Modern Art got me in e.e. cummings "who knows if the moon's a balloon" and Marc Chagall's "The Village and I"

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In 2017, a friend based in Paris wanted to gift me some books, and she asked me for my preference. I asked for poetry books and she got me e.e. cummings and Maria Rainer Rilke from Shakespeare and Company bookstore. 


The copy of the ee cummings I got is his 100 selected poems and it has the thrift-book style cover above which I liked. It is hard to love Cummings but you can love him in a specific poem that conveys special feelings to you just as he did for me. Don't worry, I have far and wide favorite from him because honestly, I could not dig some of his poems. 


For me, his poems are abstraction rendered in words, and I specifically love him in this one because this defies reality, logic, organization, reason but celebrates color, childhood, dreams, ideals, abstraction. When I read this poem the first time, I instantly thought of Chagall's The Village and I, the painting I personally wished to see in person the first time I saw it in a book. I don't know what my logical reason is for associating both of them, or if there is really a need to know if there is some underlying reason for doing so, but one common denominator I think here is that they both touch something about home and ideals.  


“who knows if the moon's

a balloon,coming out of a keen city

in the sky--filled with pretty people?

( and if you and I should


get into it,if they

should take me and take you into their balloon,

why then

we'd go up higher with all the pretty people


than houses and steeples and clouds:

go sailing

away and away sailing into a keen

city which nobody's ever visited,where


always

it's

Spring)and everyone's

in love and flowers pick themselves”

― e.e. cummings, Collected Poems


You can check out my earlier blog on this particular museum find, Marc Chagall's The Village and I, at the MoMA or the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

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