e.e. cummings has been my favorite poet for pretty much my entire life. I’ve bought, highlighted and replaced at least 5 copies of his “Collected Poems 1904-1962” and would love to share one of my favorite items from it. The following is the introduction to “New Poems” and I think it’s awesome! Enjoy.
The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople _it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike.
Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootof-minusone. You and I are human beings;mostpeople are snobs.
Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to most-people? Catastrophe unmitigated. Socialrevolution. The cultured aristocrat yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultravoluptuous super-palazzo, and dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming with every conceivable species of undesirable organism. Mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness.
If mostpeople were to be born twice they'd improbably call it dying-you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery, the mystery of growing: the mystery which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now;and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything, catastrophic included.
Life,for mostpeople,simply isn't. Take the socalled standardofliving.
What do mostpeople mean by "living"? They don't mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science, in its finite but unbounded wisdom,has succeeded in selling their wives. If science could fail,a mountain's a mammal.
Mostpeople's wives can spot a genuine delusion of embryonic omnipotence immediately and will accept no substitutes
-luckily for us,a mountain is a mammal. The plusorminus movie to end moving, the strictly scientific parlourgame of real unreality, the tyranny conceived in misconception and dedicated to the proposition that every man is a woman and any woman a king, hasn't a wheel to stand on. What their most synthetic not to mention transparent majesty, misandmr collective foetus, would improbably call a ghost is walking.
He isn't an undream of anaesthetized impersons,or a cosmic comfort-station,or a transcendentally sterilized lookiesoundiefeelietastiesmellie.
He is a healthily complex, a naturally homogeneous, itizen of immor-tality. The now of his each pitying free imperfect gesture, his any birth or breathing,insults perfected inframortally millenniums of slavishness.
He is a little more than everything,he is democracy;he is alive:he is ourselves.
Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are by somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being;somebody who said to those near him, when his fingers would not hold a brush "tie it into my hand" —
nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary,nothing emptied or filled, real or unreal;nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening,innocent spontaneous, true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden, but actually flowers which breasts are among the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted;brain over heart, surface: nowhere hating or to fear; shadow, mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making; only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely open-ing;only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno, impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong;never to gain or pause, never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence;never to rest and never to have:only to grow.
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question
Thanks for sharing that! So so good. So many good lines. This is my favorite, I think: "Life,for eternal us,is now;and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything, catastrophic included." A mantra for the age...
“Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are by somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being;somebody who said to those near him, when his fingers would not hold a brush "tie it into my hand" —”
Thanks for writing today’s piece. I haven’t pulled out Cummings yet this year and it was a great nudge. 🫶
The line is true and useful. I struggle with my college students who want me to admit (or even profess!) that life is in fact a catastrophe for them. Luckily, I agree with Cummings, and so I can honestly push back, and I think this comforts them--
Sunday morning always brings me back to college and makes me wish I’d had Greg as a Lit prof. No matter how familiar I am with a work, he usually points out something I’d never noticed or considered before and I love it!
I wonder how high *English major* would rank if we surveyed the PREVAIL readership. ;-)
I love when the English majors come out! I had some wonderful students, but in my actual professor days (adjunct, briefly), there was much yawning and watching-glancing. The first day or my first class, one of the students asked what I thought of Harry Potter, and I made the mistake of answering honestly, and I watched the enthusiasm for my class drain out of her face. (I wonder if she remembers this, and what she thinks now...)
"may I feel said he" is worth looking up this fine morning to start the day with laughter. Thanks, Greg, for another one of my favorites. Also, one I've committed to memory, since it often applies to hardheaded somebodies, is "plato told him; he couldn't believe it(Jesus told him;he wouldn't believe it)..."
Wonderful snapshots and ponderings. You put the sun in Sunday morning.
The grammar and punctuation things always sort of irk me, but it's priceless how the poem manages to be such deceptively unassuming hilarious tearjerkery.
He definitely would not have discovered "peripherally situated ego" at Trump's address.
Thanks, Maureen. Yeah, it irks me, too, but he does it just enough to be fashionable but not enough to detract. The lack of spaces between comma and letter are very irritating, because they just look like typos.
