Lit by Mary Karr Page B

Jesus—flaming heart all day-glo orange. Yet I’d believed—through grade school—Mother’s lie that poetry was a viable profession.
    As a toddler, Mother’s slate-blue volume of Shakespeare served as my booster seat, and in grade school, I memorized speeches she’d read aloud, to distract or engage her. Picture a bedridden woman with an ice pack balanced on her throbbing head while a girl—age seven, draped in a bedsheet and wearing a cardboard crown—recites Macbeth as Lady M. scrubs blood off: Out, out, damn spot …
    Then social mores had intervened. A distinct scene from junior high flushes vividly back.
    Girls sitting out of rotation volleyball in gym class stared at me all gap-mouthed when—of a rainy spring day—I spouted e. e. cummings. Through open green gym doors, sheets of rain erased the parking lotwe normally stood staring at as if it were a refrigerator about to manifest food. The poem started:
    in Just-:
    spring when the world is mud-
    luscious…
    As I went on, Kitty Stanley sat cross-legged in black gym shorts and white blouse, peeling fuchsia polish off her thumbnail with a watchmaker’s precision. She was a mouth breather, Kitty, whose blond bouffant hairdo featured above her bangs a yarn bow the color of a kumquat.
    That it? Beverly said. Her black-lined gaze looked like an old-timey bandit mask.
    Indeed, I said. (This was my assholish T. S. Eliot stage circa ninth grade, when I peppered my speech with words I thought sounded British like indeed .)
    Is that a word, muddy delicious? Kitty said.
    Mud-luscious, I said.
    Not no real word, Beverly said, leaning back on both hands, legs crossed.
    I studied a volleyball arcing white across the gym ceiling and willed it to smash into Beverly’s freakishly round head.
    It’s squashing together luscious and lush and delicious , and all of it applied to spring mud. It’s poetic license, I said.
    I think it’s real smart how you learn every word so they come out any time you please, Kitty said.
    Beverly snorted. I get mud all over Bobby’s truck flaps, and believe you me, delicious don’t figure in.
    As insults go, it was weak, but Beverly’s facial expression—like she was smelling something—told me to put poetry right back where I’d drug it out from.
    Shortly after this, my junior high principal had actually warned me that any girl aiming to be a poet was doomed to become—I shit you not— no more than a common prostitute . And so the fantasy went underground, though in high school I’d still hitchhiked two hours to Houston to buy (coincidentally) Bill Knott’s first book, which gave me the dim hope that somewhere, a solitary madman knew just how I felt.
    Sitting before a living, nose-blowing Bill Knott made all my writer heroes real. It shot voltage through my own poetic leanings, and inside me, some image of myself as a black-turtleneck-clad poet came creaking back to life. The festival must’ve had fifty or sixty podiums, and behind every one stood a poet with a teaching job and a book to offload. They were real, and their ranks looked open.
    But how to get there? The small U-shaped bar I tended started to feel like a locked corral I needed to jump out of, but which way other than just not here .
    At the same conference, an unlikely first teacher showed up—a rusty-handed Mississippian named Etheridge Knight, whose debut book had been written in the pen. He was lumbering and black, with a scraggly mustache and a soul patch under his chin. His jaw was lumpy and uneven, with patches of white skin edged in pink—ragged and tear-shaped, as if acid flung in his face had eaten away his color. He spoke of poetry as an oral art (this was pre-poetry-slam America). Without pages, he half-sang the folk tale of Shine, a porter on the Titanic strong enough to swim to safety.
    the banker’s daughter ran naked on the deck
    with her pink tits trembling and her pants roun her neck
    screaming Shine Shine save poor me
    and I’ll give you all the