ee cummings

While Mr. Cummings' works can be somewhat agitating for me because I love proper grammar and punctuation, I find that no matter how often I come back to his 100 Selected Poems, I am enamored once again. I picked this little book up at a flea market or used book store somewhere and have never regretted the small change I paid for it. In other words: buy it.

Here is one of my favorites; number 28 (in this book):


since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
-the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis