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
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
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