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AnOther E.E. Cummings by E. E. Cummings
An eye-opening selection of Cumming's more avant-garde poetry and prose. As a poet, Cummings was a pioneer not only in linguistic and typographic inventions, but also in sound and concrete poetry. But his prose is no less experimental; he wrote memoirs, essays, and fiction that are constantly provocative and often radically experimental. To read the avant-garde Cummings is to read a writer who consistently broke with established norms, "never to rest and never to only to grow." To not read the avant-garde Cummings is to not read Cummings.
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First published January 1, 1996
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About the author
E.E. Cummings
369 books3,931 followersEdward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School.
He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.
After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.
In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including "Buffalo Bill ’s.” Serving as Cummings’ debut to a wider American audience, these “experiments” foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years.
In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.
The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence.”
During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.
At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.
source: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/e-...
He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.
After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.
In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including "Buffalo Bill ’s.” Serving as Cummings’ debut to a wider American audience, these “experiments” foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years.
In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.
The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence.”
During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.
At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.
source: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/e-...
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
January 21, 2011
I'm not going to review all of the e.e. cummings collections that I own (there are way too many as I have this thing about collecting them). What I will say is that cummings has this totally selfish/creative/lovely/beautiful/erotic way of writing that just gets me every time. There is rarely a poem of his that I've read that I don't like. He's modern and writes very much that way, and I love his playful use of punctuality and grammar as a means of conveying his emotions. If you've never read cummings, you may love him, you may hate him, but you can't deny that he was an original.
January 21, 2022
I have often stated that my favourite of Cummings's poems are the poems that reflect the poet's experimental leanings. AnOther E.E. Cummings is composed entirely of poems that illustrate the poet's multifaceted approach to experimental poetry, including "deviant traditional verse", "language experiments", "visual poetry and sound poetry", "texts set to music", "condensed prose", "elliptical narratives", "film scenarios", and more. The result is by far the best selection of Cummings's writing that I have ever read.
I have seen her a stealthily frail
- pg. 7
i like my body when it is with your
- pg. 8
in making Marjorie god hurried
- pg. 9
if a cheerfulest Elephantangelchild should sit
- pg. 10
you asked me to come:it was raining a little,
- pg. 15
O Thou to whom the musical white spring
- pg. 16
when you went away it was morning
- pg. 17
kumrads die because they're told)
- pg. 28
the-boys-i-mean-are-not-refined
- pg. 29
of evident invisibles
- pg. 34
whereas by dark really released,the modern
- pg. 35
god gloats upon Her stunning flesh. Upon
- pg. 36
light cursed falling in a singular block
- pg. 37
the bed is not very big
- pg. 38
the poem her belly marched through me as
- pg. 39
mortals
- pg. 41
may i feel said he
- pg. 46
moan
- pg. 49
youful
- pg. 50
inthe,exquisite;
- pg. 55
up into the silence the green
- pg. 57
i will be
- pg. 62
the moon is hiding in
- pg. 71
O It’s Nice To Get Up In,the slipshod mucous kiss
- pg. 74
in Just-
- pg. 79
ta
- pg. 100
warped this perhapsy
- pg. 103
l(a
- pg. 136
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-g-r
- pg. 149
SNOW
- pg. 160
!blac
- pg. 174
why did you go
- pg. 176
dim
- pg. 178
gee i like to think of dead it means nearer because deeper firmer
- pg. 192
April 14, 2009
What I love about ee cummings is that heisdiff:errrrent. He doesn't pay attention to capitilization, punctuation, or grammar rules. He strings words together beautifully and stirs up emotions you never knew you had. ee cummings seriously makes me smile. His poetry and prose is like a decoding a secret language, and you have to analyze every line. You can't skim his work so maybe that's the point, maybe he wants you to feel his words, not to read them. Well, ee, it works for me.
March 18, 2020
review of
Richard Kostelanetz edited E. E. Cummings' AnOther E. E. Cummings
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 10-17, 2020
for the full review: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
I, & the world, owe a great debt of gratitude to Richard Kostelanetz for the depth & scholarliness & passion that he's dedicated to his studies of the avant-garde. Until I read this bk, I'd somewhat dismissed Cummings as 'avant-garde lite', now I think he's a truly great writer that I'm happy to've finally come to appreciate.
