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The Twisted Trinity / poem by Carson McCullers
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Will Dockery
Oct 13, 2016, 2:10:46 AM10/13/16
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"Twisted Trinity" poem by Carson McCullers
Reading a good book tonight on local girl who did well, Carson McCullers. This one is slightly special in that there is a chapter on her poetry... Taking notes on that and it should make for a good read, hopefully.
More on this later as I'm taking in the four poems that are focused on in this chapter, the first being "Twisted Trinity", written in 1941 when Carson had returned home to Columbus Georgia, burned out from psychic stress, and filing for divorce, she was down in the primitive Deep South, he home town, renewing what she called her "shattered equilibrium", while comparing her journey into the south as comparable to her friend Annemarie Schwarzenbach's journey through Africa. Way down in Columbus, Georgia in late 1941, McCullers wrote that she was balancing her poetic and prosaic strands. It was in this setting that she wrote the poem "Twisted Trinity":
http://www.nzz.ch/articleCT58W-1.154639
The Twisted Trinity
There was a time when stone was stone When a face on the street was a finished face And a leaf, my soul and God alone Made instant symmetry.
Now all things fail, the trinity is twisted. Stone is not stone. And faces like the fractioned characters In dreams are incomplete.
Until in the child's unfinished face I recognize Your sudden eyes. The soldier climbs the evening stair leaving Your shadow.
And to the delicate autumn hill and the slant star The exiled intellect must add a new dimension: Something of you.
-Carson McCullers
In November 1941, Carson McCullers published this poem in the exile magazine "Decision," published by Klaus Mann, which Annemarie Schwarzenbach read in Africa a few weeks later and enjoyed. Annemarie Schwarzenbach translated this poem to German and alos wrote an answer, OB Poem for it. The point of the poem was a trinity of Self - Nature and God. An "instant symmetry", she called it.
"...I have you in mind, there, in the winter air of the little town in Georgia that I know - and I am so happy to know that you are working, writing, living alone, fully embedded in your loneliness. Your poem 'The Twisted Trinity' could be the motto of my book, for it starts with a man who is looking at a tree and is looking for the momentary symmetry between the tree, his soul and God's silence...", Annemarie wrote Carson, from Africa. "Annemarie Schwarzenbach died on November 15th 1942 after a bicycle accident in Sils. Her literary works were not discovered until 1987, almost 50 years after her death..."
Later, David Diamond set the poem to music, and still later, in 1947, Carson McCullers published a re-write of the poem called "Stone Is Not Stone", much ore a of downer, the subject being more about her husband being gone. She said that there had been a time in her life when "stone was stone,". Yet in "the child's unfinished face," the poet could recognize "sudden eyes".
Next poem I'll be exploring is Carson McCullers' poem "The Mortgaged Heart", which has been said to be her most well crafted poem. The theme is the "mortgage". A lover holds on to her heart, even after death, yet this is seen as a positive, "good" thing.
Reading a good book tonight on local girl who did well, Carson McCullers. This one is slightly special in that there is a chapter on her poetry... Taking notes on that and it should make for a good read, hopefully.
More on this later as I'm taking in the four poems that are focused on in this chapter, the first being "Twisted Trinity", written in 1941 when Carson had returned home to Columbus Georgia, burned out from psychic stress, and filing for divorce, she was down in the primitive Deep South, he home town, renewing what she called her "shattered equilibrium", while comparing her journey into the south as comparable to her friend Annemarie Schwarzenbach's journey through Africa. Way down in Columbus, Georgia in late 1941, McCullers wrote that she was balancing her poetic and prosaic strands. It was in this setting that she wrote the poem "Twisted Trinity":
http://www.nzz.ch/articleCT58W-1.154639
The Twisted Trinity
There was a time when stone was stone When a face on the street was a finished face And a leaf, my soul and God alone Made instant symmetry.
Now all things fail, the trinity is twisted. Stone is not stone. And faces like the fractioned characters In dreams are incomplete.
Until in the child's unfinished face I recognize Your sudden eyes. The soldier climbs the evening stair leaving Your shadow.
