Poetry Response #3

“Still Memory” by Mary Karr is showing a short snapshot in the author’s childhood. She describes a typical morning with her family. Her father comes home from his nightshift as her mom is making coffee as the town is just waking up. This scene is contradicting to the title. This is not a still memory, but one with action with many descriptions. Karr describes how the “bed became unroped from its moorings” and how the flowers “open their narrow valleys for dew”. This gave me a sense of how the morning felt and I could picture how the flowers must have looked. In addition, Karr appeals to the readers senses when she describes her dad of smelling “of crude oil and solvent” and that the room smelled of coffee.

One of the things this poem is about is about the inevitability of death. The narrator of the poem is recording everything in snapshots because she is afraid there are a limited number of pictures. She illustrates this when she says that her father stood in the doorway, “not dead”, and how her parents were not “yet born each into a small urn of ash”. This shows that she has fear of them dying. Not only would she be without parents, but she would not have any money since her parents were poor. I assume the narrator of this story is Mary Karr because she said “my ten-year-old hand reaches/ for a pen to record it all/ as would become long habit”. I think this implies that she had a difficult life and expresses her hardships through her writing down daily events and thoughts. She shows very little optimism and emotion. This poem is a picture of the author’s reality that has had a lasting impression on her.