soul of a poet.



photo courtesy of f*ckyeahtattoos (i wish i could say that this tattoo was mine, but sadly, i am too much of a committment-phobe to get one.)

i'm not much a poetry aficionado - besides yeats and keats and shakespeare and the odd nursery rhyme, i don't know many poets' works.  in high school i went through a phase of writing poems - these rambling, yearning, adolescent poems full of the requisite teenage angst (i cringe just thinking about them and thank god they are in the garbage somewhere) but i have always been in love with e.e. cummings and his quietly gentle words. 

early in his life, cummings went to paris and fell in love with the city.  he wrote letters that were censored due to his vocal hatred for the germans, and eventually was arrested and imprisoned by the french army on charges of espionage and other "undesirable" activities.  shortly after being released, his father was killed and cummings used these events as the basis of a novel and his poetry.  cummings was quite prolific, writing over 2,900 poems, 2 novels, and several plays, not to mention countless drawings and paintings.  going on to marry three times, cummings had one daughter and eventually died of a stroke in north conway, new hampshire, in 1962.

what i love the most about cummings' poetry is the fact that he mixes the avant-garde (use of lowercase letters, odd punctuation) with the classic romantic tradition.  i'm thinking of incorporating some of cummings' words into a stamped piece, but i'm not confident yet in my skills - but maybe one day...

sometimes i wake up thinking of his verses - sometimes they appear in my dreams.  like today:

you being in love
will tell who softly asks in love,

am i separated from your body smile brain hands merely
to become the jumping puppets of a dream?   oh i mean:
entirely having in my careful how
careful arms created this at length
inexcusable, this inexplicable pleasure-you go from several
persons: believe me that strangers arrive
when i have kissed you into a memory
slowly, oh seriously
-that since and if you disappear

  (yes, probably a little sappy for a cloudy sunday morning - but his words are so lovely)