Poetry heads over to God’s territory

FOR the last century, serious poetry has been largely secular. Literary types see religion as something literature has gotten over. Poets who fail to vanquish any Christian spirituality beyond what is quaint are usually condemned to “inspirational poetry,” except poor old T.S. Eliot. But it’s his angst that people take seriously, not his prayer.

Now, however, two major American poets have declared themselves on the side of God. Mary Karr’s “Sinners Welcome” mixes her beloved stories from the wrong side of the tracks with new notes of care and forgiveness and pure, often angry, hymns to God. Franz Wright’s collection “God’s Silence” is filled with simple, devastating poems about God as the only possible way out of personal hells.

Karr is a sort of bad-girl poet -- a Texan and recovering alcoholic who’s loud about it -- known for her bestselling memoir “The Liar’s Club.” Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning son of poet James Wright, is a poet’s poet, someone writers read. Whereas Karr wears her hells like pretty hats she brags about, Wright is open like a flayed soul, prepared to forgive even those who cause him pain because all other routes are futile, as he explains in “Text & Commentary”:

“The final and ultimate act of compassion: return / from peace to the place where you were tortured / to death in order to comfort once more / the frightened friends who’d deserted you ....”

One hardly feels it’s poetry, it’s so direct. Later he writes, “I lived as a monster, my only / hope is to die as a child.”

Karr, a Catholic, doesn’t always reach Wright’s straightforward transcendentalism. But she hits religion with a woman’s view of the world. In particular, her poem about the Nativity is stunning: “Maybe at the womb’s first clutch / she briefly felt that star shine ... But in the muted womb-world with its glutinous liquid / the child knew nothing / of its own fire. (No one ever does, though our names / are said to be writ down before / we come to be.)”

The meditations of St. Ignatius have the devout re-create the birth and death of Christ in their minds until it feels real -- Nativity and Passion remade in memory. This is the first time I’ve seen done well a contemplation of Mary giving birth.

In her infamous 1991 essay “Against Decoration,” for the quarterly review Parnassus, Karr took potshots at almost every major name in poetry, from such old-school modernists as Michael Blumenthal to then-fresh voices such as Rosanna Warren, with particular venom for critic Helen Vendler. Karr’s thesis was that a lot of Reagan-era and ‘90s poetry had too much decoration -- prettiness for pretty’s sake. The essay, reprinted in her 1998 collection “Viper Rum,” felt like a kid taking on all the school’s bullies at once -- sort of a preemptive strike by a scrawny someone who knew to go for the knee and groin. Her point -- now 15 years old and, many believe, still valid -- was lost in the adolescent tantrum.

“Sinners Welcome” ends with Karr’s latest essay, “Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer,” about her path to God as a way out of alcoholism. “I prayed with belligerence, at least once with a middle finger aimed at the light fixture.... I said Keep me sober....” It’s a daring mix. Before she had her fists up; now she strips herself bare, a far braver act.

Wright explains less and says more. If hating life is a version of mystical experience, Wright takes his pain and creates portable defense systems for strangers (his readers) against the fallen world. His hands strip poetry to its nub. As Karr notes in her essay, what’s left when poetry is stripped bare is prayer.

Getting religion in the poetry biz can hurt a poet’s chances. I felt it in my master of fine arts program as a Quaker, even though Quakers are pretty liberal. If you go to church, you can’t possibly be a serious artist. But now two serious poets say it is God that keeps them going. This could be quite a shake-up for the literary world.

Could God be reentering the secular world of arts? Perhaps intelligence needs spirituality, and spirituality needs intelligence. On the other hand, most contemporary Christianity cannot stand up to the standards and criticism of secular arts (or to their ancestor, the standards and criticism of the old church fathers and reformers). One thing is certain, neither Wright nor Karr partake of the anodyne God of the fundamentalists. The god of these two poets is the god of the downtrodden. This god doesn’t like “the affluent, the users-up

Karr’s complaint in her earlier essay was, essentially, that poetry had forsaken meaning. Now she and Wright have found a source of meaning that makes a great deal of recent poetry sound like faint tunes. In “God’s Silence” and “Sinners Welcome,” Wright and Karr have found an appeal to the beyond that turns second acts from mire into glory. Theirs is the vox humana speaking again of eternal things.

Laurel Maury writes reviews for a variety of publications.