I haven't been reading as much poetry as I used to - my mind has been full of other things. But I was looking out at my patch on New York sky and a few lines of ee cummings sprang unbidden into my mind. I've been hiding a bit from cummings for lots of reasons, not he least of which is that I've heard him dismissed as suitible mostly for moon-struck adolescents.
I admit it - in college my big eyed, henna-haired, moon-struck roommate and I copied out sheaves of his poems on attractive paper and stuck them all over the walls with her ink-drawings of flowers and women and trees, and my gentle idea of "found art" - scraps of things that seemed beautiful or abandoned to me that I would bring home. I didn't know the term "art installation" at the time, but I guess that's what we had.
Discovering ee cummings was a huge gift to me. I had never encountered someone who (for all his strange syntax) spoke so plainly and without artifice about all the things I carried in my heart and had no words for.
I guess I was terrified that encountering him again, now that I'm a little more grown up and jaded, I'd find it all to be fluff and melodrama and emotional emptiness.
It's not.
We had the inevitable Klimt posters on our wall, too, especially the dreadfully over exposed Kiss. Thing is, that painting, no matter how many times I see it on a coffee mug, never loses any of its shock of intimacy and beauty. Like many cummings poems, it is cluttered and gilt and ornate, but also very plain and unflinching and true. I had been worried that these artists were just part of a stage. I went through a ballerina stage, a pony stage, a black-eyeliner and Sylvia Plath stage, and, I was afraid, an ee cummings and Klimt stage. I'm thrilled to realize that while they might have been included in a whole "emotional aesthetic" stage (which I don't think I've really grown out of) they also contain lasting truth and accessibility. In both, there is a simplicity, a courage and a shamelessness in revealing these tender/mad/embarassing things that I want to learn from.
Rereading the poems today my heart is just falling into each one. I wanted to post one but every one is more beautiful than the next, so I'll post the one that came into my mind and started this whole thing.
65
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i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of allnothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
ee cummings
Of The Best Stuff, but Cracked
1 comment:
Picasso is such a weird experience for me. I stare and stare at certain paintings of his and understand them on a dreaadfully literal and biographical level, but am rarely moved, distracted by google-eyes and thick lines. A lot of times the emotions and edginess of the picture escape me, even though I did play Picasso's plaything in Steve Martin's excellent play.
I seem to have a lot more emotional receptors where it comes to language -perhaps I mean a much higher confusion tolerance - I don't find Aaron Wilson as difficult as he is sometimes painted, and for me the language needs to be severely and violently fractured to get me to turn away with the same sigh of "what the fuck?" that I seem to reserve for many Picasso's drawings and paintings.
I guess what struck me is that I'd expect to find Klimt and cummings banal, because they have been easily swallowed and digested by just about everyone - and yet I don't, which is both cheering and humbling.
And I'm coming more and more to believe in the personal and ultimately subjective quality of art. As in the finger pointing at the moon, the truth that a piece may or may not express is objective, but the quality and decipherability of the finger-pointing depends a lot on where you're standing.
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