Archive for the ‘E E Cummings’ Category
Entry 1751 — Lesson 1
Friday, March 13th, 2015
I have an excuse to avoid truly beginning my lesson in how to compose an otherstream poem: another medical procedure, this one a sound scan of my thyroid. Routine, I guess because I’m hypo-thyroidal. Only took ten minutes. Errands followed. So, I’m barely unnull. Nonetheless, I will try to get my lesson in today, beginning with lead-in excerpts of poems by Cummings, then the original (and now final) version of my (full) ooem:
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If I were in a high school or college teaching this lesson (which, nota bene, is for absolute beginners, although I hope anyone reading it will learn from it), I would pass out hand-outs with the poems above on them to the students (student?). Then:
IF YOU WANT TO COMPOSE ANY KIND OF POETRY:
Dictum 1: READ POETRY!!!
(I’m tempted to end my first lesson there, but–heck–you’re all my good friends! I can’t cheat you.)
Listening to poetry is okay, but reading it means you have it continuingly in front of you, so seems to me better. It’s also difficult to attend readings or buy recordings compared to getting books or magazines with it, or going online after it. In any case, I will be referring to printed poetry only.
I suspect anyone teaching a how-to-course in any kind of literature will tell you the same thing. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. In fact, it’s received wisdom, and received wisdom is right much more often than not. This bit of received wisdom is maxolutely valid–i.e., it could not be more valid.
The more you read poetry, the more of an idea of what it is you will get. Beyond some dictionary’s probably inept, and certainly incomplete definition of it. But by far the most important reason for reading poetry is to find poems you like! And you will find a few before long, even if you read only publications recommended by college professors or other authorities if you seriously intend to compose poetry–as either a hobby (and there’s nothing wrong with that) or a vocation.
If you get through a few hundred poems and find none that genuinely excite you, ask someone who’s been around (like me) where to go for poetry different from what you’ve been reading. If that doesn’t help–if, that is, you sincerely explore a reasonable wide variety of poems and are not excited by any of them, accept that you’re simply incapable of appreciating poetry–as I am incapable of appreciating gymnastics. So what.
I should think anyone who knows enough about poetry to want to compose it will find poems that he really likes. When this happens, as common sense would indicate, he must find out who wrote them, and look up that poet’s other poems. If this goes well, he will automatically be strongly attracted to one or more, enough to become at least temporarily addicted to his work.
SubDictum 1: When you have found a poet whose work you are extremely drawn to, read everything you can about his life. If you feel like it. I add that, and make this rule a “SubDictum,” because I followed it with great enjoyment and, I think, got a useful push from my vicarious identification with various literary heroes of mine. But it won’t make a poet of you, and I suspect there are those without my interest in poets rather than their work, or literary history. In short, ignore this SubDictum if you have little urge to follow it.
Dictum 2: This is my first teaching that a lot of poets and not all that few teachers of poetry will reject. In fact, I would agree that it is not necessary for one wanting to become a poet; however, it is necessary, in my opinion, for one who wants to become among the best poets. Those I therefore direct to read as much commentary on the poets whose works you most enjoy as you can. Poetry criticism be Good! So what if much of it, maybe most of it, is not too good; 90% of poetry is mediocre or lousy, too. So read as much as you can, and zero in on those whose commentary you enjoy the way you zeroed in on poets whose poems you enjoyed.
One important thing they should do for you is path you to other poets writing work like the ones you like do. Negatively-Positively, they may expose you to flaws in a favorite of yours that helps you to appreciate up to a higher level of enjoyment. They should introduce you, in their negative commentary, to poets whose poor work will increase your appreciation of inferior work, which it is important to learn. Or perhaps make you realize there’s poetry out there the critic doesn’t like but you do. And you will begin developing a critical view of your own.
Dictum 3: WRITE POEMS!!!
Start by imitating the poems you’ve found you like. Remember that you are just beginning and that it takes time to become anything of a poet. In the meantime, it should not take too long for you to experience the happiness of effectively imitating something a hero of yours has done. The chances are 999 to 1 that it will be part of a sub-mediocre poem, but that’s of no consequence. Every poet’s first attempts are poor. Regardless of the mothers or friends or teachers who praise them.
