E e cummings pics of flowers

“Then it was spring; and in spring anything may happen. Absolutely anything.” ~ E. E. Cummings

Spring, April, Poetry Month: a welcome trifecta of hope, beauty and possibilities. It’s a time of birdsong, thoughtful reading, invention, and above all, celebration. We celebrate and marvel at words, which, according to Wordsworth, can capture “the breathings of your heart.”

Nobody does Spring better than my favorite poet E. E. Cummings. It’s fitting that my first encounter with Cummings was his iconic “in-Just/spring” —  I remember meeting the “little lame balloonman” in high school and I haven’t been the same since.

In college, his “sweet spring” was on continuous loop as I read, read, read, wrote, wrote, wrote, and learned how to learn:

sweet spring is your
time is my time is our
time for springtime is lovetime
and viva sweet love

As a young teacher, I shared “Spring is like a perhaps hand” and “O sweet spontaneous” with my students. We discussed the inherent musicality of language, with Cummings the prime example of a poet who reveled in experimentation and innovation. Words are living, breathing entities, after all — why not make them sing?

Today I’m happy to share another of Cummings’s spring poems. I love the lyricism, playfulness, energy, and unabashed glee. No matter how many times I read it, it feels fresh and alive — as though Cummings was right here, making this poem before our very eyes.

when faces called flowers float out of the ground

when faces called flowers float out of the ground
and breathing is wishing and wishing is having —
but keeping is downward and doubting and never
–it’s april (yes,april;my darling)it’s spring!
yes the pretty birds frolic as spry as can fly
yes the little fish gambol as glad as can be
(yes the mountai

“The Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself,”wroteE.E. Cummings (October 14, 1894–September 3, 1962) — an artist who withstood some spectacularly obtuse criticism for unlearning tradition to press forward with a daring creative vision for the possibilities of language and form that would forever change the landscape of literature. Even the way he signed his name became the subject of controversy and enduring popular misconception. (In fact, contrary to the latter, Cummings himself used both all-lowercase and capitalized versions in signing his work, but capitalized more frequently than not.)

The poet applied the same ardor for felicitous experimentation to his other great passion: painting, which he considered his “twin obsession,” joining the canon of great writers who were also, unbeknown to most of their readers, pictorial artists — a canon that includes Sylvia Plath’s visual art, Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly studies, J.R.R. Tolkien’s illustrations, Richard Feynman’s sketches, William Faulkner’s Jazz Age etchings, Flannery O’Connor’s cartoons, and Zelda Fitzgerald’s watercolors.

In a delightful performance of poetic role-play, Cummings contemplated his dual passion in the foreword to a catalogue for the one-man exhibition he had the spring after his fiftieth birthday at the Memorial Gallery in Rochester, New York, later included in E.E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised (public library) — the out-of-print treasure that gave us Cummings on what it really means to be an artist and his electrifying advice on the courage to be yourself.

In a dialectic prose poem both playful and profound, he sunders himself into critical interlocutor and answering artist — an artist who speaks with the soul-wink of a Zen Buddhist philosopher:

Why do you paint?
For exactly the same re