Lovely read, thank you. I wonder what Cummings would have thought had he traversed Russia in 1910, before the revolution, or in 1921, shortly after when the collectivism was more organic and less imposed by a totalitarian regime. That he should have embraced McCarthy is disappointing, and presumably means that his revulsion of what he saw in 1931 overcame his critical judgment. Did he, like 25% of the country, continue to embrace him after the Army-McCarthy hearings? The line from McCarthy to Trump is direct and runs through Roy Cohn, but one would imagine that Trump's obsequious love of despots, not least Kim, and propensity to label anything anti-Trump as communist would be enough to put him off if nothing else did. One would hope so.
Thanks, Frank. I'm taking the McCarthy stuff from the one book, which I'm assuming is scholarly enough to be right. One hopes EEC would have snapped out of the McCarthy trance before it drowned him, but who knows? We all make mistakes, lord knows. I do know that part of his revulsion was Lenin's Tomb, which of course did not exist in 1910 or 1921, so you may well be right.
For me, the central idea of communism -- "Hey, let's share everything so there is no want" -- is a much lovelier concept than capitalism's "fuck you, give me mine." I never begrudge anyone for wanting to believe in that, and Stalin was EXTREMELY skillful at exploiting the common decency of artists and intellectuals to present his butchery as good.
In 1921, I believe, there were still US troops in Russia, there to collect all the war material it had given the Romanovs so it didn't wind up with the Bolsheviks. I'm reading a great book about this now.
It's funny you bring up Stalin and artists. As a young man, and, at the time aspiring photographer, in 1979, I knew one of them. His name was Hugo Bloc, and he had been a photographer and collagist in Berlin in the 30s until he fled the Nazis and came to New York. As a teenager from an aristocratic family, he had served as an Uhlan in the German army in WWI and been wounded and taken prisoner by a group of Russian soldiers. He expected to be maltreated and possibly killed. As it turned out, they were pre-revolutionary Communists, and wound up nursing him back to health. He was so taken with their kindness that he renounced his privilege and became a lifelong Communist (he tried to recruit me to the Party). When I knew him, he was already in his 80s, living with his much younger wife in an Upper East Side walkup in NY, still handing out CP literature. He was a lovely man, but continued to defend Stalin, claiming that his vilification was all propaganda. His work has completely disappeared, I can find no trace of him or it on the internet. I am guessing that until now, I have been the only person that still knows his story. Now you do, too.
I'll read enthusiastically anything with the word "antepenultimate" in it (correctly used and spelled -- apparently Google was absent that day in English class and doesn't like it).
But thank you for this reminder that it's past time to cycle back through the cummings etcetera on my shelf etcetera, as it's been awhile. There is, after all, some appreciable distance between his poems and, say, a stuck up William F. Buckley monologue.
I guess I just regard our bulky systems of commerce and governance as inevitable and don't expect much from them -- and I despise the mere brick-throwers (looking at you, Steve Bannon, RFK Jr, and Donald Trump etcetera, but also quite a few friends etceterawho should know better) for their casual destructive negligence.
Recommending the savage poem "i sing of Olaf glad and big" (1931).
Full disclosure, I spelled it "antipenultimate" and the Substack spellcheck bleeped, and I changed it to the "e," and lo, it passed the censor. So I spelled it wrong on my penultimate try!
I have a slender volume of Cummings poems, and unlike other things, they are easy and fun to read through. I very much enjoyed reading up about him, and there were so many poems I could have used (although not all are in the public domain as of yet, and I think the estate is...as EEC might have said...uncool about it.
lovely post. What I've always liked is that he made his poems sing, exuberantly. My favorite is "anyone lived in a pretty how town." You don't have to "understand" in the sense of "being able to write a precis" to absorb it. A few lines, however, stand out as being in one's toolkit for so many reasons and allusions-- of children, "and down they forgot as up they grew." Pretty sure even MAGAts were once five with that sense of fair play so imbedded in kids.
Thanks, Susan. I like that one, too...it was in one of the collections we used as a textbook, and I sometimes have just the title in my head, and it evokes music, like it is a pop song from, say, 1983 and not a poem at all.
“hear / ye!the godless are the dull and the dull are the damned.”
Maga-oids claim God but live in a godless way, therefore are damned. Going to mass on Sunday does not qualify as godly, simply an unthinking robot going through the motions. So many of the rest of us lie in the mud, pacifists, perhaps held in the hands of fear of what may be. Does this explain dead heat polling? Are we confronting a coin toss election?
