Abacus

by Mary Karr

Mary Karr's four volumes of poetry are Sinner's Welcome (published by HarperCollins in 2006), Viper Rum, The Devil's Tour, and Abacus. She has received The White Writer's Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Radcliffe Bunting Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry. Her first memoir, The Liars Club (Penguin, 1995), received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for best first non-fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for more than a year and was named "Best Book of 1995" by more than thirty newspapers and magazines. The sequel, Cherry, (Viking, 2000) was excerpted in The New Yorker and appeared on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, and BookSense. It was named a Notable Book in The New York Times. She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University and lives in Syracuse and New York City.

Genres: Poetry

56 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1987

About the author

Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.

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.

The Liars' Club, 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 Wolff, 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, which she says details "my journey from blackbelt sinner and lifelong agnostic to unlikely Catholic," came out in November 2009.

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 (HarperCollins, NY 2006). Her poems have appeared in major literary magazines such as Poetry, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly.

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 Merrill, Amy Clampitt, Vijay Seshadri, and Rosanna Warren (daughter of Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Penn Warren). Karr favors controlled elegance to create transcendent poetic meaning out of not-quite-ordinary moments, presenting James Merrill'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 Jarrell 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 Poetry (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.

Reviews

[Husayn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn't expect to like this book, but i really really enjoyed it. Simple, great control of language, addressed women's issues head on

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry. Capital P Poetry.
Mostly autobiographical.
Some about her father, dying.
Some about her experiences with men.
Some about her childhood.
Some written for others.

[Caleb Knight · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tender and direct. Mary Karr has a gift for using language in a way that makes her images feel matter of fact, like they have always existed and she was the one honest enough to notice them.

[tortoise dreams · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first book by the noted memoirist, a collection of 35 early poems.

Poetry Review: Abacus is a mature and thoughtful first book of poetry. Published eight years before her first astonishing memoir, The Liars' Club, it already contains the self-reflection which made that book successful and eye-opening. Much poetry since the days of Sexton and Plath contains elements of obvious autobiography, poetry and memoir share a close relationship, wondering do we classify it as fiction or nonfiction. In Abacus we see that Mary Karr was writing memoir from the beginning, just in poetry instead of prose. Consider such lines from this book as:

"I know the Perrys will be taking down the lawn chairs"
"You took them home to make a purple pie/ that stained my mouth and your hands"
"Ginnie ... got a heart-shaped/ locket, then a shotgun wedding ring"
"I hauled the army footlocker thunking/ up the basement stairs."

Each could be the grain of sand enwrapped by the full story that becomes a pearl in one of her memoirs to come. Many of the poems are the unabashedly romantic memories of someone living life richly, reflecting on bohemian larks, ex-lovers, and adventures. She writes of hitting the road much like a latter day Kerouac drinking champagne in a kimono and pearls; she's not above a sense of myth making:

"I was full of sex and Russian novels and the college/ we couldn't afford"
"I stole my mother's face,/ growing into her high heels,/ her taste for alcohol and men"
"After high school I ran away to the coast/ slept in a pink Lincoln Continental on blocks/ ... At night I traveled everywhere on LSD"
"In Paris where I use a cigarette/ for my night light."

The book's title comes from the poem "The Distance," in which a lover's gift of a pearl is "strung now with the rest, your gifts,/ my abacus of love and hate." As can be seen from the above lines, Karr's poetry is mostly straightforward and accessible as one would expect from someone who would later publish a pot-stirring essay titled "Against Decoration" in Parnassus in 1991. The poems can almost be read like prose, which is no criticism, and show hints of Sylvia Plath ("Vampire") and Neruda ("Exile's Letter"). Some of the best pieces in Abacus describe the long death of her beloved father in painful, sharp-edged syllables. As a first book one might expect it to be short, but as we'd learn Mary Karr was never prolific; she was too busy living life. [4★]

[Casper · Rating 5 out of 5]

really visual & dark, i cried like 6 times in the 52 short pages

[Devin Vanderpool · Rating 3 out of 5]

4 really lovely poems. Deep sentiment for her dying Father. Loved the Diogenes series.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

some true gems in here; so glad i was able to find it as it's been out of print for decades

[Bruce Moody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not bad for a free kindle book.