At this point I was going to show the value of imitation using the four texts above. While writing my way to here, however, I realized that I should have used an earlier example of my own work. I wrote a fair amount of bad imitative poetry when I began, and nothing any good until I was around 25 and wrote my “traffic” poem above. It’s a bad example, though, because (in my opinion) quite good, although imitative. There are special reasons for its success. One is that it’s based on the simplest poetic form, the Classical American haiku form (which is derived from the form the Japanese invented–apparently–but significantly different from that in ways I won’t go into right now). What’s more, the Classical American Haiku form is extremely explicit, and therefore easy to get technically right.
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I feel I could keep going for at least a few more full paragraphs but I also think I’ve reached a good stopping point, and have a topic to discuss which may take a while to get through: haiku-sensitivity, which I think a person is either born with or will never have, and I have it. Urp.
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Entry 1750 — Found Original
Thursday, March 12th, 2015
Sorta interesting story about the above: it turned up yesterday in an email from Germany! Remember, I was hunting all over for it in vain, then remembered it together–I thought. Actually, I remembered “descent,” but changed it to “development.” I forgot “mix.” I think the original better than my revision.
To get back to the sorta interesting story, the email it arrived in–more accurately, the email that had a link to it–was from Kurt Henzel, a German who has suddenly discovered concrete poetry, and wanted to buy two books by Irving Weiss that I had published–and stuff of mine. In his email, he asked for signed copies of two of my poems, the one above and “the poem r,” one of my favorite visual poems although never before mentioned by anyone.
Here’s the other:
Here’s something else from the Internet:
resipiscence /res-ə-PIS-əns/. noun. Originally, repentance and recognition of one’s misdeeds. Now the act of coming to one’s senses, a change of heart. The Shorter OED’s formulation: “return to a better mind.” From Latin resipiscere (to recover one’s senses), from from sapere (to taste, to be wise).
From yesterday’s Katex–click here to find out about it. (It’s a newsletter or the equivalent put out by Chris Lott often has interesting odd words. I posted this because it seems so much like many of my coinages–in other words, I’m not alone in my love of coining mouthfuls. I also think I might find a use for this one.
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Apologies, but that’s it for today. Again, a tough day for me: a loss in tennis in the morning, both for me and my partner is one match, and for our team in all three of our matches. Oh, well, we should not finish last, and the season will soon be over. In the afternoon, two hours at my dentist’s (that increased my credit card debt by another thousand).
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Entry 1749 — Lesson One Begins
Wednesday, March 11th, 2015
I was hoping to make a complete lesson for this entry–the one I discussed yesterday for a how-to book for beginning otherstream poets. I had so much trouble scanning the poems by Cummings I wanted to use in it that I’m too worn-out to try to write much of the lesson.
But here is my piece for the lesson again, followed by 4 excerpts of poems by Cummings that I stole the core-technique my poem depends on from Cummings, my lesson being about the necessity to steal from other poets:
sky's piecemeal white development down buildings' dark sides into tr;af:fi,c.
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Entry 1693 — Cummings’s Early Visual Poetry
Thursday, January 15th, 2015
Karl Kempton, who is in the process of writing a full-scale history of visual poetry, queried me about E. E. Cummings earlier today. “relooking at early cummings,” said he, “i can not say his work prior to & (and) could be considered visual, except for impression III, part of tulips and chimneys, publication date 1923.” Then he asked me for my take. The following notes were the immediate results:
I would accept “III’ of “Impressions” as, barely, a visual poem because the way it uses the parenthesis marks at the end of it as a visual metaphor for a sack. At the same time they are a conceptual metaphor for a shooting star’s being changed from something emphatic in the material world diminished into something parenthetical to reality–down a level from it.
“in Just-” (which i have an entry about in the Facts-on-File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry) is a highly effective visual poem for me, albeit its visiophors (visual metgaphors) are very simple. “hist whist” is borderline. “stinging” becomes super-simply a visual poem at its end, “-S.”
These poems are also infraverbal, for me; I consider Cummings more important for more or less inventing infraverbal poetry than for his visual poetry. The passage, “so/ drunG// k, dear,” in his “I” (first stanza: “nimble/ heat/ had”) in “Portraits,” one of the sections of Chimneys, becomes infra-verbal with “drunkG” and also visual when after a space comes “k, dear” because the G in “drunG” is a verbo-auditory metaphor for drunkenness as well as what I’d call a verbo-conceptual metaphor for it. It is the first because its mispronunciation acts as a metaphor for drunkenness; it is the second because its mistakenness is a conceptual metaphor for drunkenness.