I first read little e e about 1958. When I learned of his death I felt sad that I did not get to at least buy him a cup of coffee and spend an hour knowing him in person. He and Albert Camus are two individuals for which i have great respect.
They both recognized Stalin for a monster early on as rather than Sartre and others.
I have owned several copies of Cummings collected poetry. Giving some away to friends. The book Enormous Room sits by my bedside in my small RV home.
Today Cummings poem "Pity this Busy Monster, manunkind" remains my favorite.
Thank you.
Cal in his Motorhome somewhere in the Great Sonoran Desert.
Thanks, Cal. He was like 21 and held by authorities for months in some weird house used as a prison, because, I think, he talked to enemy soldiers during the war. Suspected of treason when he was just being Cummings. That is the basis for that novel by your bed, as I'm sure you know.
When I was a lit major at ASU in Tempe (quick, pass me a hat, sunglasses, and trench coat so I will not be recognized), ca. 1972, this anecdote was in circulation: Did you hear about the antiwar protest over at Phoenix College? Guy was passing out copies of "I sing of Olaf" [Substack composition bot INSISTS on the capital I] as part of the protest. He and several other students got detained by campus security and hauled up before the dean of students, who had one of the copies of the poem on his desk. He scowled at the students and said "OK, which one of you assholes is E.E. Cummings?"
I later discovered that this was in circulation all over the U.S., with the details adjusted to fit the locale and whatever retrograde college bureaucrat was at hand.
And now I am thinking about how e.e. cummings would have struggled with contemporary writing apps, which try to do your punctuation thinking for you.
All hail my 1964 Olympia SM 9, which attempts no such thing.
To your point about writing apps, when Faulkner sent "The Sound and the Fury" to be published, an enthusiastic copy editor supposedly added punctuation marks to the stream of consciousness narratives so that when the galleys arrived, Faulkner had to take them all out again. Would that we could blame it all on machines.
And the first thing you'd do, as a serious reader of such stream of consciousness monologues, is insert punctuation in pencil. But yes, the infernal machines have made things worse by making them better. I turn off any new gadgets for "helping."
I love that anecdote, which I had never heard before. Ha!
I don't mind the spellcheck on here so much, because I don't have a proofreader (actually, I have many, but the proofs don't come in until after publication!), but I hate texting for that reason. Sometimes I look back at the texts and they make no sense, because the phone has decided to use words I did not select.
I was born the year you were there at ASU, and I learned to type on a manual typewriter...
I found this piece unsettling because I have always found the “modernist” style unsettling. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because poetry is meant to arouse emotion, but it messes with my sense of the importance of orderliness. I care about grammar, spelling and punctuation, and I put as much care into writing these comments, and even posts on Facebook, as I did in writing my book or the technical writing in my career. We’re all clearly products of our times and our cultural influences. But, make no mistake, I understand that you’re just doing your job, Greg, in unsettling me!
Thanks, Earl. My main issue with this sort of style is that it turns off most readers immediately. Because who wants to navigate through the bullshit? It's sort of inherently pretentious and elitist. But EEC succeeds, I think, in using the style but NOT being immediately repellent. Which is some trick!
I did an interpretive e e cummings poem in UIL poetry competition around '65 or so. They gave first and second to guys who did by rote declamations just like the damn record. Of course, interpretive e e cummings is just for the ear, there were no records, and the judges all seemed to be deaf. How easily we encounter disgust there hewingtotheline.
e.e. cummings has been my favorite poet for pretty much my entire life. I’ve bought, highlighted and replaced at least 5 copies of his “Collected Poems 1904-1962” and would love to share one of my favorite items from it. The following is the introduction to “New Poems” and I think it’s awesome! Enjoy.
The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople _it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike.
Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootof-minusone. You and I are human beings;mostpeople are snobs.
Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to most-people? Catastrophe unmitigated. Socialrevolution. The cultured aristocrat yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultravoluptuous super-palazzo, and dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming with every conceivable species of undesirable organism. Mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness.
If mostpeople were to be born twice they'd improbably call it dying-you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery, the mystery of growing: the mystery which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now;and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything, catastrophic included.
Life,for mostpeople,simply isn't. Take the socalled standardofliving.
What do mostpeople mean by "living"? They don't mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science, in its finite but unbounded wisdom,has succeeded in selling their wives. If science could fail,a mountain's a mammal.
