April 13, 2019 2 min read

These poems + art prints play well together.

Untitled #11 by Matthew Tischler

Last Saturday, we proudly owned our love of lit when we announced we were rolling out something special to celebrate National Poetry Month: three new poetry + print pairings a week, straight through to May. Every poem is provided by our friends at Poets.org, and the possibilities are actually infinite, so we hope you appreciate the restraint we exercised ...

Poetry and art make fantastic bedfellows. Bringing them together deepens our appreciation of both works on their own, and as we mentioned last week, we’ve been pairing them for a long time. Playing off unspoken connections and ethereal affinities, we go with our gut in making these matchups. Let us know what you think @20x200 on Twitter or Insta! Or pass along your own pairings, cuz our appetite for art + poetry knows no bounds. —Team 20x200

Paired: Matthew Tischler + E.E. Cummings

Spring is like a perhaps hand by E.E. Cummings

III

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.

In Your Face by Helena Wurzel

Paired: Helena Wurzel + Lucille Clifton

the lost women by Lucille Clifton

i need to know their names
those women i would have walked with
jauntily the way men go in groups
swinging their arms, and the ones
those sweating women whom i would have joined
after a hard game to chew the fat
what would we have called each other laughing
joking into our beer? where are my gangs,
my teams, my mislaid sisters?
all the women who could have known me,
where in the world are their names?

Nonsensical Infographic No. 6 by Chad Hagen