"The Less Holy Bible" comprises 20 poems set apart from others in Mary Karr's collection Tropic of Squalor (2018). "Less Holy" is what we expect from Karr, whose memoirs of addiction and affairs earned her a reputation for being a "black belt sinner." When she tells The On Being Project that she's "a real church lady" who reads scripture every day, she herself seems a little surprised. These poems, she says, are her personal responses to particular books of the Bible. While she gleefully skewers authorities, ex-lovers, and herself in these poems, she's never less than serious about our potential to cause pain and find grace.
My favorite is called "Revelation," a natural choice for the final book of this bible. Subtitled "A Messenger," the poem begins, "It was anybody's son at the door." Already we have sympathy for the bike messenger in a green slicker who plowed through heavy rain to bring her the contract for a lucrative job. She invites him to step inside while she handles the papers, and we get to know him, his hopes and his obstacles. As he rides off "green wings extended / behind in the wind," she reveals his appropriate name and prays to be "rich again," thinking not of the money but of how this encounter has enriched her. Us, too.
Connecting content to the Biblical names is fun. While psalms in the Bible are words set to music, "Psalms: Carnegie Hall Rush Seats" sets musical ecstasy to words. Obadiah's litany of disasters inspires "Obadiah: A Perfect Mess," about a confluence of pedestrians packing the sidewalk, men moving a piano, and a downpour -- apparent disaster mitigated by kindness. The sorry descendants of David in Kings I and II inspire an imprecation on political shysters that she calls "The Obscenity Prayer," modeled on the Lord's prayer ("And empower our asses / that they destroy those / who ass against us").
Karr is playful even when her subjects are grim. "We live on a scab," Karr writes in the first poem, "Genesis: Animal Planet" about her own genesis in a town settled uneasily over petrochemical toxins and the goo left by prehistoric life. The numbers in "Numbers" are statistics from her hometown's cancer epidemic, blithely ignored by executives whose polluting factory is the cause. "Exodus" recalls the inner voice that told her "run, you little bitch." A neighbor in New York who molests children is subject of a poem she calls "Ecclesiastes," perhaps because she's thinking, as the Bible book says, there is a time to kill. "Hebrews" and "Lamentations" concern Holocaust survivors and 9/11.
The title of one particularly intense poem is a bitter joke. As the names of gospel writers Mark and John are slang terms for "victim" and "sexual predator," Karr gives us "Marks and Johns: The Blessed Mother Complains to the Lord Her God about the Abundance of Brokenness She Receives." When the title gives away so much, who needs the poem? But as the voice of St. Mary recounts the self-harm, scars, and losses suffered by desperate people who kneel at her altar, she has a vision of each one as "a cross my son is nailed to." It's a twist that helps us to see the Crucifixion in a new way.
"I try to see God in everything," Karr told On Being, a practice she carries on in the stand-alone poems of Tropic of Squalor, too. Some concern God's working within a person to break them out of stifling or harmful self-concern. They don't always make it, like the daughter whose parents' love can't keep her from harming herself ("The Burning Girl"). Karr indicts probably her entire readership who live in a "city of I-beams and mirrored towers," heads bent over phones in the line at Whole Foods, oblivious to the whole world's wonders within their reach ("Discomfort Food for the Unwhole"). But there's also Karr's appreciating her difficult father's appetite for life unmediated by literature ("Illiterate Progenitor"). And Karr's memory of playing basketball with fellow inmates of a rehab center includes a miracle from which she takes the inspiration to want to live again ("Loony Bin Basketball").
I'm keeping this Less Holy Bible on the shelf within easy reach of the other one.
- I discuss two more selections from the Less Holy Bible in Poets on Prayer (01/2022)
- I appreciate Karr's collection Sinners Welcome (2006) in Discomfort and Joy (06/2020).
- A piece of Karr's essay relating poetry to prayer kicks off Where Prayer Meets Poetry: the Collect (05/2020), about an Anglican specialty.
- Mary Karr's poem "Etchings from the Plague Years" (1993) was my introduction to her work. My seminar group considered it in a theological reflection. See Vocation and Plague at our class blog, the second half of the article.
- Watch Karr and others in a forum arranged by On Being with the Episcopal National Cathedral
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