Near the beginning there's a section of relevant quotes. Here're 3 selections:
"[Guillaume Apollinaire] achieved the final dismemberment of poetry as an exposition in the "calligrammatic" style, often undeniably effective, sometimes merely cute. The visual aptness of these poems is seldom matched by appropriate qualities of sound, which Apollinaire could easily have produced. His idiogrammatic ideas did not find such disciplined application as we find later in E. E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson.
—Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (1958)" - p vii
"Cummings was . . . the very model of a modern anarchist general; the kinky sexuality—surrogate whores, doll-women, weird dildos, and assorted promiscuities" —Robert Peters, Where the Bee Sucks (1994) - p viii
"Simultanism, the third voice of life, signifies an approach to immobility and this an extremely sensitive attunement to the infinite universe. Baudelaire, Bergson, and Cummings are all describing this state.
—Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (1958)" - p viii
Note that 2 of these quotes are from The Banquet Years, a bk that was important to me when I was in my early 20s in the 1970s. As for the middle quote.. well.. "An anarchist general"? Perhaps Peters is unaware of this being a contradiction — or perhaps, typically of so many people, he simply doesn't understand anarchism.
In a dedication "To the memory of S. Foster Damon (1893—1971) that follows this brief section of quotes it's stated that Damon "owned a rare copy of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, which delighted and bewildered Cummings. (p ix) It's worth noting that I made a movie of me sucking pussy while reading the entirety of "Tender Buttons" & that an excerpt from the audio from that is on my Significantly Different from the Other One CD. "Tender Buttons" is possibly my favorite of the Stein that I've read. I detested her The Making of Americans (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/... ).
In Kostelanetz's Preface he states that:
"I wanted to do an anthology that would gather in one place this Other Cummings, much as an earlier anthology, The Yale Gertrude Stein (1980)"
[..]
"AnOther Cummings represents the fruit of twenty-five years of thinking and perhaps a decade of selecting" - pp xiii-xiv
I have a copy of The Yale Gertrude Stein & I'm glad I do but I think that one of the reasons why Gertrude Stein 'scholarhip' tends to the shallow b/c academics primarily read the work in excerpt instead of reading entire pieces. This attitude that 'that's enough to get the idea' leads to work like The Making of Americans being praised by people who've never read more than a few pages of it. Let's hope the same thing doesn't happen w/ Cummings. It's my DUTY now to read entire Cummings bks rather than just the delightful excerpts collected here.
From the Introduction:
"No one would dispute the opinion that E. E. cummings (1894—1962) ranks among the prominent modern American poets. What is surprising, and thus debatable, is that no other major American poet of his generation remains so neglected and misunderstood."
[..]
"Even when Cummings is acknowledged, it is usually for his more conventional lyric poems. Richard Ellmann's higbrow The New Oxford Book of American Verse (1976) is no different from Nancy Sullivan's more mundane Treasury of American Poetry in including only his lyrics, while he appears not at all in Helen Vendler's The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1985), even though he ranks among Harvard's more distinguished literary alumni."
[..]
"Only one scholar, Milton A. Cohen, has written a book about another dimension of his creativity—the paintings and drawings, on which he worked most of his daytimes; indeed, they have never been satisfactorily exhibited or sompletely examined." - pp xv-xvi
I'm certainly amongst the 1st to praise & support the work of the UNDERAPPRECIATED (see my documentary about the UNDERAPPRECIATED MOVIEMAKERS FESTIVAL: https://youtu.be/KwlfRxmRU3E ) but it's a little hard for me to accept Cummings into that category. After all, his writing has been widely published & distributed. I wd've known about it at a fairly young age, at a time when I wdn't've been very aware of a variety of poetics. AND, as this very bk makes clear, Cummings gave Norton lectures at Harvard in 1952 & had a show of his artwork at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester in 1945. As such, he might be 'neglected' in contrast to, say, an extremely popular author such as Stephen King, but he's nowhere near as obscure as I am or as many other people are.
