E.E. Cummings: C/D?

o by the by
has anybody seen
little you-i
who stood on a green
hill and threw
his wish at blue

with a swoop and a dart
out flew his wish
(it dived like a fish
but it climbed like a dream)
throbbing like a heart
singing like a flame

blue took it my
far beyond far
and high beyond high
bluer took it your
but bluest took it our
away beyond where

what a wonderful thing
is the end of a string
(murmurs little you-i
as the hill becomes nil)
and will somebody tell
me why people let go

A lot of what his schtick rides on is alienating very common ideas -- so "we" becomes "you-i", etc. And it's exciting the first time you see it, but it's a very easy code to crack, and what's lying beneath isn't very much. The alienation is a novelty rather than a path to something otherwise difficult to express.

You can hear a bit of Cummings talking here.

darling! because my blood can sing
and dance(and does with each your least
your any most very amazing now
or here)let pitiless fear play host
to every isn't that's under the spring
-but if a look should april me,
down isn't's own isn't go ghostly they

doubting can turn men's see to stare
their faith to how their joy to why
their stride and breathing to limp and prove
-but if a look should april me,
some thousand million hundred more
bright worlds than merely by doubting have
darkly themselves unmade makes love

armies(than hate itself and no
meanness unsmaller)armies can
immensely meet for centuries
and(except nothing)nothing's won
-but if a look should april me
for half a when,whatever is less
alive than never begins to yes

but if a look should april me
(though such as perfect hope can feel
only despair completely strikes
forests of mind,mountains of soul)
quite at the hugest which of his who
death is killed dead. Hills jump with brooks:
trees tumble out of twigs and sticks;

And I think he can do a good job with a thickly verbal poem like:

what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer's lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry

[something something something]

what if a keen of a lean wind flays
screaming hills with sleet and snow;
strangles valleys by ropes of thing
and stifles forests in white ago?

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two;
peels forever out of his grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other:then
laugh,leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

I have an analogy. Think of the song lyrics that impressed you when you were an impressionable youngster with little wisdom of any sort -the sort of lyrics that made you believe the singer knew more than you did about life and you sort of modeled yourself on. Going back over them today, how many seem shallow and unworthy of the importance and trust you attached to them?

Cummings stikes me that way. He isn't stupid, but he is shallow and doesn't seem to think much about what he says, so long as it sounds good at first blush. He blurts tunefully.

Now, if anyone is getting more out him than I am, then that's marvellous. I can't seem to get him down my craw without him sticking at this point.

amen to that!

I'm not sure that a poet's first duty is to be true, at least qua poet. Although I think the rest of Aimless's point is OTM, which makes me think that E.E.'s goal might have been, you know, seduction on a grand scale (to the lowest common denominator, even), which makes him sound pop, which after all he is, and perhaps we're [I'm] being rockist. But it doesn't seduce me, and that's what counts.

making fools understand
(like wintry me) that not
all matterings of mind
equal one violet

He's easy to understand but disguises it so people feel clever, populist because he slags politicians etc, and has killer phrases about pretty parts of 'nature'. I love him, but not unreservedly, as I distrust gut-punches of emotion.

The phrase in question states a single meaning - that, if you were to take "all matterings of mind" and consider each one individually, then at least one would be either greater than or less than one violet. That much is clear from what he wrote.

By placing this statement in the context of a poem, it is clear that he considers it portentious and wants us to consider it as such. Given the insipidity of what he said, one instinctively wishes for a more meaningful statement, hence Casuistry's desire to reconstruct it into something more sensible. It isn't a case of ambiguity, but merely the objection of the mind to verbose nonsense.

"let's start a magazine
to hell with literature
we want something redblooded

lousy with pure
reeking with stark
and fearlessly obscene

but really clean
get what I mean
let’s not spoil it
let’s make it serious

something authentic and delirious
you know something genuine like a mark
in a toilet

graced with guts and gutted
with grace"

squeeze your nuts and open your face

Stumbled across an ebook of Ezra Pound / Cummings letters from ~1920-1960 last week; like 10 years ago I remember finding it while browsing at the library and forgot to track it back down.

V v v fun read. Nice intro contextualizing their relationship; there's enough mutual respect that both kinda syntactically ball out in their styles in prose form. Hilariously arch and playful all over the place (nice editorial addendums at the end of each letter describing what/who the fuck they'd just been talking about). Also funny to watch Pound keep bugging Cummings to PLEASE READ THESE ECONOMIC TEXTS, and Cummings just willfully ignoring everything Econ-related.

Also Pound was born a century too early, wldve made an incomparable blogger / Wiki power-editor.

got 'the enormous room' free on my kindle a while back. anyone read it?

I've heard some people saying that Cummings' playfulness with text and grammar tends to disguise some quite obvious and rote patterns of thought and observations, what do u lot think about that?

Me, I don't know, I just know that Cummings is someone who when I read him as a teenager I realised that 'poetry' could also be 'light' and 'easy', which was an important little realisation for me at the time

I read 'Enormous Room' so long ago that I was an entirely different person at the time and almost no memory of the experience remains. Something about being a prisoner of war. Beyond that... nothing.

my recollection of it is: locked up by either the french and/or american authorities for some kind of vague misdemeanor/misunderstanding while in the wwi ambulance corp (?), horrible french people, bunch of sniffy class stuff, well connected father writes to the president or similar and he's released. all of which leaves him somewhat embittered and feeling persecuted... but it's been awhile since i read it. interested if anyone's read eimi about his trip to the soviet union? looking through it, the prose is much more dense and tortured than the enormous room. i seem to remember he was a longtime neighbour of djuna barnes (who i find much more interesting) once they were both back in the states.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/02/e-e-cummings-susan-cheever-biography

Cummings and Marion, literally penniless, used their last two tokens to take the subway uptown from Patchin Place to a fabulous New Year’s Eve party. They were dressed to the nines: she, long-legged in a spectacular evening gown, and he in a glamorous gentleman’s top hat and tails. The night was freezing cold; how would they get home? Neither of them worried at all as they dazzled the party-goers and had the time of their lives.

In the elevator on their way home in the early morning, the airy, beautiful couple noticed a leaden banker and his stodgy wife. They were all a little drunk on champagne. The banker admired Cummings’s beautiful hat. “Sir,” asked Cummings in his educated accent, “what would you give for the privilege of stepping on it?” The banker paid $10, the hat collapsed on cue, and Cummings and Marion took a cab back to Patchin Place.