love is a place by E. E. Cummings
love is a place
E. E. Cummingslove is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all placesyes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds
MARGINALIA
1.
Would you believe me if I said that there is a universe inside my body. Not merely a wild thing that grows abundant with the wind and rain, but the cosmos housed by these bones. Would you believe me if I said our carcasses are made up of words.
2.
Love is a word that means I will always reach for your hand in all the lifetimes befalling this earth. Love is a map that ties a rope around both our waists, love is—as love does—the deepest dwelling. Love means the lines on your face.
3.
Yes is the world and all the other worlds where you and I exist.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904–1962 by E. E. Cummings, published by Liverlight, 2016. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“Presented here in a bold new edition, E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904–1962 showcases Cummings’s transcendent body of work, collected in its entirety.
Combining Thoreau’s controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, E. E. Cummings, together with Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. Today Cummings is recognized as the author of some of the most sensuous lyric poems in the English language, as well as one of the most inventive American poets of his time. Formally fractured and yet gleefully alive and whole, at once cubistic and figurative, Cummings’s work expanded the boundaries of what language is and can do.
With a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Stephen Dunn, this redesigned, newly corrected, and fully reset edition of Complete Poems collects and presents all the poems published or designated for publication by E. E. Cummings in his lifetime. It includes 36 poems that were first collected in the 1991 edition and 164 unpublished poems issued in 1983 under the title Etcetera. It spans his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, up through his last valedictory sonnets.
In the words of Randall Jarrell, “No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and special reader.”” (Source)
ABOUT E. E. CUMMINGS
Edward Estlin (E.E.) Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cummings earned both his BA and MA from Harvard, and his earliest poems were published in Eight Harvard Poets (1917). In 1922 he published his first book, The Enormous Room, a fictionalized account of his French captivity. Cummings’ first collection of poems, Tulips and Chimneys, appeared in 1923. Another collection quickly followed: XLI Poems, also in 1925. By the time of his death in 1962 Cummings held a prominent… (more)
Read more poems by E. E. Cummings • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
- Explore other works in pursuit of: love • infinity • affirmation • Or browse the index
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hellogeorge
This is so beautifully written, Ms. T. Thank you for your words.
T.
Thank you for your kind words. It’s comments like yours that make the process of curating these poems so rewarding. I hope you continue to explore the world of poetry with us, and that you find more words that resonate with you.
T.