"Some of his affectations were disaffecting, such as not capitalizing the first person singular. (Spelling his name entirely in lower-case letters was someone else's invention that should be forgotten.)" - p xvi
Thank you, Kostelanetz, I didn't know that. All these decades, I thought that Cummings spelled his name in all lower-case as a self-effacing continuation of "not capitalizing the first person singular" — it's good to have that misinformation revealed.
"As the epigraph to this essay suggests, Cummings observed a clear distinction between ordinary speech and poetry. The former was common language; the latter, exceptional language. Thus, contrary to current fashion, he enthusiastically used such traditional devices as meter, alliteration, resonant line breaks, and even rhyme." - p xvii
Ok.
"A second rich Cummings device was the use of one part of speech to function in place of another. Thus, verbs sometimes appear as nouns:
my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give
As Malcolm Cowley carefully observed in the New Republic (Jan. 27, 1932), nouns also "become verbs ('but if a look should april me') or they become adverbs by adding 'ly,' or superlative adjectives by adding 'est' (thus, instead of writing 'most like a girl,' Cummings has 'girlest'). Adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions, too, become participles by adding 'ing' ('onlying,' 'softlying,' 'whying,'); participles become adverbs by adding 'ly' (kneelingly')."" - p xviii
That, predictably enuf, interests me much more than the use of tradtional means, Cummings manages to skew familiarity, it's still familiar but it's bent out of shape or sculpted anew. As such, it's akin to Modern Art of roughly the same time &/or earlier: Cubism (Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)), Futurism (Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)), etc.
"Though Cummings was nearly an exact contemporary of Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), the two never met and probably had no effect upon each other; nonetheless, Cummings illustrates Mayakovsky's dictum: "Neologisms are obligatory in writing poetry."" - p xxii
"Cummings probably worked as hard at his paintings and drawings as he did at his writing, the former being done by day and the latter at night. More than 2,000 completed paintings exist; the Houghton Library at Harvard reportedly has over 10,000 sheets of drawings. His literary eminence notwithstanding, Cummings had remarkably few exhibitions and scare dealer representation." - p xxiii
This bk was copyrighted in 1998. Much has changed since then as to what's easily searchable online. Going to https://eecummingsart.com I find "Paintings, Drawings & Sketches for Sale" by Cummings available from "Ken Lopez Bookseller". The work is browseable by subject (Landscapes, Portraits, Abstracts, Nudes, Still Lifes, & City & Interiors) &/or by medium (Oil Paint, Watercolor, Ink, Pencil). I find the artwork to be generally uninteresting, maybe there's good reason why it's unknown in relation to Cummings's writing. Take an oil painting labeled as "full moon, tree, and mountain" (Item # 0901) made on "1945-02-14" ( https://eecummingsart.com/gallery/art... ): there's broadness of gesture, prominent brushstrokes, slightly garish colors. In other words, nothing as new as "Adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions, too, become participles by adding 'ing' ('onlying,' 'softlying,' 'whying,')".
I find a drawing that's vaguely more interesting to me: Item # 0011, described as a "figurative abstraction", no date ( https://eecummingsart.com/gallery/art... ). It's vaguely Chagallesque & I like Chagall. It's small, ripped & appears to have what might be a glue stain. The price online is $1,750. I might buy it if the price were 10% of that — but then I've spent most of my life in poverty. In general, I find the work slightly above amateurish — but not by much.
The 1st porm presented by Cummings is under the heading of "Deviant Traditional Verse":
"guilt is the cause of more disauders
than history's most obscene marorders" - p 3
&, yes, I find that very elegant. By taking the ends of dis-orders & mar-auders & switching their places, Cummings directs the reader to mentally (or audibly) slightly distort the pronuniciation. "order" & "auder" are close enuf to each other to still 'work' but far enuf apart to result in implied neologisms. What wd a "disauder" be? What wd a "marorder" be? & how do these implied new meanings tie in to Cummings's philosophical claim?