I take its capital G as auditory rather than visual (although, yes, the whole word is something visual, but not really visual in the sense of something seen, visual in the different sense of something read); hence it seems to me the G contributes to both its mispronunciation (since it indicates, to me, an accentual emphasis on the g-sound) and its conceptual mistakenness, since it is mistakenly capitalized, according to conventional spelling. The continuation of “drunG” after the line it occupies and a skipped line by a k, makes the “k, dear” a visual metaphor for the blank-minded mistakenness that drunkenness is, and the way drunkenness tries stumblingly to be “correct.”
“Buffalo Bill’s” is, of course, a visual poem.
The gaps in many of the Tulips I consider purely verbal since they simply indicate auditory pauses of various lengths.
So, I would claim the presence of five (-and-a-half) visual poems in Tulips and Chimneys.
It’d be nice to go one into a full-length study of Cummings’s evolution as an otherstream poet–i.e., a visual and an infraverbal poet as well as an adventurer in other kinds of language poetry besides infraverbalism, but I have too many other things on my plate right now.
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Entry 1645 — Part of Something from 1994
Friday, November 28th, 2014
I was going to write something new for today but it fell apart somewhere before its midpoint. I have hopes for it, but . . .
So, in place of it, here’s commentary on poetry from an article published twenty years ago that I actually got paid for: 9 pages on all the neglected kinds of poetry then extant (just about all of which are still extant, and neglected). As is the case with nearly all my poetry commentary/criticism, no one every wrote me about it.
I was going to use just what I said about Kathy Ernst’s “Philosophy,” then thought it might be interesting to present the whole page in media res. Less work for me, at any rate. So, here is page 6 from the November/ December issue of Teachers & Writers:
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Entry 1627 — Norman Friedman, RIP
Monday, November 10th, 2014
A day or two ago I got the sad news that Norman Friedman died on the 6th of November. He for many years was probably the foremost critic of E. E. Cummings, one of my three favorite pre-1960 American poets. Certainly I learned more than a little about Cummings (and poetics) from his writings over the years. He was also a very nice man, as I found out when I met him at a literary conference where I presented a paper on Cummings several years ago.
This morning curiosity about him sent me to Wikipedia where, to my shock, I was unable to find an entry on him. Along the way, though, I found an essay of his on Cummings at jstor.org, a site you can read academic writings at for a fee. The fees are way more than I can afford but I took advantage of an offer allowing me to read three essays for free, so am now midway through Friedman’s “E. E. Cummings and His Critics,” (1962).
In his essay, Friedman is making an excellent case for Cummings as what academics should consider a serious poet–i.e., one with a serious outlook on life that he expresses in his poetry. I suppose he is right but for me, “all” Cummings did was celebrate existence, using all the verbal means he could think of in order to able to do that maximally.
Oh, sure, he was diverted from this central concern to take on collectivism (which I applaud) and science (which I don’t applaud) but at his best he did the only thing I believe poets should do, which is use the whole of their language to celebrate existence–which I think requires them at the same time to show by contrast what’s wrong with it. I think what I mean is that a poet should side with, and celebrate, beauty in his poetry, which he can’t do without opposing, and condemning, ugliness (at least implicitly) as when Basho celebrates the beauty of the many moments existence’s best moments combine in his old pond haiku while at the same time implicitly rejects–and I should have used “rejecting: instead of “condemning” earlier in this sentence–existence’s lesser moments, the one’s with only the present in them, or–worse–only some solely intellectual or solely unintellectual present in them. Or nothing at all, unless the nothing that includes all isn’t what many of the greatest minimalist poems are about. (Yeah, I’m going a little over-mystical there.)
You’re in luck. I don’t have time right now to knock out several thousand words on the poetic moment I’m talking about. The traditional haiku moment is an instance of it, but only one instance, whatever the wacked-out anti-Western idolizers of the Far East maintain.
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Entry 1314 — Just-Spring
Sunday, December 29th, 2013
It crossed my mind earlier today that a flair for the use of fresh language might be the most important attribute of a superior poet. Certainly E. E. Cummings had it, which is why he rates so high with me. In particular, I think the invention of new words or phrases, or the use of a word in a way it was never before used, like Cummings’s melding of “just” and “spring” in his famous poem about the balloonman, is about the most important thing a superior poet can do. Hopkins and Dylan Thomas are two others I quickly think of who did this. If I were fading out, I’d try to find examples, and mention more poets of fresh language. I might even come up with a Grummaniacal name for them.
