(You, seriously, should see the original here. The words themselves almost dance in and out of their lines.)
There are a handful of artists that are so absolutely amazing and who do things that come across as downright effortless that they inspire dozens or hundreds of imitators and if your primary interaction with what the original did is through his or her bastard children, you’re quite likely to hate the original artist. That’s pretty unfortunate because the problem isn’t the original. It’s those who saw that it looked effortless and then went on to say “I could do that!” when, seriously, it took a lifetime of practice to get something that perfect and that seamless.
Well, cummings was able to do so many things so very effortlessly and he did them so very perfectly. He had love poems that were so intimate and playful like “i like my body when it is with your body” and “if“, poems that deal with death that, instead of feeling sad, feel almost whimsical like “it is funny, you will be dead some day” and a laugh-out-loud poem called “nobody loses all the time“, and to round out the gorgeous triad of sex, death, and nature, his “the wind is a Lady with bright slender eyes” will make you remember one of the days long ago when you stood in a field of flowers (even if you never did).
See what he does there with capitalization and meter (let alone rhyme)? He throws them all out the window but… no, wait, he kept them. No wait, he lost them. No wait, there they are. Hidden.
I don’t blame you if you look at some of his stuff and immediately recoil and remember the stuff you wrote that, approximately, might have looked like the stuff e e cummings wrote if you looked at both of the poems upside down. Look! No capitalization! Look at the sentence breaks! Ugh! I hate this! I’d just ask to try to look again and see that this is the guy who did it well enough and gorgeous enough and made it look easy enough for you to say “i want to do that too”.
Two years ago, I wrote this. I liked the beginning of the essay, I loved the title… but I had no idea how to finish it. After two years of thinking about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that I needed to display a lot more gratitude.
Thanks. To all of you and everyone and everything, I suppose.Report
Thanks for sticking around, you. And thanks for reading this poem. Love you.Report
Especially you.Report
Yay!Report
Reading e e cummings in your 20s and reading him in your 40s are completely different experiences.Report
Definitely. Someone (I don’t remember who) bought me his complete works when I was in my teens, and I loved it, but mostly because it was so different. It wasn’t until I started going through it again about 15 years later that I realized it was actually really good.Report
My favorite poet.Report
Mine, too. Jason read “love’s function is to fabricate unknownness” from my book at our wedding.Report
I’m not sure he’s my favorite, but he’s definitely one of my favorites. There is no cummings without Whitman, and it’s hard for me to read Whitman and not think, “Damn, this is pretty much as good as free verse can possibly be.”
Cummings, when he’s at his most whimsical, playing with indentation and punctuation, having an entire line that is just an end parentheses, is pretty damn fun though.Report
I’m not sure I’ve ever read him. In one of those bizarre ironies, I was just reading about him yesterday for my book project and then read this. Clearly means I should read him.Report
anyone lived in a pretty how town
with up so many floating bells down
I loved that.Report
“they said their nevers they slept their dream”Report
Am I the only one who finds the picture of the tombstone ironic?Report
I like to think that he’d find it funny.Report
dhex has already contracted with The Designers’ Republic for his own headstone, to ensure there will be no similar screwups.Report
Shouting from the grave. it is a funny,thing.Report
I’ve always liked e e cummings and Emily Dickinson, I respect Whitman, and I was amazed by Ginsberg’s “Howl” when I first read it in my late 30s.
But I’ve never enjoyed poetry beyond those poets. I don’t know why. They’re all Americans, I don’t know if that has anything to do with it–different styles? There are plenty of American poets who leave me cold, though.Report
I’m sure that there are at least three of us who have started a “howl for ordinary gentlemen” in a text file that now sits abandoned waiting for us to get drunk enough to try again.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by libertarianism”Report