There is plenty of sex, something I didn't associate w/ Cummings in my 'avant-garde lite' image of him:
" she,straddling my lap,
hinges(wherewith I tongue each eager pap)
and.reaching down,by merely fingertips
the hungry Visitor steers to love's lips
Whom(justly as she now begins to sit,
almost by almost giving her sweet weight)
O,how those hit thighs juicily embrace!
and (instant by deep instant)as her face
watches,scarcely alive,that magic Feast
greedily disappearing least by least—
though what a dizzily palpitating host
(sharp inch by inch)swoons strenly my huge Guest!
until(quite when our touching bellies dream)
unvisibly love's furthest secrets rhyme." - p 6
It's interesting to me the way I'm unnerved by Cummings not putting spaces after punctuation — but, then, why is it 'needed'? The punctuation serves its conventional purpose w/o the space, the space becomes superfluous. BUT, THEN, in line 7, he has the space: "and (instant" & I wonder whether that's a typo or whether he's fucking w/ the reader. I shd mention that the 1st line is actually substantially indented but I've never gotten such indentations to work here on Goodreads.
In general, I love the language, his wordplay always keeps things lively & surprising.
"helves surling out of eakspeasies per(reel)hapsingly
proregress heandshe-ingly people
trickle curselaughgroping shrieks bubble
squirmwrithed staggerful unstrolls collaps ingly
flash a of-faceness stuck thumblike into pie
is traffic this recalls hat gestures bud
plumptumbling hand voices Eye Doangivuh sud-
denly immense impotently Eye Doancare Eye
And How replies the upsuirtingly careens
the to collide flatfooting with Wusyuhname
a girl-flops to the Geddup curb leans
carefully spewing into her own Shush Shame
as(out from behind Nowhere)creeps the deep thing
everybody sometimes calls morning" - p 11
There's that switching again. "helves surling" cd've been 'shelves hurling', more specifically: 'shelves hurling out of speakeasies' — & isn't "ingly" lovely on its own detached from its usual end position?
But how do you feel about science there E.E.?
"of Course life being just a Reflex you know since Everything is Relatives or
to sum it All Up god being Dead(not to
mention in Terred)
LONG LIVE that Upwardlooking
Serence Illustrious and Beatific
Lord of Creation,MAN:" - p 22
[indentation on line 4]
People seem generally so content to use punctuation as is generally done, Cummings loves to shake it up, I find it so refreshing.
"emptied.hills.listen.
,not,alive,trees,dream(
ev:ery:wheres:ex:tend:ing:hush
)
and Dark
IshbusY
ing-roundly-dis
tinct;chuck
lings,laced
ar:e.by(" - p 26
Even if one finds it nonsensical, i.e.: not contributing to semantic content, so what? There's a sense of liberation to it.
"BALLAD OF AN INTELLECTUAL" is practically long by Cummings standards, a whole 2pp w/o much space. It seems a bit sarcastic about the intellectual &, yet, I'd say that Cummings was one so..
There's even an "EROTIC POETRY" section. I have mixed feelings about erotica in general. It's usually too 'soft porn' for me. Still, I like Cummings's, I can relate somehow. Maybe it's just the heterosexuality of it.
"there is between my legs a crisp city.
when you touch me
it is Spring in the city;the streets beautifully writhe,
it is for you;do not frighten them,
all the houses terribly tighten
upon your coming:
and they are glad
as you fill the streets of my city with children." - p 66
"skies may be blue;yes
(when gone are hail and sleet and snow)
but bluer than my darling's eyes,
spring skies are no
hearts may be true;yes
(by night or day in joy or woe)
but truer than your lover's is,
hearts do not grow
nows may be new;yes
(as new as april's first hello)
but new as this our thousanth kiss,
no now is so" - p 69
It's odd, to me at least, that I picked the above 2 to quote from. Neither is particularly explicit, as some of the others are, & the 2nd is downright romantic. My slip is showing.
Under "LANGUAGE EXPERIMENTS" this one is printed on the page sideways w/ the left margin parallel to the bottom of the page:
"life hurl my
yes,crumbles hand(ful released conarefetti)ev eryflitter,inga. where
mil(lions of aflickf)litter ing brightmillion of S hurl;edindodg:ing
whom areEyes shy-dodge is bright cruMbshandful,quick-hurl edinwho
Is flittercrumbs,fluttercrimbs are floatfallin,g;allwhere:
a:crimbflitteringish is arefloatis ingfallall!mil,shy milbrightlions
my(hurl flicker handful
in)dodging are shybrigHteyes is crum bs(all)if,ey Es" - p 84
&, like most or all sensible & kind people, Cummings is against war:
"Lis
-ten
for the full review: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
Richard Kostelanetz edited E. E. Cummings' AnOther E. E. Cummings
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 10-17, 2020
for the full review: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
I, & the world, owe a great debt of gratitude to Richard Kostelanetz for the depth & scholarliness & passion that he's dedicated to his studies of the avant-garde. Until I read this bk, I'd somewhat dismissed Cummings as 'avant-garde lite', now I think he's a truly great writer that I'm happy to've finally come to appreciate.