And to the delicate autumn hill and the slant star The exiled intellect must add a new dimension: Something of you.
-Carson McCullers
In November 1941, Carson McCullers published this poem in the exile magazine "Decision," published by Klaus Mann, which Annemarie Schwarzenbach read in Africa a few weeks later and enjoyed. Annemarie Schwarzenbach translated this poem to German and alos wrote an answer, OB Poem for it. The point of the poem was a trinity of Self - Nature and God. An "instant symmetry", she called it.
"...I have you in mind, there, in the winter air of the little town in Georgia that I know - and I am so happy to know that you are working, writing, living alone, fully embedded in your loneliness. Your poem 'The Twisted Trinity' could be the motto of my book, for it starts with a man who is looking at a tree and is looking for the momentary symmetry between the tree, his soul and God's silence...", Annemarie wrote Carson, from Africa. "Annemarie Schwarzenbach died on November 15th 1942 after a bicycle accident in Sils. Her literary works were not discovered until 1987, almost 50 years after her death..."
Later, David Diamond set the poem to music, and still later, in 1947, Carson McCullers published a re-write of the poem called "Stone Is Not Stone", much ore a of downer, the subject being more about her husband being gone. She said that there had been a time in her life when "stone was stone,". Yet in "the child's unfinished face," the poet could recognize "sudden eyes".
Next poem I'll be exploring is Carson McCullers' poem "The Mortgaged Heart", which has been said to be her most well crafted poem. The theme is the "mortgage". A lover holds on to her heart, even after death, yet this is seen as a positive, "good" thing.
Will Dockery
Oct 15, 2016, 12:53:35 AM10/15/16
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Finishing up my write-up on "The Mortgaged Heart" and should have it posted by tonight or tomorrow.
Shatzberg Services
Oct 20, 2016, 7:01:31 PM10/20/16
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On Saturday, October 15, 2016 at 12:53:35 AM UTC-4, Will Dockery wrote:
> Finishing up my write-up on "The Mortgaged Heart" and should have it posted by tonight or tomorrow.
Looking forward to that, my friend.
> Finishing up my write-up on "The Mortgaged Heart" and should have it posted by tonight or tomorrow.
chrispu...@gmail.com
Oct 20, 2016, 7:33:05 PM10/20/16
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Will Dockery
Oct 20, 2016, 10:54:30 PM10/20/16
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Will Dockery
Oct 21, 2016, 1:39:16 AM10/21/16
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😍
Will Dockery
Oct 21, 2016, 4:01:41 AM10/21/16
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Finishing up my write-up on "The Mortgaged Heart" and should have it posted... tomorrow at the earliest, much too weary at the moment.
Meanwhile, here is the poem:
http://www.best-poems.net/carson_mccullers_poems/the_mortgaged_heart.html
Meanwhile, here is the poem:
http://www.best-poems.net/carson_mccullers_poems/the_mortgaged_heart.html
bosl...@gmail.com
Oct 28, 2016, 5:48:03 PM10/28/16
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Will Dockery
Oct 28, 2016, 8:49:20 PM10/28/16
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At least times have changed enough for gays that you don't have to go through the persecution folks like Truman Capote went through in this area back in the day.
Will Dockery
Oct 31, 2016, 12:03:29 AM10/31/16
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I'll be getting back to this project later next month, sorry for the delay.
Search Group Solutions
Nov 2, 2016, 11:12:03 PM11/2/16
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Hope you find the time soon.
Will Dockery
Nov 3, 2016, 12:01:12 PM11/3/16
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On Wednesday, November 2, 2016 at 11:12:03 PM UTC-4, Search Group Solutions wrote:
> Hope you find the time soon.
I'm aiming for the weekend on it, but with car repairs slated for those days, it may yet have to reside on the back burner for a while longer.
> Hope you find the time soon.
Today, there are errands to run in Albany, Georgia.
Hope all is well with you, or mostly so.
