Still Memory Poetry Response

Mary Karr succeeded in catching the very essence of what happens and what you feel like when waking form a deep sleep in her poem “Still Memory”. I personally have liked the moment when you wake up, and when reading “Still Memory” I was able to appropriately match my feelings to those described by Karr. It is the same as taking a cold shower after hours of heavy workouts. During the shower, you feel your mind getting empty, and a blank new sheet being placed over the old and shrouded up sheet. After you wake up from deep sleep, you feel the novelty of the new “day”. However, this feeling is evanescent; it feels like a complete peace for just a short time, and then you come back to reality, realizing your busy schedule, your responsibilities and the duties that you have to fulfill. Karr opened up the poem with the same essential feeling. “The bed came unroped from its moorings…drifted upstream till it found my old notch… in the house I grew up in… then it locked in place…” The world slowly, but steadily came into focus as she wakes up.

Waking up is not a huge part of life but rather a trivial and insignificant moment in the twenty-four hours of a day that no one really puts into account. However, Karr depicts it with a fuller meaning. Once the mind has fully concentrated, the senses and logical brain gear up. I usually set my alarm ten minutes before I actually have to wake up, just to lie in bed and listen to the daily routines of life, just as Karr described in her poem. Whether it is the sound of my sister taking a shower, or my mom making a delicious breakfast, or the Chris Tomlin songs I put on my phone.

Karr’s poem is not an alien “story” but rather that I can truly relate to, which would be the obvious goal of an author. She successfully describes an “inexplicable” trivial routine of life into one that we can apply to our own lives and relate to it. I truly appreciate her skills of taking such a minute detail