For now, I just say that one way of recognizing mediocrity in a poet is his total conventionality of word-choice and use. You can recognize the subj-mediocrity by his used of dead poeticisms.
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Entry 1043 — A Revision
Friday, March 15th, 2013
I’m here again because the technician I called to help me with my computer won’t be to my house until later, so I can still come here. (I’m hoping the technician can take care of my computer’s problem or problems while here, but suspect h’ell have to take my cup away for a while.) Anyway, this poem is from a sequence of 4 I made that were published in the Cummings Society magazine, Spring.
I’m posting it because I’ll soon be posting it in my Scientific American guest blog so went to Paint Shop to get it ready, remembering that I wanted to make a short revision of its remainder. That had been “-(little lame balloonman).” It came to bother me because a remainder should not be a negative term. So I’d come up with “the absence of the little lame balloonman.” That was the first thing I changed it to earlier this morning. I liked the idea of a “positive” negativity like an absence of something. But before long I thought it strained. I changed it to “nothing else.” That cost the reference to the balloonman that I have in all peoms in the rest of the sequence. Result: the present remainder. I’m not sure it’s my best, or is as good a one as I could possibly come up with, but it works, and I’m sticking with it.
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Entry 982 — A Philistine Versus Cummings
Sunday, January 13th, 2013
The following is from Poetry, America’s leading home of Philistines. It’s part of a series of negative responses to canonized poets by mostly utter mediocrities (at best). Guriel, author of this slam of Cummings, seems the most egregious, for the others bothered to find parts of their subject’s oeuvre worth praise, or at least not bad enough to scorn. The author of one, on Stevens, forthrightly admitted not having the brains to appreciate him–although she may have been ironic.
It’s fitting that Cummings took the most abuse, for his best work is still a decade or more too advanced for Poetry.
Guriel may not be the most obtuse critic of Cummings ever–while Cummings was still alive, some halfwit whose name I failed to record parodied him by throwing letters on a page “almost as fast as (he) could hit the typewriter keys,” and calling the result, “Forest Fire.” This he follows with a mock “critique” of the poem, praising its “typographically created impression of chaos, suggested by a broken word such as ‘hiss’ and by the skillfully misplaces letters and punctuation marks, all of which add eloquently to the complex simplicity and the dissociated unity of the whole.” Ha ha, aren’t these avant garde critics dumb!
The philistine always assumes a poet he can’t appreciate is only doing one thing in his poetry, so has no problem parodying it since all he has to do is compose something that does nothing but that one thing, as here. He, of course, disregards the fact that doing something another poet has invented is easier than inventing it.
Time now for Guriel, with my commments inserted:
Sub-SeussReconsidering E.E. Cummings.
BY JASON GURIEL
Young people encounter many temptations on their way to adulthood: vampires, Atlas Shrugged, Pink Floyd, the acoustic guitar. Of course, such stuff, designed to indulge one’s sense of oneself as a unique individual, must eventually be repudiated. It’s not easy, growing up.
BG: Growing up requires one to accept that one is a sheep, and leave behind a child’s imaginativeness?
But I had no trouble saying no to the relentlessly quirky E.E. Cummings. Thank the high school teacher who required me to get Cummings’s “anyone lived in a pretty how town” by heart. I labored over the poem for an afternoon, recited it to the wall, gave up. What was at stake if I misremembered the order of words like “up so floating many bells down?” Does it really matter it’s not “up so many floating bells down?” Would Cummings himself have applauded the mistake as a heartening sign of a maverick mind at play?
BG: Yes, Jason, it matters. To understand that, you must first be able to imagine yourself not necessarily superior to a poet doing unconventional things with syntax, but assume that maybe he’s trying to give pleasure by doing so rather than irritate his readers. Here Cummings forces his readers to slow down, the first obligation of a poet, for a poet should want those encountering his work to take the time to let its full sensual effect to reach them. The slight change of word-order is not pivotal, but “so floating many bells” is a more charged image, it seems to me, than “so many floating bells”; the syntax of the first jarring the reader into increasing attention, wondering about “so floating” ( a slant way of saying “so floatingly” to increase the meaning of floating?), and about a “floating many,” the syntax of the second doing nothing. I would add that Cummings uses “up” and “down” simply to describe in a way that almost forces a reader to look up and down bells floating up (and) down. Whatever they are. Bell-sounds and bell-shaped flowers are what they made me think of. They do make one muse into concrete imagery, which is an important duty of poems.
