PICASSO 

your brain's
axe only chops hugest inherent
Trees of Ego, from

 whose living and biggest

bodies lopped
of every
prettiness

you hew form truly
                      - e. e. cummings (1894-1962)

The mission of Cyberwit is to encourage and promote the visual arts and poetry. I hope our planet 'where ignorant armies clash by night' will become a safer and better place to breathe in through the medium of photos, paintings, drawings, and poetry. The great significance of painting was very well realised by Lewis Carroll in his Alice's Adventures in Wondrland, Ezra Pound in his Chinese Ideograms, and Augusto de Campos who pioneered Concrete Poetry. Cyberwit's Harvests of New Millennium is divided into three sections: (1) Photos, Paintings and Drawings, (2) Poetry and (3) Biography of Contributing Artists. The book features poems and artworks by the artists from all over the world.            

I have tried my best to include only such artists, who are able to transcend the dream world of 'fancy and funs, the daffodil and lily." The world today needs art, which is modern, cosmical, and has the postmodern quest for "metanarratives" (Lyotard). The "Rebel Poets of the 1950s" in USA attacked "the hackneyed and moribund" culture. For example, the Beat poets like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Gregory Corso were quite unconventional in their experiments with poetic technique. Ginsberg's "Howl" (1955) became the best-seller after its obscenity trial in 1957. 

The poems and artwork selected for Harvests of New Millennium will surely compel our admiration. Several poets in Harvests of New Millennium have concentrated on the burning problems of  our megapolitan world. It is true that the postmodern era is highly confused about the direction to be adopted by a poet. The quest for "infallible church of poetic tradition" seems to be a futile attempt. To attain lofty, sublime and severe style the contemporary poet "should ascend out of  common interest, the thoughts of the newspapers, of the market place, of men of science, but only so far as we can carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole" (W. B. Yeats).     

The fact is that a poet should have a message to convey. A poem must not be empty; it must have content. "Dante, Milton, Goethe, would never, for a moment, have admitted that they were but the idle singers of empty days; every one of them felt he had a message, and must be free to utter it or die. Imagine, in these poets, the same amount of purely poetic power, vast as that is, without the thought and how immense the loss!" (Kellett, Fashion in Literature). But the philosophy or thought of a poet should not be a hindrance in our poetic enjoyment. The whole mission of a poet is to make his thought and philosophy come to life in other minds than his. "The radiant persuasions of sense and sound in a poet's phrases marshalled by the structure of his thought into the inclusive harmony, will effect an experience in the reader's mind which may be, so far as it is possible, the imitation of the poet's experience" (Abercrombie, The Theory of Poetry). 

Sample Artworks 

© Adelle Desiree Jean                 © Airton Adami ( Pitti )                 ©  Angela Neff 

© Donald Edward Kidd                © Francie Aguilera                       © Jeroen van Valkenburg 

 
© Nancy Arnold                                                         © Shelagh McKenna 

© Mildred Savage