{"id":28461,"date":"2010-10-14T07:48:12","date_gmt":"2010-10-14T11:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=28461"},"modified":"2015-06-25T08:25:49","modified_gmt":"2015-06-25T12:25:49","slug":"happy-birthday-e-e-cummings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=28461","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday, E.E. Cummings!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ac&#038;ref=tf_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=thesheivari-20&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=0871407108&#038;asins=0871407108&#038;linkId=EUCHDUU5MPJ3RQUF&#038;show_border=true&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=true\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><p>\n<img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"eecummings.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/eecummings.jpg\" width=\"300\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\nE.E. Cummings was one of the few poets I responded to viscerally when I first had to read his stuff in high school.  I didn&#8217;t know what it was all about, but I loved his weird syntax, I loved how the poems looked on the page &#8211; they became like little jigsaw puzzle pieces &#8211; 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 it like that?   I liked the mystery of it.<\/p>\n<p><big>since feeling is first<\/big><\/p>\n<p>since feeling is first<br \/>\nwho pays any attention<br \/>\nto the syntax of things<br \/>\nwill never wholly kiss you;<\/p>\n<p>wholly to be a fool<br \/>\nwhile Spring is in the world<\/p>\n<p>my blood approves,<br \/>\nand kisses are better fate<br \/>\nthan wisdom<br \/>\nlady i swear by all flowers. Don&#8217;t cry<br \/>\n\u2014the best gesture of my brain is less than<br \/>\nyour eyelids&#8217; flutter which says<\/p>\n<p>we are for each other: then<br \/>\nlaugh, leaning back in my arms<br \/>\nfor life&#8217;s not a paragraph<\/p>\n<p>And death i think is no parenthesis<\/p>\n<p>\nFormer poet laureate Billy Collins <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2117098\/nav\/ais\/\">wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings. By erasing the sacred left margin, breaking down words into syllables and letters, employing eccentric punctuation, and indulging in all kinds of print-based shenanigans, Cummings brought into question some of our basic assumptions about poetry, grammar, sign, and language itself, and he also succeeded in giving many a typesetter a headache. Like Pound, who never wrote an obedient line, Cummings reveled in breaking the rules of grammar, punctuation, orthography, and lineation. Measured by sheer boldness of experiment, no American poet compares to him, for he slipped Houdini-like out of the locked box of the stanza, then leaped from the platform of the poetic line into an unheard-of way of writing poetry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>One of the poems I remember reading in high school was &#8220;next to of course god america i&#8221;.  The last line: &#8220;He spoke.  And drank rapidly a glass of water&#8221; freaked me out a little bit.  It seemed so bureaucratic, so perfectly evocative of a PTA meeting.    I thought about that poem a lot.<\/p>\n<p><big>next to of course god america i<\/big><\/p>\n<p> &#8220;next to of course god america i<br \/>\n love you land of the pilgrims&#8217; and so forth oh<br \/>\n say can you see by the dawn&#8217;s early my<br \/>\n country &#8217;tis of centuries come and go<br \/>\n and are no more what of it we should worry<br \/>\n in every language even deafanddumb<br \/>\n thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry<br \/>\n by jingo by gee by gosh by gum<br \/>\n why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-<br \/>\n iful than these heroic happy dead<br \/>\n who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter<br \/>\n they did not stop to think they died instead<br \/>\n then shall the voice of liberty be mute?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p> He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water<\/p>\n<p><p>\nPerhaps the most famous of his poems is &#8220;somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond&#8221;, the one woven into the plot and emotional themes of Woody Allen&#8217;s <i>Hannah and her Sisters<\/i>.  I know a lot of people who count it as one of their favorite poems of all time, and I would certainly rank it with some of Shakespeare&#8217;s sonnets as one of the best love poems ever written.<\/p>\n<p><big>somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond<\/big><\/p>\n<p>somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond<br \/>\nany experience,your eyes have their silence:<br \/>\nin your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,<br \/>\nor which i cannot touch because they are too near<\/p>\n<p>your slightest look easily will unclose me<br \/>\nthough i have closed myself as fingers,<br \/>\nyou open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens<br \/>\n(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose<\/p>\n<p>or if your wish be to close me, i and<br \/>\nmy life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,<br \/>\nas when the heart of this flower imagines<br \/>\nthe snow carefully everywhere descending;<\/p>\n<p>nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals<br \/>\nthe power of your intense fragility:whose texture<br \/>\ncompels me with the color of its countries,<br \/>\nrendering death and forever with each breathing<\/p>\n<p>(i do not know what it is about you that closes<br \/>\nand opens;only something in me understands<br \/>\nthe voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)<br \/>\nnobody,not even the rain,has such small hands<\/p>\n<p>A guy I was madly in love with sent it to me in an email once, with no explanation, no note from him.  Just the poem.  I already knew 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 &#8211; you&#8217;re not sending it to me because you like the rhyme scheme.  It&#8217;s the SENTIMENT you want to express &#8211; and cummings expressed it better than anyone.  &#8220;nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands&#8221;.  Perfection.  Heart cracks open every time I read it. It&#8217;s a dangerous poem.  It should be used only wisely and well, something that that guy I was in love with did not understand. <\/p>\n<p>Cummings was doing stuff with language 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 specific way.  