{"id":10005,"date":"2010-04-08T05:56:01","date_gmt":"2010-04-08T09:56:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=10005"},"modified":"2015-04-06T09:37:44","modified_gmt":"2015-04-06T13:37:44","slug":"the-books-the-norton-anthology-of-modern-and-contemporary-poetry-e-e-cummings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=10005","title":{"rendered":"The Books: \u201cThe Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry\u201d \u2013 E.E. Cummings"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"15210828.JPG\"Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry<\/p>\n

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 1: Modern Poetry<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\n\"eecummings.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\nHe 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>. 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.<\/p>\n

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
\nany experience,your eyes have their silence:
\nin your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
\nor which i cannot touch because they are too near<\/p>\n

your slightest look easily will unclose me
\nthough i have closed myself as fingers,
\nyou open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
\n(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose<\/p>\n

or if your wish be to close me, i and
\nmy life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
\nas when the heart of this flower imagines
\nthe snow carefully everywhere descending;<\/p>\n

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
\nthe power of your intense fragility:whose texture
\ncompels me with the color of its countries,
\nrendering death and forever with each breathing<\/p>\n

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
\nand opens;only something in me understands
\nthe voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
\nnobody,not even the rain,has such small hands<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets<\/a>\"\"<\/i> writes:<\/p>\n

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<\/i>, wrote plays, and a travel diary about his trip to the Soviet Union, Eimi<\/i> (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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That, to me, seems quite insightful. (But then, Schmidt always is.)<\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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<\/i> for all of his strong emotions – that’s the only way he could get it out.<\/p>\n

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

I love the poem below. He’s one of the few poets of this period who are truly funny<\/i>.<\/p>\n

may i feel said he<\/big><\/p>\n

may i feel said he
\n(i’ll squeal said she
\njust once said he)
\nit’s fun said she<\/p>\n

(may i touch said he
\nhow much said she
\na lot said he)
\nwhy not said she<\/p>\n

(let’s go said he
\nnot too far said she
\nwhat’s too far said he
\nwhere you are said she)<\/p>\n

may i stay said he
\n(which way said she
\nlike this said he
\nif you kiss said she<\/p>\n

may i move said he
\nis it love said she)
\nif you’re willing said he
\n(but you’re killing said she<\/p>\n

but it’s life said he
\nbut your wife said she
\nnow said he)
\now said she<\/p>\n

(tiptop said he
\ndon’t stop said she
\noh no said he)
\ngo slow said she<\/p>\n

(cccome? said he
\nummm said she)
\nyou’re divine! said he
\n(you are Mine said she)<\/p>\n

\n