Morton writes the poetry of life
Faced with the prospect of losing a tidal wave of hair that had become her trademark as a poet and performing artist, Karla K. Morton took the offensive, instead, and shaved her head down to the dome.
“I just thought, ‘I’ll beat this chemotherapy to the punch,’” a cheerful Morton explained during an early public appearance, sans locks, at last fall’s Langdon Weekend literary festival at Tarleton State University’s Granbury outpost. “Does my hair define me, or do I define myself?”
“Is a lion any less without its mane?” asks Morton in a new book called Redefining Beauty — a chronicle of a year spent defeating cancer. Due in September from San Antonio-based Dos Gatos Press, Redefining Beauty revels in good-humored defiance, invoking by turns an air of insolence and indignation, a near-Homeric sense of blood-and-thunder epic struggle and a droll wittiness that lends weight to the old saw about the therapeutic possibilities of laughter.
The emotional depth, coupled with intellect to match and an adventurous hunger for challenge, figures in Fort Worth native MortonÂ’s selection as Texas State Poet Laureate for 2010. The honor has come at a crucial time.
Following nine months of treatment for breast cancer — her hair has restored itself, curly and darker — Morton received word of her selection as next year’s Poet Laureate. The date, this past May 19, marked her anniversary of surgery. Whether fate or coincidence, the designation fulfills an ambition that Morton has nurtured since she was a schoolgirl.
“It’s everything that I’ve always worked for,” Morton says.
Though an early bloomer as a poet — a grade-school classroom exercise kindled the interest, she recalls — Morton has worked relentlessly to have her work discovered. She spent some 20 years refining the talent, collecting “enough letters of rejection to paper a house,” as she puts it, before she achieved publication in Concho River Review of San Angelo, first in a series of watersheds.
“Submit, refine, revise, re-submit — never stop creating,” as Morton characterizes the necessary combination of artistry and persistence. “The worst enemy of any artist is to accept ‘no’ as the answer. One rejection notice equals three new submissions.”
The method had worked for Morton in her drive to appear in print, and a similar refusal to accept “no” has figured in her recovery from cancer.
After Morton had received the diagnosis, she and her husband, Denton-based hospital administrator Stan Morton, informed their children, Matthew and Kathryn. The familyÂ’s unified response proved one of determination and focused defiance. Morton began writing the poems that make up Redefining Beauty as an assertion of the will to prevail.
“It’s not pretty,” she reflects. “It’s a fight. An enemy within. A monster. You have to make the choice to fight.
“And neither is poetry necessarily pretty. Some harsh and angry expressions in this book, y’know… It’s the willingness to fight when threatened that makes anybody’s life worth living.”
Morton has written all along in the language of candor and unbridled expression, now soothing, now provocative. Her comparatively recent visibility as a published author strikes a contrast with the significantly older and more widely published poets — men, as a general rule — who have served in recent years as Poet Laureates of Texas. The official state tradition dates from the 1930s.
Morton will succeed 2009 Poet Laureate Paul Ruffin, of Sam Houston State University. The title carries no regimented duties, but Morton has already launched a campaign to visit schools statewide, to encourage interest in the creative arts. Her tour also will include visits to cancer-treatment centers.
MortonÂ’s rise to prominence during the past few years has been distinguished by various projects that have promised, or threatened, to define her poetic range within a narrow realm. Her breakthrough as a recording artist, a CD-album called Wee CowrinÂ’ Timorous Beastie, is an epic narrative poem-with-music in the 17th-century Scots manner.
The Beastie, however, has proved one-of-a-kind as Morton has delved into ancient Mideastern Sufi poetry, among other forms, and then tackled Redefining Beauty as an outpouring of the rage to live in an unpredictable range of rhyme, non-rhyme, formal and free-form verse and a conversational style that plays out like candid speech.
“It’s not about me, in any event,” Morton says. “It’s about poetry as a voice that all of us can share, to express ourselves and to learn from the experiences of others. Poetry is a restless impulse, capable of transforming our lives, and it’s the duty of any poet to share that voice as widely as can be. If poetry can give me a better handle on my life, then it becomes my duty to give poetry to even greater numbers of people.”
Karla Morton will present a selection of poetry on Sept. 11 at Tarleton StateÂ’s Langdon Weekend festival at the Dora Lee Langdon Center in downtown Granbury. MortonÂ’s Little Town, Texas, Tour is in the scheduling stages. Schools and townships can connect with the tour by contacting publicist Kelly Kirkendoll Shafer at kelly@shafercommunications.com, or by telephone at 817-236-6075.
On the Web: www.kkmorton.com and www.tarleton.edu, keyword: Langdon.
