Spring is like

…a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere) arranging
a window, into which people look (while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here) and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things, while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there) and

without breaking anything.

–e.e. Cummings

My collage was not only inspired by the e.e. cummings  poem, but very directly by the work of Miriam Schapiro.  Her work pictured above, St. Marks (16 Frames), provided the grid variation that I used as a ground.  Schapiro, a pioneer associated along with Judy Chicago in the Feminist Art Movement, was also linked to the Pattern and Decoration Movement.  She not only incorporated the work of other female artists directly into a dialogue with her work, but she championed the use of textiles and other symbols associated with women and the work of anonymous women artists too often dismissed as merely “craft”.

Windows often provided structure to her thought, and she used the window and frame in many of her artistic explorations, including her “Shrines” series.  A window encompasses both an opening and a boundary, a mediation between inside and outside.  It is a good symbol to use when considering the way we interact with ourselves and our relationship to the world.

e.e. cummings is a poet we study in high school in a way that narrows his work to a gimmick.  Recently, I seem to find his poetry everywhere I look, speaking to me in a different and more complete voice.

Read more about Miriam Schapiro here.

and e.e. cummings here.