Carson McCullers: where have you been?

I discovered Carson McCullers quite serendipitously or rather I should say I stumbled upon her in a Roberto Bolaño poem from the Tres collection (seen here) , a sort of dream sequence in which McCullers appears as one of Bolaño's erotic partners. A little online research led me to a sampling of poetry from The Mortgaged Heart, a collection of poems, essays and stories.

Best known for her novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (an Oprah book!), it's probably safe to say that any notoriety she enjoyed as a poet was a function of an acutely dysfunctional life. If not directly visible in her poetry, it's probably more the 'urban legend' of the wildly promiscuous, drunken artiste that bestows any literary value on her. Generalizations like this, however, ought to be reserved for a wider study of her life and works.

The small sampling of poetry I've read online does, however, rather endear her to me. It's not the clever Levertov nor exquisitely sensuous Loy nor even wildly joyous DiPrima I detect but rather a lonely girl grappling with "fractioned" gods and metaphysicals. Who wouldn't bend under that weight. Or if  the poet-persona herself isn't to blame for the mess her life is in, perhaps it's best to look at those shabby religious distinctions (between '"Father" and "sorrow of separation"; "God" and "Thing") and the twisted theology they invoke. What was she thinking? The tragedy lies perhaps in the fact that she quite possibly worshipped before she wrote them.

I think the great Bolaño must have envisaged love with McCullers as a case of two broken angel-halves trying (rather pathetically) to look whole. Ah, perhaps it takes one to know one.


Father, Upon Thy Image We Are Spanned

Why are we split upon our double nature, how are we planned?
Father, upon what Image are we spanned?
Turning helpless in the garden of right and wrong
Mocked by the reversibles of good and evil
Heir of the exile. Lucifer, and brother of Thy universal Son
Who said it is finished when Thy synthesis was just begun.
We suffer the sorrow of separation and division
With a heart that blazes with Christ's vision:
That though we be deviously natured, dual-planned,
Father, upon Thy image we are spanned.
AVE

Stone Is Not Stone

There was a time when stone was stone
And a face on the street was a finished face.
Between the Thing, myself and God alone
There was an instant symmetry.
Since you have altered all my world this trinity is twisted:
Stone is not stone
And faces like the fractioned characters in dreams are incomplete
Until in the child's inchoate face
I recognize your exiled eyes.
The soldier climbs the glaring stair leaving your shadow.
Tonight, this torn room sleeps
Beneath the starlight bent by you