Near the beginning there's a section of relevant quotes. Here're 3 selections:
"[Guillaume Apollinaire] achieved the final dismemberment of poetry as an exposition in the "calligrammatic" style, often undeniably effective, sometimes merely cute. The visual aptness of these poems is seldom matched by appropriate qualities of sound, which Apollinaire could easily have produced. His idiogrammatic ideas did not find such disciplined application as we find later in E. E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson.
—Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (1958)" - p vii
"Cummings was . . . the very model of a modern anarchist general; the kinky sexuality—surrogate whores, doll-women, weird dildos, and assorted promiscuities" —Robert Peters, Where the Bee Sucks (1994) - p viii
"Simultanism, the third voice of life, signifies an approach to immobility and this an extremely sensitive attunement to the infinite universe. Baudelaire, Bergson, and Cummings are all describing this state.
—Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (1958)" - p viii
Note that 2 of these quotes are from The Banquet Years, a bk that was important to me when I was in my early 20s in the 1970s. As for the middle quote.. well.. "An anarchist general"? Perhaps Peters is unaware of this being a contradiction — or perhaps, typically of so many people, he simply doesn't understand anarchism.
In a dedication "To the memory of S. Foster Damon (1893—1971) that follows this brief section of quotes it's stated that Damon "owned a rare copy of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, which delighted and bewildered Cummings. (p ix) It's worth noting that I made a movie of me sucking pussy while reading the entirety of "Tender Buttons" & that an excerpt from the audio from that is on my Significantly Different from the Other One CD. "Tender Buttons" is possibly my favorite of the Stein that I've read. I detested her The Making of Americans (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/... ).
In Kostelanetz's Preface he states that:
"I wanted to do an anthology that would gather in one place this Other Cummings, much as an earlier anthology, The Yale Gertrude Stein (1980)"
[..]
"AnOther Cummings represents the fruit of twenty-five years of thinking and perhaps a decade of selecting" - pp xiii-xiv
I have a copy of The Yale Gertrude Stein & I'm glad I do but I think that one of the reasons why Gertrude Stein 'scholarhip' tends to the shallow b/c academics primarily read the work in excerpt instead of reading entire pieces. This attitude that 'that's enough to get the idea' leads to work like The Making of Americans being praised by people who've never read more than a few pages of it. Let's hope the same thing doesn't happen w/ Cummings. It's my DUTY now to read entire Cummings bks rather than just the delightful excerpts collected here.
From the Introduction:
"No one would dispute the opinion that E. E. cummings (1894—1962) ranks among the prominent modern American poets. What is surprising, and thus debatable, is that no other major American poet of his generation remains so neglected and misunderstood."
[..]
"Even when Cummings is acknowledged, it is usually for his more conventional lyric poems. Richard Ellmann's higbrow The New Oxford Book of American Verse (1976) is no different from Nancy Sullivan's more mundane Treasury of American Poetry in including only his lyrics, while he appears not at all in Helen Vendler's The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1985), even though he ranks among Harvard's more distinguished literary alumni."
[..]
"Only one scholar, Milton A. Cohen, has written a book about another dimension of his creativity—the paintings and drawings, on which he worked most of his daytimes; indeed, they have never been satisfactorily exhibited or sompletely examined." - pp xv-xvi
I'm certainly amongst the 1st to praise & support the work of the UNDERAPPRECIATED (see my documentary about the UNDERAPPRECIATED MOVIEMAKERS FESTIVAL: https://youtu.be/KwlfRxmRU3E ) but it's a little hard for me to accept Cummings into that category. After all, his writing has been widely published & distributed. I wd've known about it at a fairly young age, at a time when I wdn't've been very aware of a variety of poetics. AND, as this very bk makes clear, Cummings gave Norton lectures at Harvard in 1952 & had a show of his artwork at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester in 1945. As such, he might be 'neglected' in contrast to, say, an extremely popular author such as Stephen King, but he's nowhere near as obscure as I am or as many other people are.