Mostpeople's wives can spot a genuine delusion of embryonic omnipotence immediately and will accept no substitutes
-luckily for us,a mountain is a mammal. The plusorminus movie to end moving, the strictly scientific parlourgame of real unreality, the tyranny conceived in misconception and dedicated to the proposition that every man is a woman and any woman a king, hasn't a wheel to stand on. What their most synthetic not to mention transparent majesty, misandmr collective foetus, would improbably call a ghost is walking.
He isn't an undream of anaesthetized impersons,or a cosmic comfort-station,or a transcendentally sterilized lookiesoundiefeelietastiesmellie.
He is a healthily complex, a naturally homogeneous, itizen of immor-tality. The now of his each pitying free imperfect gesture, his any birth or breathing,insults perfected inframortally millenniums of slavishness.
He is a little more than everything,he is democracy;he is alive:he is ourselves.
Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are by somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being;somebody who said to those near him, when his fingers would not hold a brush "tie it into my hand" —
nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary,nothing emptied or filled, real or unreal;nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening,innocent spontaneous, true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden, but actually flowers which breasts are among the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted;brain over heart, surface: nowhere hating or to fear; shadow, mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making; only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely open-ing;only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno, impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong;never to gain or pause, never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence;never to rest and never to have:only to grow.
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question
Thanks for sharing that! So so good. So many good lines. This is my favorite, I think: "Life,for eternal us,is now;and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything, catastrophic included." A mantra for the age...
My email signature file for the longest time was…
“Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are by somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being;somebody who said to those near him, when his fingers would not hold a brush "tie it into my hand" —”
Thanks for writing today’s piece. I haven’t pulled out Cummings yet this year and it was a great nudge. 🫶
The line is true and useful. I struggle with my college students who want me to admit (or even profess!) that life is in fact a catastrophe for them. Luckily, I agree with Cummings, and so I can honestly push back, and I think this comforts them--
Brain warp, don’t we most people, and human beings, need a cosmic-comfort station?
My goodness, Greg. What a lesson for an English major this morning. Thank you for bringing the past to the present so poetically.
Sunday morning always brings me back to college and makes me wish I’d had Greg as a Lit prof. No matter how familiar I am with a work, he usually points out something I’d never noticed or considered before and I love it!
I wonder how high *English major* would rank if we surveyed the PREVAIL readership. ;-)
I love when the English majors come out! I had some wonderful students, but in my actual professor days (adjunct, briefly), there was much yawning and watching-glancing. The first day or my first class, one of the students asked what I thought of Harry Potter, and I made the mistake of answering honestly, and I watched the enthusiasm for my class drain out of her face. (I wonder if she remembers this, and what she thinks now...)
Thanks, Katharine! This was a fun one to research, for sure.
"may I feel said he" is worth looking up this fine morning to start the day with laughter. Thanks, Greg, for another one of my favorites. Also, one I've committed to memory, since it often applies to hardheaded somebodies, is "plato told him; he couldn't believe it(Jesus told him;he wouldn't believe it)..."
Oh, that's a good one! Thanks, Mary!
Thanks for a very thought provoking piece today.
Thanks, Joseph.
Wonderful snapshots and ponderings. You put the sun in Sunday morning.
The grammar and punctuation things always sort of irk me, but it's priceless how the poem manages to be such deceptively unassuming hilarious tearjerkery.
He definitely would not have discovered "peripherally situated ego" at Trump's address.
Ha!! Most definitely and defiantly:-)🙌
Thanks, Maureen. Yeah, it irks me, too, but he does it just enough to be fashionable but not enough to detract. The lack of spaces between comma and letter are very irritating, because they just look like typos.
Wouldn't want to be his copyeditor :( !
Lovely read, thank you. I wonder what Cummings would have thought had he traversed Russia in 1910, before the revolution, or in 1921, shortly after when the collectivism was more organic and less imposed by a totalitarian regime. That he should have embraced McCarthy is disappointing, and presumably means that his revulsion of what he saw in 1931 overcame his critical judgment. Did he, like 25% of the country, continue to embrace him after the Army-McCarthy hearings? The line from McCarthy to Trump is direct and runs through Roy Cohn, but one would imagine that Trump's obsequious love of despots, not least Kim, and propensity to label anything anti-Trump as communist would be enough to put him off if nothing else did. One would hope so.