The poetry, I concluded, wasn’t just sub-Seuss; it was tantamount to a teaching tool of the most condescending kind: the last resort. (No, really, poetry is crazy fun was the point one was meant to internalize.) Cummings seemed to have been invented to convert that stubborn student the syllabus has failed to win over to verse — or, at least, to reacquaint the kid with his inner child, the id whose appetite for nonsense and nursery rhymes has been socialized away. When it came to Cummings (or unstructured playtime) resistance was supposed to be futile.
BG: Here Guriel its criticizing Cummings for what he thinks his teacher used his poem for. I haven’t spoken with his teacher. It would be interesting if Poetry contacted the teacher and learned the motive for forcing poor Guriel to memorize a poem he didn’t like. (Guess what? It’s far from my favorite Cummings poem.) It’s good to expose students to the crazy fun that poems can be, including the very best. But the teacher might have been thinking of language poetry, so many of whose best features Cummings’s poems were precursors of, the idea being that immersion in Cummings would help the right students later to appreciate the poetry many superior contemporary poets are composing. There are several other possibilities. I suspect, though, that the teacher simply liked the poem and wanted to give students a chance to like it, too.
Randall Jarrell nearly said as much when he noted that “no one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive both to the general and the special reader.” He should’ve said that “no one else has ever made a formula for avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to people who don’t actually read poetry but would like to think they can write it.” Even today, it’s enough to reject an institution or two — capitalism, grammatical English — to be mistaken for an innovator. Rebel, misspell, repeat:
v o i c e o ver (whi!tethatr?apidly legthelessne sssuc kedt oward black,this )roUnd ingrOundIngly rouNdar(round)ounDing ;ball balll ballll balllll — From No Thanks, Section TwoThe message Cummings communicates here — and which langpo types and concrete poets continue to internalize — is remarkably unambiguous: words are toy blocks, and poems, child’s play. No one else has made making it new look so easy.
BG: Actually, this excerpt is from a long evocation of the moon. Easy as rhyming to do, sure.
But Cummings’s poems themselves were only superficially “new.” Beneath the tattoo-thin signifiers of edginess — those lowercase i’s, those words run together — flutters the heart of a romantic. (Is there a correlation between typographically arresting poetry and emotional arrestedness?) He fancies himself an individual among masses, finds the church ladies have “furnished souls,” opposes war. He’s far more self-righteous, this romantic, than any soldier or gossip — and far deadlier: he’s a teenager armed with a journal.
BG: Guriel mentions flaws I also find in Cummings, although I favor individualism and my heart flutters with romanticism. Guriel is an irresponsible critic, however, because he ignores the many poems of Cummings that transcend the attitudes Cummings had and Guriel is superior to. As he would find if he read enough of him to be fair to him.
Recording his thoughts about sex or the female body, however, Cummings’s speaker is less a teenager than a child trapped in a man’s body, which is to say a man-child: a boob blinking at a pair of breasts. In poem after poem, he can’t help but notice such curiosities as “sticking out breasts” and “uttering tits” and “bragging breasts” and “ugly nipples squirming in pretty wrath” and breasts that are “firmlysquirmy with a slight jounce” and “wise breasts half-grown.” (Hands off, ladies! He’s spoken for.) And when he shifts his attention to other parts of the beloved — and, worse, gropes for only the weirdest words to describe them — the boob makes an ass of himself:
i bite on the eyes’ brittle crust
(only feeling the belly’s merry thrust
Boost my huge passion like a businessand the Y her legs panting as they press
proffers its omelet of fluffy lust)
How does one excuse such lines? Is it that you can’t write a poem without breaking some eggs? That you can’t make it new without making a mess?
boys w!ll be boyss, i guess….
BG: It’s easy to excuse, Jason. You merely refer to the many many poor poems of Wordsworth, or to the large dead portions of Pound’s Cantos, and point out that the many world-class poems these two composed are a hundred times more important than any number of their bad ones a cherry-picker like you can find.
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Entry 904 — American Visiotextual Art
Saturday, October 27th, 2012
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