Opening Up

Mary Karr talks to Ruth Graham about the intersection of music and poetry and everything else:

What made you want to memorize so much poetry as a child, and do you still do it often now? It’s tricky!

Well, not when you’re young, it’s not. The mind soaks it up, probably the way it learns a language. I always had a very good memory for language when I was a kid. It’s sad when you get older; it’s too hard to memorize things. There’s a really simple sonnet that I memorized last year, and I stop at the same place every time.

I think I started trying to impress my mother. My mother would get drunk and be maudlin and suicidal and loll around, and I think I started with the Shakespeare speeches because it amused her. She liked me when I did it. She paid attention to me and thought I was clever. So I was always trying to win her attention. Thank god she didn’t like titty dancers, right? My life would have been very different.