Monday, December 10, 2012

E. E. Cummings and I carry your heart with me


Notes

The poem, "i carry your heart with me," by E. E. Cummings has been a favorite love poem 
and a favorite selection at weddings for many years. The poem has gained renewed 
interest since being featured in the film, "In Her Shoes." It is used with devastating effect 
in the film’s climactic wedding scene and again to close the movie. Countless fans have 
been inspired to review the touching words of "i carry your heart with me."


I carry your heart with me


i carry your heart with me 
(i carry it in my heart) 

i am never without it
(anywhere i go you go, my dear; 
and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear no fate 
(for you are my fate, my sweet) 

i wantno world 
(for beautiful you are my world, my true)

and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing 

is you 
here is the deepest secret nobody knows


(here is the root of the root 
and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; 
which grows higher than soul 
can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart 
(i carry it in my heart)




E. E. Cummings 


E. E. Cummings was born Edward Estlin Cummings in 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He died in North Conway, N.H., in 1962. Cummings earned a B.A. degree from Harvard in 1915 and delivered the Commencement Address that year, titled "The New Art." A year later he earned an M.A. degree for English and Classical Studies, also from Harvard.
Cummings joined an ambulance corps with the American Red Cross in France during World War I. The French imprisoned him on suspicion of disloyalty, a false accusation that put Cummings in prison for three months. He wrote the novel, The Enormous Room, about his experience. Many of Cumming’s writings have an anti-war message.
Cummings was a fine artist, playwright and novelist. He studied art in Paris following World War I and he adopted a cubist style in his artwork. He considered himself as much a painter as a poet, spending much of the day painting and much of the night writing. Cummings particularly admired the artwork of Pablo Picasso.
Cummings' understanding of presentation can be seen in his use of typography to "paint a picture" with words in some of his poems.
The E. E. Cummings Society publishes an annual journal, titled "Spring." It normally contains articles, news, event notices, and critical essays about Cummings and his works. It also includes some reproductions of Cummings’ artwork.
During his lifetime Cummings wrote over 900 poems, two novels, four plays, and had at least a half dozen showings of his artwork.


Sunday, December 9, 2012

Live like it's Heaven on Earth


work-lke-you-don't-need-the-money-love-like-you've-never-been-hurt-dance-like-nobody's-watching-sing-like-nobody's-listening-live-like-it's-heaven-on-earth


Work like you don't need the money.


Love like you've never been hurt.

Dance like nobody's watching.

Sing like nobody's listening.

Live like it's Heaven on Earth.

- Satchel Paige

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

a poem from Elizabeth Bishop


One Art



The art of losing isn't hard to master; 
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like a disaster. 

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Brief Biography of Pearl S. Buck


Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, 1892 - 1973

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia. Her parents, Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker, were Southern Presbyterian missionaries, stationed in China. Pearl was the fourth of seven children (and one of only three who would survive to adulthood). She was born when her parents were near the end of a furlough in the United States; when she was three months old, she was taken back to China, where she spent most of the first forty years of her life.
The Sydenstrickers lived in Chinkiang (Zhenjiang), in Kiangsu (Jiangsu) province, then a small city lying at the junction of the Yangtze River and the Grand Canal. Pearl's father spent months away from home, itinerating in the Chinese countryside in search of Christian converts; Pearl's mother ministered to Chinese women in a small dispensary she established.
From childhood, Pearl spoke both English and Chinese. She was taught principally by her mother and by a Chinese tutor, Mr. Kung. In 1900, during the Boxer Uprising, Caroline and the children evacuated to Shanghai, where they spent several anxious months waiting for word of Absalom's fate. Later that year, the family returned to the US for another home leave.
In 1910, Pearl enrolled in Randolph-Macon Woman's College, in Lynchburg, Virginia, from which she graduated in 1914. Although she had intended to remain in the US, she returned to China shortly after graduation when she received word that her mother was gravely ill. In 1915, she met a young Cornellgraduate, an agricultural economist named John Lossing Buck. They married in 1917, and immediately moved to Nanhsuchou (Nanxuzhou) in rural Anhwei (Anhui) province. In this impoverished community, Pearl Buck gathered the material that she would later use in The Good Earth and other stories of China.
The Bucks' first child, Carol, was born in 1921; a victim of PKU, she proved to be profoundly retarded. Furthermore, because of a uterine tumor discovered during the delivery, Pearl underwent a hysterectomy. In 1925, she and Lossing adopted a baby girl, Janice. The Buck marriage was unhappy almost from the beginning, but would last for eighteen years.
From 1920 to 1933, Pearl and Lossing made their home in Nanking (Nanjing), on the campus of Nanking University, where both had teaching positions. In 1921, Pearl's mother died and shortly afterwards her father moved in with the Bucks. The tragedies and dislocations which Pearl suffered in the 1920s reached a climax in March, 1927, in the violence known as the "Nanking Incident." In a confused battle involving elements of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops, Communist forces, and assorted warlords, several Westerners were murdered. The Bucks spent a terrified day in hiding, after which they were rescued by American gunboats. After a trip downriver to Shanghai, the Buck family sailed to Unzen, Japan, where they spent the following year. They then moved back to Nanking, though conditions remained dangerously unsettled.
Pearl had begun to publish stories and essays in the 1920s, in magazines such as NationThe Chinese RecorderAsia, and Atlantic Monthly. Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published by the John Day Company in 1930. John Day's publisher, Richard Walsh, would eventually become Pearl's second husband, in 1935, after both received divorces.
In 1931, John Day published Pearl's second novel, The Good Earth. This became the best-selling book of both 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize and the Howells Medal in 1935, and would be adapted as a major MGM film in 1937. Other novels and books of non-fiction quickly followed. In 1938, less than a decade after her first book had appeared, Pearl won the Nobel Prize in literature, the first American woman to do so. By the time of her death in 1973, Pearl would publish over seventy books: novels, collections of stories, biography and autobiography, poetry, drama, children's literature, and translations from the Chinese.
In 1934, because of conditions in China, and also to be closer to Richard Walsh and her daughter Carol, whom she had placed in an institution in New Jersey, Pearl moved permanently to the US. She bought an old farmhouse, Green Hills Farm, in Bucks County, PA. She and Richard adopted six more children over the following years. Green Hills Farm is now on the Registry of Historic Buildings; fifteen thousand people visit each year.
From the day of her move to the US, Pearl was active in American civil rights and women's rights activities. She published essays in both Crisis, the journal of the NAACP, andOpportunity, the magazine of the Urban League; she was a trustee of Howard University for twenty years, beginning in the early 1940s. In 1942, Pearl and Richard founded the East and West Association, dedicated to cultural exchange and understanding between Asia and the West. In 1949, outraged that existing adoption services considered Asian and mixed-race children unadoptable, Pearl established Welcome House, the first international, inter-racial adoption agency; in the nearly five decades of its work, Welcome House has assisted in the placement of over five thousand children. In 1964, to provide support for Amerasian children who were not eligible for adoption, Pearl also established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, which provides sponsorship funding for thousands of children in half-a-dozen Asian countries.
Pearl Buck died in March, 1973, just two months before her eighty-first birthday. She is buried at Green Hills Farm.