The Books: “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry” – E.E. Cummings

15210828.JPGDaily Book Excerpt: Poetry

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 1: Modern Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair

E.E. Cummings was one of the few poets I responded to emotionally and viscerally when I first had to read his stuff in high school. I just LOVED him. I didn’t know what it was all about, but I loved his weird syntax, I loved how the poems looked on the page – they became like little jigsaw puzzle pieces – where you get fragments of meaning. The words seem to make sense, but lots of times they are not in the right order. And I wondered about that. Why did he do that? I just loved him.

I think the poems I read back then were “next to of course god america i” – that one I very much remember reading early on. The last line: “He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water” freaked me out a little bit. It seemed so bureaucratic, so PTA meeting. I think we read “anyone lived in a pretty how town” too – but the “next to of course god america i” is the one I really remember from back then.

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He shows up a lot, if you pay attention. Perhaps the most famous example is how “somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond” is woven into the plot and emotional themes of Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters. I know a lot of people who count that as one of their favorite poems of all time, and I would certainly rank it with some of Shakespeare’s sonnets as one of the best love poems ever written.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

That is a killer poem. I have a personal association with it as well. A guy I was madly in love with, early on, sent it to me in an email once, with no explanation, no note from him. Just the poem. I already know it well, and it is such a naked open expression of love and desire that naturally I thought: Well, you have to be sending this to me for a REASON – you’re not sending it to me because you like the rhyme scheme. It’s the SENTIMENT you want to express – and cummings expressed it better than anyone. “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”. Perfection. Heart cracks open every time I read it. It’s a dangerous poem. It should be used only wisely and well.

Cummings was doing stuff that yes, had been done before – Gertrude Stein and others had been obsessed with how things LOOKED on the page – but he went at it in his own very very specific way. Even in his own generation, he really stands apart. Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine back then, and midwife to lots of the modernists, loved Cummings’s stuff, but she did say, “Beware his imitators!” – which is very good advice. He is easy to imitate – but hard to capture.

Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets writes:

He split himself between Paris and Greenwich Village, and later in life between the Village and his New Hampshire farm. He died in 1962. Never happy in a single form, cummings dabbled in painting and drawing, based a satirical ballet on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, wrote plays, and a travel diary about his trip to the Soviet Union, Eimi (1933), because he was fascinated with the human experiment of communism. Poems were his primary activity, but set against those of Moore and Loy, Williams and Stevens, his verse is soft-centered. It is often said that dialect poetry, translated into standard English, can prove standard-sentimental, the charm imparted only by the distortions of language: cummings is a dialect poet in this sense. His belief in the Individual, the sacred unit, the anarchic “I” in tension or conflict with the world and its institutions, issues in inventive distortions of language, but not the radical vision of a Loy or the bleakness of Jeffers. The experimentalist and iconoclast takes his place in the Elysian Fields among the conservatives.

That, to me, seems quite insightful. (But then, Schmidt always is.)

If you read some of cummings’s lesser known poems, not just the anthologized ones, and if you read a bunch of them in succession, you start to get the impression … the feeling … of the philosophy behind all this. I suppose he had a philosophy about language, sure he did, he liked mucking it up, but it seems to me that what I sense as one of the driving engines of his poetry is a hatred of phoniness, officiousness, pettiness – he is brutal when it comes to bureaucrats, anyone who seems outside of the real thrust of life. He can be very very judgmental. There are those who “get it”, and that is a small number, according to cummings, and outside of that charmed circle, is a vast ignorant populace. He wants no part of convention. He is of that generation (born in 1894, died in 1962) who saw two World Wars overtake the entire world like a flu virus. It changed how writers dealt with language. He was, in his own way, grappling with the same issues as TS Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound – the giants – but unlike them: you can recognize an e.e. cummings poem just by looking at it. It is not MANNERED, though. It’s not a trick. His poems end up feeling incredibly organic and true, full of very real feeling. The forms he chooses, the way he reverses word order, ends up feeling like a vehicle for all of his strong emotions – that’s the only way he could get it out.

But I think Harriet Monroe is right. Beware his imitators for they are a plague! They have the mannerisms, but not the heart.

I love the poem below. He’s one of the few poets of this period who are truly funny.

may i feel said he

may i feel said he
(i’ll squeal said she
just once said he)
it’s fun said she

(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she

(let’s go said he
not too far said she
what’s too far said he
where you are said she)

may i stay said he
(which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she

may i move said he
is it love said she)
if you’re willing said he
(but you’re killing said she

but it’s life said he
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she

(tiptop said he
don’t stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she

(cccome? said he
ummm said she)
you’re divine! said he
(you are Mine said she)

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5 Responses to The Books: “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry” – E.E. Cummings

  1. Catherine says:

    Yeah, he’s one of my favourites too. “your slightest look easily will unclose me” is one of those lines that just reverberates with me, it runs through my mind a lot.

    cummings has been on my mind lately, actually. I was just reading about Harry Crosby and Caresse and their whole hedonistic, sun-worship lifestyle last night, and cummings wrote a poem about Crosby and his suicide. I can’t get the whole text online, though, the only part of the poem I know is:

    2 boston
    Dolls; found
    with
    Holes in each other

    ‘s lullaby

    Which is haunting.

    I always think of him as a descendant of Whitman. They’re very different, obviously, but I always get a similar kind of declamatory, US panoramic thing going on in both their work: “This is America!”. You can’t imagine either man being born anywhere else – even though cummings travelled around, etc. The way they both played around with form and structure seems symptomatic of their nationality, and then this freedom is tempered by the sometimes banal, sometimes depressing, sometimes seedy themes and tones they tackle. Oh, and both are terrifically sexy writers!

  2. red says:

    Catherine – really interesting what you say about Whitman. I think another similarity is how much the SELF, the “I”, is the center. e.e. cummings is always in his poems, front and center – in a similar way that Whitman was really the first American poet to do that – to create a celebration of him SELF in verse after verse. That, too, can be seen as very very American.

    I did not know that about his poem about Harry Crosby – that is haunting. I’d like to read the whole thing.

  3. Catherine says:

    Yes, absolutely, that real individualistic streak, that’s totally true. The Great I Am!

    It’s driving me nuts trying to find the full text of that poem. It’s not in any poetry anthology I own and I don’t have his complete works. Gaaaah.

  4. red says:

    Damn! It’s not in my anthology either.

  5. otherstevie says:

    he might actually be my favorite poet. ever. i totally understand what you said about “somewhere…” – & what i would add (apart from its being quoted in the epigraph to The Glass Menagerie – referring to the power of Laura’s intense fragility) is that what makes his love poems the bestest ever is the utter lack of sentimentality. they are never cloying and NEVER conventional. and you’re so right about the brutality he shows in his political work.
    he shows an obsession with expressing EXACTLY what he means, and i always felt his diversions from formal convention were mostly a refusal to obey ARBITRARY conventions: he used capitals, punctuation marks, even spaces, only when he MEANT them. “It’s the start of a sentence” is not reason enough to capitalize a letter. (i only refuse to capitalize because i’m lazy with the shift key, btw.)
    i have a distinct recollection of my early reading days when i noticed that the lowercase letter “e” seemed to smile. i don’t think of myself as a visual thinker; in fact i have a very hard time visualizing anything that’s not really there. i think of myself as a verbal thinker, but the LOOK of certain words and letters always affected me, and he was pretty much the first writer i ever came across who acknowledged that look and gave it the proper attention.
    what cracked me up about your post, though, is the guy giving you that poem. my first ever boyfriend wrote out a cummings poem to me; other than two poems he wrote himself it’s the only letter of his i still have. it was “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in / my heart)”

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