Mary Karr A Perfect Mess Analysis

In the Mary Karr’s poem “A Perfect Mess”, Karr describes the importance of human impulses and wonts in the stability of a given society. Specifically, she describes the chaotic nature of New York City and the role that an individual plays in upholding the beauty that is created by the chaotic nature of the city. She explains that although the law is in place to keep society flowing, that fluidity in truth comes from “the sprawl/of our separate wills”. Her position on the role of an individual in a specific society is that even though there are a great amount of people in any given group, each one as a separate human contributes their own free will through their actions, which, in turn, shapes and drives their society. She displays this through a hypothetical example which, although probably

Karr also describes the role of an individual in a society’s culture, which, in her view, is one of little control, as according to her, it is the city as an entity that creates artists out of a hunger for beauty. In this view, the individual does not have a great amount of power or any degree of singularity amongst the others in terms of creativity. The city itself is the one that “feeds on beauty, starves/for it, [and] breeds it,” which, although it is a somewhat contrasting view to the one Karr expresses previously, it works in tandem with the aforementioned role that Karr gave to humans, as since the humans are the driving force behind the city’s identity and the city’s identity is what creates art, the people, by association, are the ones who cultivate the culture, or at least the need for art and