Quick Updates!

Regarding poets who paint, etc., my colleague Professor Nimura has reminded me that, yes, indeed, e.e. cummings painted as well as wrote, and she has sent along a link:

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cummings/paintings.htm

And another blogger (regarding "Out Here") noted that, yes, we may or may not be meant to work in relative obscurity, but it's still nice to share. Indeed. It did make me think of Dickinson, among others, however, who seemed to have an inkling that her work would be shared--except later, when she was Elsewhere. I think she might have capitalized Elsewhere, too.

(How great would it be if Dickinson returned and wrote a blog? The posts would be terse and completely original. She'd make the genre her own.)

I may have to get serious about this and develop a real list of poet/painters and painter/poets.

But not tonight. I have sleeping to do before I go more miles.

Anyway, thanks for the info/input.

Poem from the Friday Challenge

A colleague and poet took up Friday's challenge, which was as follows:

I selected one word each from the [love] poems [selected by students from the Norton anthology] and invited the students to try to write a poem that successfully incorporated all the words. Here is the list, in case you'd like to accept the challenge, too: ask, eye, felicity, medicine, neutral, spoken, bread, satisfaction, cloud, absence, murmur, difficult, beauty, we, hold, live, delight, cold, compare, and sunlight.

She wrote the following fine poem (which works very well as a whole piece but which, in my opinion, also has two especially splendid lines--the second and the next-to-last):


Poets Asking Metaphors



We ask:
What’s felicity to the eye, and what’s medicine?
And, what is neutral?
Does spoken bread yield satisfaction?
And, does absence murmur?
And, is beauty too difficult?
We hold, we live, we delight in this cold.
We compare this cold with sunlight.



by Tamiko Nimura Copyright 2008 Tamiko Nimura