“your slightest look easily will unclose me”

e.e. cummings is everywhere these days. There’s a massive biography of him just published, and so there’s a lot of talk about it. Is e.e. cummings important? Was he a poseur? Was what he did (breaking up the traditional lines of verse, doing away with punctuation and capital letters) really all that big a deal? Or was it an annoying ruse for attention?

I happen to think that it was a big deal. Here’s a wonderful article about the complex and argued-over legacy of e.e. cummings. I especially find this section to be very wise:

“No one else wrote like Cummings, and Cummings wrote like no one else” is how the poet’s latest biographer, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, delivers the bad and good news in E.E. Cummings: A Biography. And a prescient Harriet Monroe tempered her praise by warning, “But beware his imitators!”

Yup. For e.e. cummings, it appears that his way of writing was an organic expression. In the same way that Vincent Van Gogh tried to make us see what HE saw in the starry night sky … e.e. cummings experienced language in a very specific way and wanted us to experience it that way too. He saw language, as opposed to just hearing it. That is why you can tell an e.e. cummings poem just by looking at the page, without reading one word. But oh yes, indeed: beware the imitators!! We all can probably name a few writers who think if they

just break up

the lines
on (the
page)
in a seeeeeeemingly r-a-n-d-o-m
way
then that means
it must be
a

P
O
E
M

Get some technique, please. Write a classical sonnet, write a haiku, follow the rules. KNOW the forms before you throw them away. Martha Graham, pretty much the godmother of modern dance, was a ballet dancer beforehand, with years of classical ballet training. Breaking free of that tradition, and creating her own style of dance, was not a random “ooh, let me express myself” kind of thing. It was a highly intelligent rebellion: “The forms that exist now, which I know very well, do not suit me, and I cannot create what I want to create inside the old tradition. So using the old tradition as a firm foundation, let’s experiment with new forms.”

e.e. cumming knew the traditional forms of poetry well, and so when he threw them away, he was able to replace it with an underlying structure of his own.

I actually really like his work. He wrote one of my favorite poems ever. It makes me cry:

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