Even in his own generation, he stands apart.  Harriet Monroe, editor of <i>Poetry<\/i> magazine back then, and midwife to lots of the modernists, loved Cummings&#8217;s stuff, but she did say, &#8220;Beware his imitators!&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>Michael Schmidt in <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0375706046?ie=UTF8&#038;tag=thesheivari-20&#038;linkCode=as2&#038;camp=1789&#038;creative=9325&#038;creativeASIN=0375706046\">Lives of the Poets<\/a><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=thesheivari-20&#038;l=as2&#038;o=1&#038;a=0375706046\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" style=\"border:none !important; margin:0px !important;\" \/><\/i> writes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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 <i>Uncle Tom&#8217;s Cabin<\/i>, wrote plays, and a travel diary about his trip to the Soviet Union, <i>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 &#8220;I&#8221; 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<p>That, to me, seems quite insightful.  (But then, Schmidt always is.)<\/p>\n<p>\n<big>i carry your heart with me<\/big><\/p>\n<p>i carry your heart with me(i carry it in<br \/>\nmy heart)i am never without it(anywhere<br \/>\ni go you go, my dear;and whatever is done<br \/>\nby only me is your doing,my darling)<br \/>\n                                                        i fear<br \/>\nno fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want<br \/>\nno world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)<br \/>\nand it&#8217;s you are whatever a moon has always meant<br \/>\nand whatever a sun will always sing is you<\/p>\n<p>here is the deepest secret nobody knows<br \/>\n(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud<br \/>\nand the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows<br \/>\nhigher than soul can hope or mind can hide)<br \/>\nand this is the wonder that&#8217;s keeping the stars apart<\/p>\n<p>i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)<\/p>\n<p>\nIf you read some of cummings&#8217;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 &#8230; the feeling &#8230; of the <i>philosophy<\/i> behind all of this.  I suppose he had a philosophy about language, 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 and pettiness (which is ironic considering his fascination with Communism &#8211; I have not read his travelogue of the Soviet Union, although I own it.  I&#8217;ll get to it some day).  He is brutal when it comes to bureaucrats, anyone who seems outside of the real thrust of life.  He is on the side of humanity, originality, life.  He can be very very judgmental.  There are those who &#8220;get it&#8221;, 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 plague, and those events changed how writers dealt with language.  He was grappling with the same issues as the giants: TS Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound &#8211; but unlike them: you can recognize an e.e. cummings poem just by looking at it.  It is not MANNERED, though.  It&#8217;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, end up being a <i>vehicle<\/i> for his strong emotions.  The form is necessary to Cummings in a way quite unique: it was the only way he could get it out.<\/p>\n<p>But I think Harriet Monroe is right.  Beware his imitators!  They have the mannerisms, but not the heart.<\/p>\n<p>We all can probably name a few writers who think if they<\/p>\n<p>just break up<\/p>\n<p>the lines<br \/>\non (the<br \/>\npage)<br \/>\nin a seeeeeeemingly r-a-n-d-o-m<br \/>\nway<br \/>\nthen that means<br \/>\nit must be<br \/>\na<\/p>\n<p>P<br \/>\nO<br \/>\nE<br \/>\nM<\/p>\n<p>Get some technique, please. Write a classical sonnet, write a haiku, write a villanelle, follow the rules. KNOW the forms before you throw them away. Martha Graham, the godmother of modern dance, was a ballet dancer with years of classical ballet training. Breaking free of that tradition was a highly intelligent rebellion: \u201cThe 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\u2019s experiment with new forms.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>E.E. Cummings 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.<\/p>\n<p>I love the poem below.  He&#8217;s one of the few poets of this period who are truly <i>funny<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p><big>may i feel said he<\/big><\/p>\n<p>may i feel said he<br \/>\n(i&#8217;ll squeal said she<br \/>\njust once said he)<br \/>\nit&#8217;s fun said she<\/p>\n<p>(may i touch said he<br \/>\nhow much said she<br \/>\na lot said he)<br \/>\nwhy not said she<\/p>\n<p>(let&#8217;s go said he<br \/>\nnot too far said she<br \/>\nwhat&#8217;s too far said he<br \/>\nwhere you are said she)<\/p>\n<p>may i stay said he<br \/>\n(which way said she<br \/>\nlike this said he<br \/>\nif you kiss said she<\/p>\n<p>may i move said he<br \/>\nis it love said she)<br \/>\nif you&#8217;re willing said he<br \/>\n(but you&#8217;re killing said she<\/p>\n<p>but it&#8217;s life said he<br \/>\nbut your wife said she<br \/>\nnow said he)<br \/>\now said she<\/p>\n<p>(tiptop said he<br \/>\ndon&#8217;t stop said she<br \/>\noh no said he)<br \/>\ngo slow said she<\/p>\n<p>(cccome? said he<br \/>\nummm said she)<br \/>\nyou&#8217;re divine! said he<br \/>\n(you are Mine said she)<\/p>\n<p>\n<iframe style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ac&#038;ref=tf_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=thesheivari-20&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=0871407108&#038;asins=0871407108&#038;linkId=EUCHDUU5MPJ3RQUF&#038;show_border=true&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=true\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>E.E. Cummings was one of the few poets I responded to viscerally when I first had to read his stuff in high school. I didn&#8217;t know what it was all about, but I loved his weird syntax, I loved how &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=28461\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39,9],"tags":[171],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28461"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28461"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104313,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28461\/revisions\/104313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}