Will Dockery
Nov 19, 2016, 9:13:24 AM11/19/16
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On Thursday, October 20, 2016 at 7:33:05 PM UTC-4, chrispu...@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/theater/reviews/suzanne-vegas-carson-mccullers-talks-about-love-review.html
"...drawn directly from or inspired by McCullers’s own writings. (“We of Me,” about the emotional ménage à trois among Carson, Reeves and the composer David Diamond, riffs on the yearning to belong expressed by the young Frankie of “The Member of the Wedding.”) Ms. Vega’s emotional sympathy with her heroine doesn’t keep her from observing the self-destructive streak in McCullers, but the ringing final words of the last song — “the love of my life is humanity” — strike a typical note. Ms. Vega too often reduces McCullers’s particular achievements to comfortingly soft generalities about the artist as lonely outsider speaking for the lost soul in all of us. Hero worship can be a tricky place to start if you are hoping to create a meaningful work of theater."
Will Dockery
Nov 19, 2016, 1:53:59 PM11/19/16
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Interesting but not surprising, it seems that Suzanne Vega has no plans to visit our town with her show, although it would be very appropriate since Columbus GA is where Carson McCullers grew up and where the settings were in most if her stories. I've just started checking all this out so this may have happened but received very little press, relatively.
George John
Nov 21, 2016, 6:44:30 PM11/21/16
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On Saturday, November 19, 2016 at 1:53:59 PM UTC-5, Will Dockery wrote:
> Interesting but not surprising, it seems that Suzanne Vega has no plans to visit our town with her show, although it would be very appropriate since Columbus GA is where Carson McCullers grew up and where the settings were in most if her stories. I've just started checking all this out so this may have happened but received very little press, relatively.
I found this:
> Interesting but not surprising, it seems that Suzanne Vega has no plans to visit our town with her show, although it would be very appropriate since Columbus GA is where Carson McCullers grew up and where the settings were in most if her stories. I've just started checking all this out so this may have happened but received very little press, relatively.
http://www.salon.com/2016/11/02/lover-beloved-is-suzanne-vegas-tribute-to-carson-mccullers-and-it-is-only-the-beginning/
Author Carson McCullers led a fascinating life. Born in Georgia, she traveled to New York City after high school graduation to study piano at the Julliard School but soon switched gears and turned to writing. McCullers was a natural, publishing the story “Wunderkind” at 19 and the best-seller “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” in 1940, when she was just 22.
Still, her personal life grew chaotic even as she published more notable plays, essays and books, including “The Ballad of the Sad Café” and “The Member of the Wedding.” She battled health issues (including two strokes at the age of 30) and depression — as did her husband James Reeves McCullers Jr., or Reeves, who committed suicide in 1953. She died in 1967 at age 50.
It’s too easy to consider McCullers a tragic figure, however. That’s the crux of Suzanne Vega’s new album, “Lover, Beloved: Songs From An Evening With Carson McCullers,” which presents illuminating, nuanced vignettes about the author’s life. Stylistically, the record runs the gamut from cabaret jazz and hushed piano ballads to swampy blues and keening folk-rock.
Lyrically, it depicts McCullers’ complicated, rich personality. The starry-eyed “New York Is My Destination” alludes to the author’s post-high school sojourn to the Big Apple — and her determination to make life in the big city work — while the fanciful, banjo- and horn-buckled “Harper Lee” arranges her quotes about famous authors to illustrate varying levels of competitive cattiness and cheeky camaraderie. “Harper, Harper, Harper/ Lee, Lee, Lee/ Why do they always compare her to me?” Vega sings lightly on the chorus.
“Lover, Beloved: Songs From An Evening With Carson McCullers” is tied to Vega’s forthcoming play, which is called “Lover, Beloved: An Evening With Carson McCullers.” (This is different from an off-Broadway play she launched a few years ago called “Carson McCullers Talks About Love.”) Vega says the world premiere of this new production is taking place next year at “a nationally recognized theater,” with the location and time to be revealed at a later date. (The play was going to open in October but was postponed for “various reasons,” Vega says, including the fact that an actress in it unexpectedly had to drop out due to another job.)
