Suicide's Note: An Annual (Mary Karr, Poetry magazine)

TL;DR

Mary Karr's elegy for David Foster Wallace, published four years after his death — a fierce, unsentimental prayer over a former lover from whom she had long since parted, "so far apart we'd grown / between love transmogrifying into hate." It opens "I hope you've been taken up by Jesus" and moves through her fury at a God (and a church) that would damn "poor suffering / bastards like you," her memory of his asking her to breathe belief into his "otherwise-only-probable soul", and her flat refusal to romanticize the act: "And forgive my conviction / that every suicide's an asshole." It closes by insisting on his continued life in the lungs of those who loved him: "We sigh you out into air and watch you rise like rain." The poem advances no interpretation of Infinite Jest; it is primary grief-side material from the woman at the center of the archive's Karr strand, and it belongs to the conduct-and-mourning side of that record, not to the source-theft question.

Key claims

• A grief poem, not a document. The title's "Annual" frames it as a recurring, calendrical mourning; the poem is addressed directly to the dead Wallace ("you") throughout.
• The relationship's arc, compressed. The one line that carries the biography is the elegy's premise: decades of distance, "between love transmogrifying into hate and those sad letters / and phone calls and your face vanishing into a noose." Karr does not narrate the well-documented violence here; the poem's register is loss and anger, not indictment.
• His asking her to carry his belief. The poem's most intimate image: "More than once you asked / that I breathe into your lungs like the soprano in the opera / I loved so my ghost might inhabit you and you ingest my belief / in your otherwise-only-probable soul" — she is asked to be the faith he cannot supply himself.
• The refusal to sanctify the suicide. "And forgive my conviction / that every suicide's an asshole. There is a good reason I am not / God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten." The anger is theological and personal at once — of a piece with her Catholic-convert voice.
• The close: he lives in the breath of the grieving. "you are every second / alive in a hard-gnawing way for all who breathed you deeply in, / each set of lungs, those rosy implanted wings, pink balloons. / We sigh you out into air and watch you rise like rain."

Theories & evidence

The poem advances no theory about Infinite Jest or any interpretive crux — it is an elegy. No THEORY block is warranted. Its theory record bearing is scope discipline only, recorded here so the strand stays clean: this is conduct-and-grief-side Karr material and keys, at most, as adjacency to wallace-misogyny (it is the affective register of the relationship the conduct record documents; it makes no misogyny claim of its own). It does not attach to karr-source-theft — that slug is about identifiable Karr material lifted into the novel's text, and this poem contains no such claim; it is Karr writing about Wallace, not about anything of hers inside his book.

Themes

Grief and mourning (the annual, recurring elegy); faith and its refusal (the quarrel with God and church; belief asked-for and unsuppliable); suicide seen without romance (the "asshole" verdict, the ungranted smiting); love turned to hate and back to loss; the body and breath as the site where the dead persist.

Cross-references

• krug-wapo-dfw-fateful-correspondent — names this poem as Karr's writing about the relationship; recaps the coffee-table and moving-car incidents that are the conduct side of the same strand.
• dtmax-every-love-story — the biography of the Wallace–Karr relationship this elegy mourns from the far side.
• walden-lrb-diary-davids-presence — the other woman's memoir in this batch; Walden approaches the same man through friendship and doubt, Karr through fury and elegy — paired first-person voices on the conduct-and-grief side.
• larb-hayes-brady-2018-interview — the scholarly reckoning that foregrounds Karr's accusations; this poem is the primary lyric voice behind that record.

Notable passages

• "I hope you've been taken up by Jesus"
• "between love transmogrifying into hate and those sad letters / and phone calls and your face vanishing into a noose"
• "More than once you asked / that I breathe into your lungs like the soprano in the opera / I loved so my ghost might inhabit you and you ingest my belief / in your otherwise-only-probable soul."
• "And forgive my conviction / that every suicide's an asshole. There is a good reason I am not / God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten."
• "We sigh you out into air and watch you rise like rain."