Thanks, Frank. I'm taking the McCarthy stuff from the one book, which I'm assuming is scholarly enough to be right. One hopes EEC would have snapped out of the McCarthy trance before it drowned him, but who knows? We all make mistakes, lord knows. I do know that part of his revulsion was Lenin's Tomb, which of course did not exist in 1910 or 1921, so you may well be right.
For me, the central idea of communism -- "Hey, let's share everything so there is no want" -- is a much lovelier concept than capitalism's "fuck you, give me mine." I never begrudge anyone for wanting to believe in that, and Stalin was EXTREMELY skillful at exploiting the common decency of artists and intellectuals to present his butchery as good.
In 1921, I believe, there were still US troops in Russia, there to collect all the war material it had given the Romanovs so it didn't wind up with the Bolsheviks. I'm reading a great book about this now.
It's funny you bring up Stalin and artists. As a young man, and, at the time aspiring photographer, in 1979, I knew one of them. His name was Hugo Bloc, and he had been a photographer and collagist in Berlin in the 30s until he fled the Nazis and came to New York. As a teenager from an aristocratic family, he had served as an Uhlan in the German army in WWI and been wounded and taken prisoner by a group of Russian soldiers. He expected to be maltreated and possibly killed. As it turned out, they were pre-revolutionary Communists, and wound up nursing him back to health. He was so taken with their kindness that he renounced his privilege and became a lifelong Communist (he tried to recruit me to the Party). When I knew him, he was already in his 80s, living with his much younger wife in an Upper East Side walkup in NY, still handing out CP literature. He was a lovely man, but continued to defend Stalin, claiming that his vilification was all propaganda. His work has completely disappeared, I can find no trace of him or it on the internet. I am guessing that until now, I have been the only person that still knows his story. Now you do, too.
if anythings like un
punctuationed run
to & from O
lear in ektasy
one junemorning
I'm printing that out and putting it on my wall. Thanks, Samm!
Dear Greg, ohthankyou etcetera.
My head, etc.,;:! are spinning. Thanks for taking us down Grammar Boulevard. Billserle.com
As you know, I abhor totalitarianism, but with grammar, maybe I don't mind it so much... ; )
I'll read enthusiastically anything with the word "antepenultimate" in it (correctly used and spelled -- apparently Google was absent that day in English class and doesn't like it).
But thank you for this reminder that it's past time to cycle back through the cummings etcetera on my shelf etcetera, as it's been awhile. There is, after all, some appreciable distance between his poems and, say, a stuck up William F. Buckley monologue.
I guess I just regard our bulky systems of commerce and governance as inevitable and don't expect much from them -- and I despise the mere brick-throwers (looking at you, Steve Bannon, RFK Jr, and Donald Trump etcetera, but also quite a few friends etceterawho should know better) for their casual destructive negligence.
Recommending the savage poem "i sing of Olaf glad and big" (1931).
First, holy SHIT that's a good poem. Wow. "I will not kiss your fucking flag" Here is the link:
https://poets.org/poem/i-sing-olaf-glad-and-big
Full disclosure, I spelled it "antipenultimate" and the Substack spellcheck bleeped, and I changed it to the "e," and lo, it passed the censor. So I spelled it wrong on my penultimate try!
I have a slender volume of Cummings poems, and unlike other things, they are easy and fun to read through. I very much enjoyed reading up about him, and there were so many poems I could have used (although not all are in the public domain as of yet, and I think the estate is...as EEC might have said...uncool about it.
lovely post. What I've always liked is that he made his poems sing, exuberantly. My favorite is "anyone lived in a pretty how town." You don't have to "understand" in the sense of "being able to write a precis" to absorb it. A few lines, however, stand out as being in one's toolkit for so many reasons and allusions-- of children, "and down they forgot as up they grew." Pretty sure even MAGAts were once five with that sense of fair play so imbedded in kids.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/22653/anyone-lived-in-a-pretty-how-town
Thanks, Susan. I like that one, too...it was in one of the collections we used as a textbook, and I sometimes have just the title in my head, and it evokes music, like it is a pop song from, say, 1983 and not a poem at all.
“hear / ye!the godless are the dull and the dull are the damned.”
