Monday, July 25, 2005

A Poetical Excursion

I used to write occasional "Poetical Excursions", in which I'd expound briefly on the bits of meaning I gleaned from various poems I'd read. I'm not sure why I stopped doing this, but I'm planning to start again. (Links to those old posts are available in the sidebar.)

While I may not have posted much about poetry in a long time, I have been reading poetry all the while, and I've been reading more poetry especially over the last six months or so. I've found that poetry is ideally suited to reading in short bursts -- such as, during lunch at work when I'm not already sitting with a friend -- and I've always believed that all writers, aspiring or otherwise, should read poetry to gain some insight as to just what is possible in language.

I particularly enjoy poetry compilations. True, collecting compilations results in a collection marked by multiple copies of many poems, but that itself strikes me as illustrative of poetry's expressive power: when you can find a single poem anthologized in both a compilation of war poetry and love poetry, you gain some insight into just what is in that slippery old word, "meaning".

This week I've been dipping into Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology, edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz. It's a nice collection, containing old favorites I've seen elsewhere and new poems I've not seen anywhere, containing poems selected under the auspices of the Favorite Poem Project. What makes this collection interesting is the introductory passages to each poem, many of them the words of ordinary Americans who "nominated" these poems for inclusion. One of these messages struck me in particular when I read it earlier today.

It is an introduction to e.e. cummings's poem "somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond". Here's the poem:

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


I've never really read much e.e. cummings before. The only time I recall encountering his work in school, there wasn't much of an exploration into what makes his work beautiful or powerful or whatever cummings is. The approach was to posit cummings as the token "modernist": "By the way, class, did you know that poems don't have to rhyme? Don't believe me? Here's a guy named e.e. cummings!" It all seemed so cute, especially with his refusal to capitalize and his unorthodox spacings of words and his runningwordstogether and the like. I often wonder if the lessons English teachers try to impart upon their charges are wasted upon readers who are not experienced enough to learn them.

But the problem with that is that there are readers who are ready for such lessons. Here's the introductory note for "somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond", which is by an eighteen-year-old student from Georgia:

I have read this poem so many times that the spine of the book is broken and always turns to its page. Today I gave that book away to the first person that I have ever truly and sincerely loved. I gave her the book because there is no gift I could give her that would be more honest. This poem has shaped who I am. It has been a long journey, but cummings's poem set my heart on a course to find love, and I have arrived, only to truly understand the poem for the first time.


Since the Favorite Poem Project ended around six or seven years ago, I'd very much like to know just what that girl made of the gift this young man gave her. Did she read the poem and understand it the same way he did? Are they still together, with their lives somehow bound by the threads woven in words by e.e. cummings?

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