"Some of his affectations were disaffecting, such as not capitalizing the first person singular. (Spelling his name entirely in lower-case letters was someone else's invention that should be forgotten.)" - p xvi
Thank you, Kostelanetz, I didn't know that. All these decades, I thought that Cummings spelled his name in all lower-case as a self-effacing continuation of "not capitalizing the first person singular" — it's good to have that misinformation revealed.
"As the epigraph to this essay suggests, Cummings observed a clear distinction between ordinary speech and poetry. The former was common language; the latter, exceptional language. Thus, contrary to current fashion, he enthusiastically used such traditional devices as meter, alliteration, resonant line breaks, and even rhyme." - p xvii
Ok.
"A second rich Cummings device was the use of one part of speech to function in place of another. Thus, verbs sometimes appear as nouns:
my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give
As Malcolm Cowley carefully observed in the New Republic (Jan. 27, 1932), nouns also "become verbs ('but if a look should april me') or they become adverbs by adding 'ly,' or superlative adjectives by adding 'est' (thus, instead of writing 'most like a girl,' Cummings has 'girlest'). Adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions, too, become participles by adding 'ing' ('onlying,' 'softlying,' 'whying,'); participles become adverbs by adding 'ly' (kneelingly')."" - p xviii
That, predictably enuf, interests me much more than the use of tradtional means, Cummings manages to skew familiarity, it's still familiar but it's bent out of shape or sculpted anew. As such, it's akin to Modern Art of roughly the same time &/or earlier: Cubism (Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)), Futurism (Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)), etc.
"Though Cummings was nearly an exact contemporary of Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), the two never met and probably had no effect upon each other; nonetheless, Cummings illustrates Mayakovsky's dictum: "Neologisms are obligatory in writing poetry."" - p xxii
"Cummings probably worked as hard at his paintings and drawings as he did at his writing, the former being done by day and the latter at night. More than 2,000 completed paintings exist; the Houghton Library at Harvard reportedly has over 10,000 sheets of drawings. His literary eminence notwithstanding, Cummings had remarkably few exhibitions and scare dealer representation." - p xxiii
This bk was copyrighted in 1998. Much has changed since then as to what's easily searchable online. Going to https://eecummingsart.com I find "Paintings, Drawings & Sketches for Sale" by Cummings available from "Ken Lopez Bookseller". The work is browseable by subject (Landscapes, Portraits, Abstracts, Nudes, Still Lifes, & City & Interiors) &/or by medium (Oil Paint, Watercolor, Ink, Pencil). I find the artwork to be generally uninteresting, maybe there's good reason why it's unknown in relation to Cummings's writing. Take an oil painting labeled as "full moon, tree, and mountain" (Item # 0901) made on "1945-02-14" ( https://eecummingsart.com/gallery/art... ): there's broadness of gesture, prominent brushstrokes, slightly garish colors. In other words, nothing as new as "Adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions, too, become participles by adding 'ing' ('onlying,' 'softlying,' 'whying,')".
I find a drawing that's vaguely more interesting to me: Item # 0011, described as a "figurative abstraction", no date ( https://eecummingsart.com/gallery/art... ). It's vaguely Chagallesque & I like Chagall. It's small, ripped & appears to have what might be a glue stain. The price online is $1,750. I might buy it if the price were 10% of that — but then I've spent most of my life in poverty. In general, I find the work slightly above amateurish — but not by much.
The 1st porm presented by Cummings is under the heading of "Deviant Traditional Verse":
"guilt is the cause of more disauders
than history's most obscene marorders" - p 3
&, yes, I find that very elegant. By taking the ends of dis-orders & mar-auders & switching their places, Cummings directs the reader to mentally (or audibly) slightly distort the pronuniciation. "order" & "auder" are close enuf to each other to still 'work' but far enuf apart to result in implied neologisms. What wd a "disauder" be? What wd a "marorder" be? & how do these implied new meanings tie in to Cummings's philosophical claim?
