Poetry Wednesday 09/23/09: Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond

Flowers and Hat: Patchen Place
By E.E. Cummings
Oil on canvas

Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond
by E.E. Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;
only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.

Right: Seated Nude on a Bed, 1943 By E.E. Cummings, Oil on canvas

Hello, and welcome back to Poetry Wednesday 9/23/09. You can sign in today and take the tour thru Thursday, so take your time.

I’ll be your hostess again this week. My sister, Sans Souci, has been very busy helping our mom get adjusted to her new assisted living residence, but she will check in.

Before we get started, please make sure that your post has a link to get back to this page to make it easier to take the tour:

1) Copy and paste the following link that I have provided for you from this page to somewhere on your poetry post.

Link back to the Poetry Wednesday tour on Laurita’s page

2) Leave the link of your poetry post in the comments section below. This is the link guests will click on to read your poem.

Whimsical and experimental, E.E. Cummings (1894-1962) was a popular American poet of the early 20th century. Cummings’ first published work was his 1922 novel The Enormous Room, based on his time in a French prison camp during World War I. He became more widely known as an avant garde poet, thanks to his unconventional use of typography, syntax and sometimes scandalous (at the time) choices of words and topics. He had a fondness for scattering words unevenly across a page, and liked to spell his own name as e.e. cummings, leading generations of college students to remember him as the guy who didn’t capitalize his own name. He is often mentioned in the same breath with Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot and other groundbreaking literary figures of the era between the world wars. His collections of poetry include Tulips and Chimneys (1923), No Thanks (1935) and Ninety-Five Poems (1958).

Cummings attended Harvard, receiving a B.A. in 1915 and a M.A. in 1916 before his World War I service.

The artwork of E.E. Cummings

Left: Partial Nude, By E.E. Cummings, Oil on cardboard

Less well-known, however, are Cummings’ achievements as a visual artist and the extent to which they express in an entirely different medium the same aesthetic principles and rigorous artistic intelligence that inform his poetry. Cummings viewed himself as much a painter as a poet, as evidenced by the enormous amount of time and energy he devoted to this lesser-known half of his “twin obsession.” Not only did Cummings spend a greater portion of his time painting than writing, he also produced thousands of pages of carefully thought-out notes concerning his own aesthetics of painting: color-theory, analysis of the human form, the “intelligence” of painting, reflections on the Masters, etc.

Right: Waterfall, 1944, By E.E. Cummings, Oil on Canvas

While Cummings achieved substantial acclaim as an American cubist and abstract, avant-garde painter in the years between the wars, he later viewed the artistic establishment as hopelessly anti-intellectual and dropped out of the New York gallery scene, devoting the remainder of his life to painting representational work: landscapes, nudes, still lifes, and portraits. In these works Cummings continued to explore the issues and elaborate the principles that had impelled his early abstract paintings, and he brought them to bear in his later, more personal, representational work.

Source: http://www.answers.com/topic/e-e-cummings
Source: http://www.eecummingsart.com/prosp/?p=1

Flowers in a Blue Jug, 1962
By E.E. Cummings
Oil on canvas

I Carry Your Heart With Me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beatuiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

The Tour starts here.

Mt. Chocorua, 1938
By E.E. Cummings
Oil on canvas

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