magazine founded as The Atlantic Monthly in Boston in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. Though based in Boston, it quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and...
.
She is a controversial figure in the American poetry "establishment," thanks to her Pushcart-award winning essay, "Against Decoration," which was originally published in the quarterly review
Parnassus (1991) and later reprinted in
Viper Rum. In this essay Karr took a stand in favor of content over poetic style. She argued emotions need to be directly expressed, and clarity should be a watch-word: characters are too obscure, the presented physical world is often "foggy" (that is imprecise), references are "showy" (both non-germane and overused), metaphors over-shadow expected meaning, and techniques of language (polysyllables, archaic words, intricate syntax, "yards of adjectives") only "slow a reader"'s understanding. Karr directly criticized well-known, well-connected, and award-winning poets such as
James MerrillJames Ingram Merrill was a Pulitzer Prize winning American poet. His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic narrative of occult communication with spirits and angels, titled The Changing Light at Sandover, which...
,
Amy ClampittAmy Clampitt was an American poet and author.-Life:Amy Clampitt was born on June 15, 1920 of Quaker parents, and brought up in New Providence, Iowa. In the American Academy of Arts and Letters and at nearby Grinnell College she began a study of English literature that eventually led her to poetry...
,
Vijay SeshadriVijay Seshadri is a Brooklyn, New York-based poet, essayist, and literary critic of significant repute.He was born in India and went to the United States in 1959, at the age of five...
, and
Rosanna WarrenRosanna Phelps Warren is an American poet and scholar.-Biography:Warren is the daughter of novelist, literary critic and Poet Laureate Robert Penn Warren and writer Eleanor Clark. She graduated from Yale University in 1976, with a degree in painting, and then in 1980 received an MA from The...
(daughter of
Pulitzer PrizeThe Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by Hungarian-American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City....
winner
Robert Penn WarrenRobert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for his novel All the King's Men and the Pulitzer Prize for...
). Karr favors controlled elegance to create transcendent poetic meaning out of not-quite-ordinary moments, presenting
James MerrillJames Ingram Merrill was a Pulitzer Prize winning American poet. His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic narrative of occult communication with spirits and angels, titled The Changing Light at Sandover, which...
's "Charles on Fire" as a successful example.
While some ornamentations Karr rails against are due to shifting taste, she believes much is due to the revolt against formalism which substituted sheer ornamentation for the discipline of meter. Karr notes
Randall JarrellRandall Jarrell was an American poet, critic,children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.-Biography:...
said much the same thing, albeit more decorously, nearly fifty years ago. Her essay is meant to provide the technical detail to Jarrell's argument. As a result of this essay Karr earned a reputation for being both courageous and combative, a matured version of the BB-gun toting little hellion limned in
The Liars' Club.
Another essay, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer", was originally published in
PoetryPoetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
(2005). Karr tells of moving from agnostic alcoholic to baptized Catholic of the decidedly "cafeteria" kind, yet one who prays twice daily with loud fervor from her "foxhole". In this essay Karr argues that poetry and prayer arise from the same sources within us.
Personal life
Karr was born January 16, 1955, in Groves, a small town in East Texas located in the Port Arthur region, known for its oil refineries and chemical plants, to J. P. and Charlie Marie (Moore) Karr. In her memoirs, Karr calls the town "Leechfield." Karr's father worked in an oil refinery while her mother was an amateur artist and business owner. Karr's sister, two years her elder, is a key figure in her memoirs. Karr developed an early interest in literature; she told a Publishers Weekly interviewer that, at the age of eleven, she wrote in a notebook that her ambition was “to write poetry and autobiography.” Upon graduation from high school, she traveled with a group of friends to Los Angeles, where she immersed herself in the lifestyle of the California hippie and surfer counter-cultures. Later that year, she enrolled in Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, but left school after two years to travel. Her political involvement in the anti-apartheid movement led her to meet African American poet Etheridge Knight who became an important influence on the development of her poetry. Karr eventually entered graduate school to study creative writing, and earned an M.F.A. from Goddard College in 1979. Among her mentors at Goddard was Tobias Wolff, whose memoir This Boy's Life served as a major influence on Karr's own writing. She also studied with noted poets Robert Bly and Robert Hass. Her first publication was a poem that appeared in Mother Jones magazine. Karr moved to Boston in 1980, where she held various jobs in the computer and telecommunications industries while continuing to write and publish poetry. In 1983 she married poet Michael Milburn, with whom she had a son, but the couple divorced in 1991. In the 90s, Karr dated David Foster Wallace. Karr has worked as an assistant professor at several colleges and universities, including Tufts University, Emerson College, Harvard University, and Sarah Lawrence College. She teaches in the department of English at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. She has been recently featured on NPR radio and CSPAN's Book TV.
Awards
- Guggenheim Fellowship (2005)
- Pushcart Prize
- PEN/Martha Albrand Award
- Bunting Fellowship (Radcliffe College)
- The Whiting Writer's Award
- National Endowment for the Arts grant
External links