There is plenty of sex, something I didn't associate w/ Cummings in my 'avant-garde lite' image of him:
" she,straddling my lap,
hinges(wherewith I tongue each eager pap)
and.reaching down,by merely fingertips
the hungry Visitor steers to love's lips
Whom(justly as she now begins to sit,
almost by almost giving her sweet weight)
O,how those hit thighs juicily embrace!
and (instant by deep instant)as her face
watches,scarcely alive,that magic Feast
greedily disappearing least by least—
though what a dizzily palpitating host
(sharp inch by inch)swoons strenly my huge Guest!
until(quite when our touching bellies dream)
unvisibly love's furthest secrets rhyme." - p 6
It's interesting to me the way I'm unnerved by Cummings not putting spaces after punctuation — but, then, why is it 'needed'? The punctuation serves its conventional purpose w/o the space, the space becomes superfluous. BUT, THEN, in line 7, he has the space: "and (instant" & I wonder whether that's a typo or whether he's fucking w/ the reader. I shd mention that the 1st line is actually substantially indented but I've never gotten such indentations to work here on Goodreads.
In general, I love the language, his wordplay always keeps things lively & surprising.
"helves surling out of eakspeasies per(reel)hapsingly
proregress heandshe-ingly people
trickle curselaughgroping shrieks bubble
squirmwrithed staggerful unstrolls collaps ingly
flash a of-faceness stuck thumblike into pie
is traffic this recalls hat gestures bud
plumptumbling hand voices Eye Doangivuh sud-
denly immense impotently Eye Doancare Eye
And How replies the upsuirtingly careens
the to collide flatfooting with Wusyuhname
a girl-flops to the Geddup curb leans
carefully spewing into her own Shush Shame
as(out from behind Nowhere)creeps the deep thing
everybody sometimes calls morning" - p 11
There's that switching again. "helves surling" cd've been 'shelves hurling', more specifically: 'shelves hurling out of speakeasies' — & isn't "ingly" lovely on its own detached from its usual end position?
But how do you feel about science there E.E.?
"of Course life being just a Reflex you know since Everything is Relatives or
to sum it All Up god being Dead(not to
mention in Terred)
LONG LIVE that Upwardlooking
Serence Illustrious and Beatific
Lord of Creation,MAN:" - p 22
[indentation on line 4]
People seem generally so content to use punctuation as is generally done, Cummings loves to shake it up, I find it so refreshing.
"emptied.hills.listen.
,not,alive,trees,dream(
ev:ery:wheres:ex:tend:ing:hush
)
and Dark
IshbusY
ing-roundly-dis
tinct;chuck
lings,laced
ar:e.by(" - p 26
Even if one finds it nonsensical, i.e.: not contributing to semantic content, so what? There's a sense of liberation to it.
"BALLAD OF AN INTELLECTUAL" is practically long by Cummings standards, a whole 2pp w/o much space. It seems a bit sarcastic about the intellectual &, yet, I'd say that Cummings was one so..
There's even an "EROTIC POETRY" section. I have mixed feelings about erotica in general. It's usually too 'soft porn' for me. Still, I like Cummings's, I can relate somehow. Maybe it's just the heterosexuality of it.
"there is between my legs a crisp city.
when you touch me
it is Spring in the city;the streets beautifully writhe,
it is for you;do not frighten them,
all the houses terribly tighten
upon your coming:
and they are glad
as you fill the streets of my city with children." - p 66
"skies may be blue;yes
(when gone are hail and sleet and snow)
but bluer than my darling's eyes,
spring skies are no
hearts may be true;yes
(by night or day in joy or woe)
but truer than your lover's is,
hearts do not grow
nows may be new;yes
(as new as april's first hello)
but new as this our thousanth kiss,
no now is so" - p 69
It's odd, to me at least, that I picked the above 2 to quote from. Neither is particularly explicit, as some of the others are, & the 2nd is downright romantic. My slip is showing.