Maga-oids claim God but live in a godless way, therefore are damned. Going to mass on Sunday does not qualify as godly, simply an unthinking robot going through the motions. So many of the rest of us lie in the mud, pacifists, perhaps held in the hands of fear of what may be. Does this explain dead heat polling? Are we confronting a coin toss election?
I'd like to think this is not a coin toss but a blow out, but then, I still "believe in that incredible
unanimal mankind," as EEC put it (and does not).
Greg, thanks for recognizing
e e cummings.
I first read little e e about 1958. When I learned of his death I felt sad that I did not get to at least buy him a cup of coffee and spend an hour knowing him in person. He and Albert Camus are two individuals for which i have great respect.
They both recognized Stalin for a monster early on as rather than Sartre and others.
I have owned several copies of Cummings collected poetry. Giving some away to friends. The book Enormous Room sits by my bedside in my small RV home.
Today Cummings poem "Pity this Busy Monster, manunkind" remains my favorite.
Thank you.
Cal in his Motorhome somewhere in the Great Sonoran Desert.
Thanks, Cal. He was like 21 and held by authorities for months in some weird house used as a prison, because, I think, he talked to enemy soldiers during the war. Suspected of treason when he was just being Cummings. That is the basis for that novel by your bed, as I'm sure you know.
God I love peripherally situated ego. And from my periphery it's Dos Passos. Fix that.
I knew it looked wrong when I was typing it...thank you.
When I was a lit major at ASU in Tempe (quick, pass me a hat, sunglasses, and trench coat so I will not be recognized), ca. 1972, this anecdote was in circulation: Did you hear about the antiwar protest over at Phoenix College? Guy was passing out copies of "I sing of Olaf" [Substack composition bot INSISTS on the capital I] as part of the protest. He and several other students got detained by campus security and hauled up before the dean of students, who had one of the copies of the poem on his desk. He scowled at the students and said "OK, which one of you assholes is E.E. Cummings?"
I later discovered that this was in circulation all over the U.S., with the details adjusted to fit the locale and whatever retrograde college bureaucrat was at hand.
And now I am thinking about how e.e. cummings would have struggled with contemporary writing apps, which try to do your punctuation thinking for you.
All hail my 1964 Olympia SM 9, which attempts no such thing.
To your point about writing apps, when Faulkner sent "The Sound and the Fury" to be published, an enthusiastic copy editor supposedly added punctuation marks to the stream of consciousness narratives so that when the galleys arrived, Faulkner had to take them all out again. Would that we could blame it all on machines.
And the first thing you'd do, as a serious reader of such stream of consciousness monologues, is insert punctuation in pencil. But yes, the infernal machines have made things worse by making them better. I turn off any new gadgets for "helping."
We are being helped into ignorance, as any thought that I have is being “auto-corrected” before I can utter it.
I love that anecdote, which I had never heard before. Ha!
I don't mind the spellcheck on here so much, because I don't have a proofreader (actually, I have many, but the proofs don't come in until after publication!), but I hate texting for that reason. Sometimes I look back at the texts and they make no sense, because the phone has decided to use words I did not select.
I was born the year you were there at ASU, and I learned to type on a manual typewriter...
For all those with a typewriter fetish: http://machinesoflovinggrace.com
I love my vintage Olympia, but if I could just get my hands on a restored Hermes 3000 . . .
I found this piece unsettling because I have always found the “modernist” style unsettling. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because poetry is meant to arouse emotion, but it messes with my sense of the importance of orderliness. I care about grammar, spelling and punctuation, and I put as much care into writing these comments, and even posts on Facebook, as I did in writing my book or the technical writing in my career. We’re all clearly products of our times and our cultural influences. But, make no mistake, I understand that you’re just doing your job, Greg, in unsettling me!
Earl I posted a comment about your comment
Thanks, Earl. My main issue with this sort of style is that it turns off most readers immediately. Because who wants to navigate through the bullshit? It's sort of inherently pretentious and elitist. But EEC succeeds, I think, in using the style but NOT being immediately repellent. Which is some trick!
I did an interpretive e e cummings poem in UIL poetry competition around '65 or so. They gave first and second to guys who did by rote declamations just like the damn record. Of course, interpretive e e cummings is just for the ear, there were no records, and the judges all seemed to be deaf. How easily we encounter disgust there hewingtotheline.
I hereby invalidate the results and give you the prize, Billy! Seriously, I hate stuff like that. Very frustrating!