Though primarily known as a writer of novels and plays, Carson McCullers did also write a little poetry. She even published a book of children’s verse, Sweet as a Pickle, Clean as a Pig, which I believe was only given one print run and seems to be rather scarce today. There are always a few copies on AbeBooks, but always just that little bit out of my price range, perhaps one day I will treat myself to my own copy. Until then, a very small selection of her poetry is available in the posthumous collection of her writing edited by her sister, Margarita G. Smith, The Mortgaged Heart. All of the poetry published in this volume is also available online. The anecdote from Margarita Smith refers to “Stone is Not Stone”

This poem called ‘Saraband’ was recorded for MGM records for Carson McCullers Reads (one day I will get that record converted), although McCullers was reciting her poems from memory and forgot four of the lines. I love how appropriately musical the rhythm of this piece is, especially when read aloud. It’s so rhythmic and soothing, especially with couplets such as the darkly beautiful “crown a host of unassorted sorrows/you never could manage one by one”, which reminds me of Elliott Smith lyrics.

Saraband

Select your sorrows if you can,
Edit your ironies, even grieve with guile.
Adjust to a world divided
Which demands your candid senses stoop to labyrinthine wiles
What natural alchemy lends
To the scrubby grocery boy with dirty hair
The lustre of Apollo, or Golden Hyacinth’s fabled stare.
If you must cross the April park, be brisk:
Avoid the cadence of the evening, eyes from afar
Lest you be held as a security risk
Solicit only the evening star.

Your desperate nerves fuse laughter with disaster
And higgledy piggledy giggle once begun
Crown a host of unassorted sorrows
You never could manage one by one.
The world that jibes your tenderness
Jails your lust.
Bewildered by the paradox of all your musts
Turning from horizon to horizon, noonday to dusk:
It may be only you can understand:
On a mild sea afternoon of blue and gold
When the sky is a mild blue of a Chinese bowl
The bones of Hart Crane, sailors and the drugstore man
Beat on the ocean’s floor the same saraband.

About her poetry, I remember best one evening at a university lecture. After she had recited ‘Stone Is Not Stone’ in her gentle Southern voice, there was a long silence. Then suddenly a young student stood up and said, ‘Mrs McCullers, I love you.’
(Margarita Smith on Carson McCullers’ poetry in The Mortgaged Heart)

[Photo Credit: Carson McCullers in 1959, by Carl Van Vechten from the Library of Congress collection]