Will Dockery
Nov 21, 2016, 9:43:10 PM11/21/16
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Thanks, Sulzbach...
I haven't really seen much of anything local about this important project.
I haven't really seen much of anything local about this important project.
John George III
Nov 22, 2016, 7:38:31 PM11/22/16
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On Monday, November 21, 2016 at 9:43:10 PM UTC-5, Will Dockery wrote:
> Thanks, Sulzbach...
>
> I haven't really seen much of anything local about this important project.
Welocme, love that song of hers about Luka, the chick on the second floor.
> Thanks, Sulzbach...
>
> I haven't really seen much of anything local about this important project.
Will Dockery
Nov 22, 2016, 10:17:03 PM11/22/16
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Yeah, and Tom's Diner also...
Do Doo do do do do Doo do...
Do Doo do do do do Doo do...
Zod
May 29, 2019, 11:31:42 PM5/29/19
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On Thursday, October 13, 2016 at 2:10:46 AM UTC-4, Will Dockery wrote:
I raise my glass of whiskey to the great Carson McCullers...........
Michael Pendragon
May 30, 2019, 2:06:15 AM5/30/19
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Will Dockery
May 30, 2019, 8:49:34 AM5/30/19
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Roach
May 30, 2019, 9:29:02 AM5/30/19
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Zod
May 30, 2019, 3:11:30 PM5/30/19
to
On Thursday, May 30, 2019 at 2:06:15 AM UTC-4, Michael Pendragon wrote:
Michael Pendragon
May 30, 2019, 3:35:22 PM5/30/19
to
Michael Pendragon
“It is my retirement....... Nothing more or less................ “
-- George “Lady Bunny” Suzbach, aging career panhandler
Zod
May 30, 2019, 3:36:30 PM5/30/19
to
It was a gift from a friend........................
Zod
May 31, 2019, 10:31:50 PM5/31/19
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On Thursday, May 30, 2019 at 2:06:15 AM UTC-4, Michael Pendragon wrote:
Will Dockery
May 31, 2019, 10:56:44 PM5/31/19
to
😉
Brainiac Five
Jun 1, 2019, 5:47:10 PM6/1/19
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Hector Heathcliff
Feb 17, 2020, 10:50:22 PM2/17/20
to
On Thursday, October 13, 2016 at 2:10:46 AM UTC-4, Will Dockery wrote:
>
> "Twisted Trinity" poem by Carson McCullers
>
> Reading a good book tonight on local girl who did well, Carson McCullers. This one is slightly special in that there is a chapter on her poetry... Taking notes on that and it should make for a good read, hopefully.
>
> More on this later as I'm taking in the four poems that are focused on in this chapter, the first being "Twisted Trinity", written in 1941 when Carson had returned home to Columbus Georgia, burned out from psychic stress, and filing for divorce, she was down in the primitive Deep South, he home town, renewing what she called her "shattered equilibrium", while comparing her journey into the south as comparable to her friend Annemarie Schwarzenbach's journey through Africa. Way down in Columbus, Georgia in late 1941, McCullers wrote that she was balancing her poetic and prosaic strands. It was in this setting that she wrote the poem "Twisted Trinity":
>
> http://www.nzz.ch/articleCT58W-1.154639
>
> The Twisted Trinity
>
> There was a time when stone was stone When a face on the street was a finished face And a leaf, my soul and God alone Made instant symmetry.
>
> Now all things fail, the trinity is twisted. Stone is not stone. And faces like the fractioned characters In dreams are incomplete.
>
> Until in the child's unfinished face I recognize Your sudden eyes. The soldier climbs the evening stair leaving Your shadow.
>
> And to the delicate autumn hill and the slant star The exiled intellect must add a new dimension: Something of you.
>
> -Carson McCullers
>
> In November 1941, Carson McCullers published this poem in the exile magazine "Decision," published by Klaus Mann, which Annemarie Schwarzenbach read in Africa a few weeks later and enjoyed. Annemarie Schwarzenbach translated this poem to German and alos wrote an answer, OB Poem for it. The point of the poem was a trinity of Self - Nature and God. An "instant symmetry", she called it.
