The first really literary person I ever knew was my twelfth-grade English teacher. (Yes, it took me until twelfth grade to find someone who read literary fiction and poetry as hobbies, rather than chores.) He was amazingly tall and limber and had a zen master-type appearance, with a round, shaved head – no coincidence he was the first man to explain Buddhism to me, I guess – but overall, I think he was quite an angry man, stormy almost, like a person in a Brontë novel. He taught us in a portable classroom – do Americans have those? – whose walls were absolutely covered in black-and-white printouts of e.e. cummings’ poetry. This was in an age when few people were on the internet, and I imagine he was a late bloomer, digitally speaking, so he must have painstakingly typed each poem out. If you’re familiar with cummings, and I imagine if you’re even bothering to read this you must be, you know what a pain in the ass, typographically, that must have been.
In any event the result of my association with that man is that e.e. cummings will forever be my favourite poet. Here’s the poem of his, though hardly an obscure one, that I love best of them all. I used to have the last line up in vinyl stickers on my wall, two apartments ago, until someone teased me and said it made my home look like a bookstore:
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 nearyour 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 roseor 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
Any other cummings-lovers out there?
I love e.e. cummings. I really like “i carry your heart” and “i thank you God for most this amazing…” “i like your body.” I remember reading another really dirty one that compared sex to driving a car, but I can never find it now.
*raises hand*
It was 11th grade for me. I can still recite from memory (most) of “anyone…”
anyone lived in a pretty how town
with up so floating many bells down
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did
…
It was my fist experience with poetry that wasn’t:
duh-duh duh-duh duh-duh duh-times
duh-duh duh-duh duh-duh duh-rhymes
The kind of cadence that you can’t help but read in a sing-song voice. Nothing against that form of poetry, but when I was young it just seemed like the poetry of old people, or ancient history. cummings sounded radical and modern and cool.
It’s funny how now I see that anyone… isn’t that far from that plodding cadence, really. Plenty of poets out there that deconstruct meter and structure and rhyme much more radically. But, cummings opened the door for me.
I like “who knows if the moon” which I read to my daughter from a big anthology of grown-up poetry for children. She loves it.
I also love “i carry your heart” but I hate the way it’s read at weddings ALL. THE. TIME. It makes me think of my other daughter who died. It’s so far away from wedding-style love for me.
I have a very amateur love for cummings, hHaving only read a scattered select poems. My favorite is “Because it’s,” which required more than idle thought to read it.
My very favorite cummings poem is “it may not always be so”, I love the idea of being accepting of love lost, and still taking joy in the fact that there was love. Also “O sweet spontaneous” is another one of my favorites.
love cummings. Love American poetry from the first half of the 20th century generally. (Esp. Millay. Maybe I’ll do one of hers sometime.) “pity this busy monster, manunkind” is my fave.
“He taught us in a portable classroom – do Americans have those?”
Heh. Yes. AKA Plan B for when not enough duffer voters died that year for the millage to pass.
Oh, I adore Cummings. I may be a Shakespeare fangirl, but Cummings is my favorite romantic poet. My favorite of his is, I believe, “in Just-spring.” The goat-footed balloonman. <3
I discovered e.e. cummings in 10th grade; tuned into his politics in addition to his magical writings. My fave segment of another of his ‘Spring’ poems [not quoting this in the same format as he wrote it]:
“While you and I
have lips and voices
which are for kissing and to sing with
Who cares if some one-eyed sonofabitch
invents an instrument
to measure Spring with?”
{loved this particular way of describing an uninspiring/uninspired scientist staring into a microscope….}
@PhDork, I love Millay. I’m not much of a poetry reader, but I do own a book of some of her poems.
I love cummings! The one you posted is one of my all time favorite poems, but I’m planning on getting a tattoo of “since feeling is first” on my side. I also love “it is so long since my heart has been with yours” and “i sing of olaf glad and big.” My 11th grade English teacher taught me to love poetry through cummings.
Funnyface, I think you probably mean “she being Brand”. I love cummings, but I have to say I honestly don’t know how I feel about having the woman in the poem compared to a car… :/