[meme] poetry

[rone]

When you see this, post a bit of poetry in your own journal.

---

pity this busy monster,manunkind,

not.  Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victum(death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
-electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange;lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen until unwish
returns on its unself.
                                  A world of made
is not a world of born-pity poor flesh

and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence.  We doctors know

a hopeless case if-listen:there's a hell
of a good universe next door;let's go

- e. e. cummings

Comments

I can't even imagine not having Complete Poems.

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

I bought it for my eleventh-grade "author's report" (term paper about some aspect of an author's career) and I've read probably two-thirds of it in 25 years. It's such a wonderfully varied body of work and pretty much defines modern poetry for me. I was just a few pages past this poem in the middle of 1x1 last time I put it down. I love the salesman and the politician, but my favorite section to open at random is just before that in the nastier Depression-era books right in the middle, ViVa and No Thanks.

what does little Ernest croon
in his death at afternoon?
(kow dow r 2 bul retoinis
wuz de woids uf lil Oinis

cemented his endearment to me permanently. You'll never find that in anthologies, or "theys sO alive / (who is / ?niggers" or the wonderful sexual poems, or any of the longer poems, especially not the prose poems like "Will I ever forget that precarious moment?" Why pick and choose when one convenient volume is so reasonably priced?