>
> "...I have you in mind, there, in the winter air of the little town in Georgia that I know - and I am so happy to know that you are working, writing, living alone, fully embedded in your loneliness. Your poem 'The Twisted Trinity' could be the motto of my book, for it starts with a man who is looking at a tree and is looking for the momentary symmetry between the tree, his soul and God's silence...", Annemarie wrote Carson, from Africa. "Annemarie Schwarzenbach died on November 15th 1942 after a bicycle accident in Sils. Her literary works were not discovered until 1987, almost 50 years after her death..."
>
> Later, David Diamond set the poem to music, and still later, in 1947, Carson McCullers published a re-write of the poem called "Stone Is Not Stone", much ore a of downer, the subject being more about her husband being gone. She said that there had been a time in her life when "stone was stone,". Yet in "the child's unfinished face," the poet could recognize "sudden eyes".
>
> Next poem I'll be exploring is Carson McCullers' poem "The Mortgaged Heart", which has been said to be her most well crafted poem. The theme is the "mortgage". A lover holds on to her heart, even after death, yet this is seen as a positive, "good" thing.
There's some of that rare Carson McCullers poetry.....
>
> "Twisted Trinity" poem by Carson McCullers
>
> Reading a good book tonight on local girl who did well, Carson McCullers. This one is slightly special in that there is a chapter on her poetry... Taking notes on that and it should make for a good read, hopefully.
>
> More on this later as I'm taking in the four poems that are focused on in this chapter, the first being "Twisted Trinity", written in 1941 when Carson had returned home to Columbus Georgia, burned out from psychic stress, and filing for divorce, she was down in the primitive Deep South, he home town, renewing what she called her "shattered equilibrium", while comparing her journey into the south as comparable to her friend Annemarie Schwarzenbach's journey through Africa. Way down in Columbus, Georgia in late 1941, McCullers wrote that she was balancing her poetic and prosaic strands. It was in this setting that she wrote the poem "Twisted Trinity":
>
> http://www.nzz.ch/articleCT58W-1.154639
>
> The Twisted Trinity
>
> There was a time when stone was stone When a face on the street was a finished face And a leaf, my soul and God alone Made instant symmetry.
>
> Now all things fail, the trinity is twisted. Stone is not stone. And faces like the fractioned characters In dreams are incomplete.
>
> Until in the child's unfinished face I recognize Your sudden eyes. The soldier climbs the evening stair leaving Your shadow.
>
> And to the delicate autumn hill and the slant star The exiled intellect must add a new dimension: Something of you.
>
> -Carson McCullers
>
> In November 1941, Carson McCullers published this poem in the exile magazine "Decision," published by Klaus Mann, which Annemarie Schwarzenbach read in Africa a few weeks later and enjoyed. Annemarie Schwarzenbach translated this poem to German and alos wrote an answer, OB Poem for it. The point of the poem was a trinity of Self - Nature and God. An "instant symmetry", she called it.
>
> "...I have you in mind, there, in the winter air of the little town in Georgia that I know - and I am so happy to know that you are working, writing, living alone, fully embedded in your loneliness. Your poem 'The Twisted Trinity' could be the motto of my book, for it starts with a man who is looking at a tree and is looking for the momentary symmetry between the tree, his soul and God's silence...", Annemarie wrote Carson, from Africa. "Annemarie Schwarzenbach died on November 15th 1942 after a bicycle accident in Sils. Her literary works were not discovered until 1987, almost 50 years after her death..."
>
> Later, David Diamond set the poem to music, and still later, in 1947, Carson McCullers published a re-write of the poem called "Stone Is Not Stone", much ore a of downer, the subject being more about her husband being gone. She said that there had been a time in her life when "stone was stone,". Yet in "the child's unfinished face," the poet could recognize "sudden eyes".
>
> Next poem I'll be exploring is Carson McCullers' poem "The Mortgaged Heart", which has been said to be her most well crafted poem. The theme is the "mortgage". A lover holds on to her heart, even after death, yet this is seen as a positive, "good" thing.
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