Under "LANGUAGE EXPERIMENTS" this one is printed on the page sideways w/ the left margin parallel to the bottom of the page:
"life hurl my
yes,crumbles hand(ful released conarefetti)ev eryflitter,inga. where
mil(lions of aflickf)litter ing brightmillion of S hurl;edindodg:ing
whom areEyes shy-dodge is bright cruMbshandful,quick-hurl edinwho
Is flittercrumbs,fluttercrimbs are floatfallin,g;allwhere:
a:crimbflitteringish is arefloatis ingfallall!mil,shy milbrightlions
my(hurl flicker handful
in)dodging are shybrigHteyes is crum bs(all)if,ey Es" - p 84
&, like most or all sensible & kind people, Cummings is against war:
"Lis
-ten
for the full review: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
June 26, 2017
I like his poetry the best, but this book gives a taste of each of his different kind of poems, his prose, translations, memoir, etc.
August 28, 2012
Cummings cambio mi modo de concebir la poesía y me ha inspirado a probar nuevas formas y a salirme de los tradicionalismos. Creo que es una lectura que deberíamos hacer todos.
Cummings changed my way of thinking about poetry and has inspired me to get out and try new things. I think everyone should read it.
Cummings changed my way of thinking about poetry and has inspired me to get out and try new things. I think everyone should read it.
January 10, 2015
A great and unique collection with pieces that I haven't seen anywhere else. It highlights a lot of his recondite works that deviate far outside the traditional standards fitting of his contemporaries (indeed even to that of today's modern poets) - some seriously strange/chaotic structures even for Cummings. Loved the section on his condensed prose and elliptical narratives.
February 24, 2008
cummings just makes me happy. even if it is sad happy. and he makes me want to be the kind of person who notices ants and red specks in the carpet. and who buys flowers for herself just because they look nice in kitchenlight.
July 11, 2008
I have a rat named after this man. Is that okay?
His poetry n' prose makes me want to put thoughts on paper without obsessing over the process. m a a a y b e hewillevenhelpme lose my addiction to correct grammar and format.
His poetry n' prose makes me want to put thoughts on paper without obsessing over the process. m a a a y b e hewillevenhelpme lose my addiction to correct grammar and format.
November 14, 2012
This is such a cool, unique, collection of the lesser known cummings poems. The pages of analysis and biography are very useful and well-written, definitely worth the read for anyone with interest in cummings' life and work.
August 10, 2011
I appreciate what Cummings did with language, but I can't see myself going back to these over and over like I do with his "since feeling is first". Nothing really spoke to the heart of me, just to aesthetic pleasure, so it's not a 5 star book for me.
December 25, 2012
I really appreciate that the editors included such a wide-range of Cummings' writing (including translations, book chapters, prose, etc.) I enjoyed his poetry and feel like I know him better as a whole-artist for the wide range introduced in the book.
June 23, 2007
I heart e. e.
I can recite "love is more thicker than forget" by heart. this is a great collection. great erotic poetry.
I can recite "love is more thicker than forget" by heart. this is a great collection. great erotic poetry.
January 9, 2008
E.E. Cummings brilliant Essential. joyouswonderousness
March 13, 2008
Love Love love e.e.C
January 25, 2009
LOVE IT!!!!
December 29, 2009
Great compilation with a variety of Cummings's works put together!
July 21, 2009
applaws)
March 8, 2012
A master piece!!!
October 11, 2022
i finished this earlier this year and totally forgot to write a review! — my favorite poet. my beloved e. e. cummings. poetry is hard for many but i believe e. e. cummings works opens up a door for people who want to experience the beauty of poetry in a dreamy, almost whimsical sort of way. the nonsense! the love! the humanity of it all!
i loved every piece of writing in here, and loved how this collection left me feeling once i closed the back cover.
i loved every piece of writing in here, and loved how this collection left me feeling once i closed the back cover.
December 20, 2022
It was interesting to see all the experimental stylings in this and it could be a valuable challenge to other writers to consider where they might want to break with writing norms. However, some of these poems definitely suffered since they felt more like experiments for the sake of trying things rather than attempts at communication.
March 26, 2020
Reading ee cummings ought to be compulsory reading for those creators or solvers of Cryptic crossword puzzles. A read mind broadening experience.
October 3, 2021
There's something special in this spree of nonsense.
October 19, 2021
gorg.
Read
September 10, 2007The categories/chapters are great: language poems, Erotic Poetry, Film Scenario, Language experiments, etc.
July 17, 2016
Not a book I would ever want to read again. Wasn't that impressed with his writing. :)
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