Apparently Cummings
August 3, 2004
isn’t cool enough for the in-crowd. Screw that. If 1/10 of the current crop of naysayers could write 1/10 the number of poems with 1/10 the skill and power that Cummings boasted it would be a revolutionary and positive change in the poetry scene today. Dumping on your predecessors does nothing to make you better.
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Poetry and Poetics
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August 4th, 2004 at 5:01 am
Odd – though I don’t know to exactly what post you’re referring, haven’t made the blog rounds yet – b/c every 18-yr-old I’ve known since my own graduation came out of hs loving Cummings. I was recently working with two freshly-minted undergrads who think he’s the shit. Maybe this sort of popularity causes folks to look at him rough?
o/t: Chris, do you have any thoughts (in Ruminate) on server vs. desktop aggregators? Tried the search but couldn’t find anything. Cheers – Jason
August 4th, 2004 at 1:33 pm
I also don’t know who’s dissing cummings, I like him too, and think he probably is ‘important,’ in that he had a good feel for spontaneous oral pacing before such things became popular. & vernacular. & the visual effect a poem can make on the page.
August 5th, 2004 at 12:08 pm
We all loved cummings at age 14, or 18, or whenever. We all outgrew his sentimentality, the endless springtimes and the condemnation of those despise springtime, the simplistic black-and-white ideology. It’s a very adolescent sensibility! (I’m sure George Bush loves springtime too.) It’s very true that Cummings also had immense talent that few can match, so I agree with the thrust of your post. I just think you also have to look at the reasons why people reject Cummings: it takes a bit of maturity to recover from the jaded undergraduate condemnation of Cummings, the embarrassment at having fallen for some of the worst aspects of his poetry along with the best. I would say there is something wrong with someone who doesn’t despise Cummings by age 20 or so. Someone who still hates it at 30, on the other hand, is still overcompensating.
August 5th, 2004 at 12:26 pm
Also, it should be noted that his reputation never quite recovered from that devastating RP Blackmur essay back in the 1930s. Although Blackmur was quite harsh, he did score some points that are quite hard to deny. Thus Cummings was never the influential figure that Williams was, for example, in the 1950s and 1960s.
August 5th, 2004 at 1:32 pm
Spot-on Jonathan, I am railing against people who are old enough to know better. It’s one thing to get out of high school and realize that cummings is sentimental and it is much cooler to be jaded. It’s another thing to be (presumably) an adult an adopt the same world-weary attitude.
Not only that, but what’s wrong with some sentimentality and exuberance if one has the ability to back it up? I just posted about the young Louis Armstrong– should we write him off in our personal quest to become avant garde jazz sophisticates that can brook no one other than Lester Bowie or Don Cherry?
It’s not only immense presumption on one’s part to assume that because I posted about Armstrong I must not understand (or like, or appreciate) Bowie, but it’s downright sad to not be able to enjoy that pioneering work.
August 5th, 2004 at 1:35 pm
I’m not talking about *you* (Jonathan) in that last comment, I hope it’s clear! Just making an analogy.
August 5th, 2004 at 4:41 pm
I didn’t take it that way. I love Armstrong too, along with Clifford Brown and Don Cherry. And I wish I still had that collected poems of Cummings.
August 7th, 2004 at 1:23 am
“We all loved cummings at age 14, or 18, or whenever. We all outgrew his sentimentality, the endless springtimes and the condemnation of those despise springtime, the simplistic black-and-white ideology. It’s a very adolescent sensibility! (I’m sure George Bush loves springtime too.)”
Jonathan, how did George Bush get into this statement? When did ’spring’ become an equivalent to right wing, fascist ideology? We are to despise ’spring’? We are to outgrow ’spring’?
I suppose there is the parodic ditty ‘it’s springtime for hitler in Germany’, is that where your thinking, ahem, ’springs’ from?
There was once a reason to condemn certain ideas and subjects as kitsch, but those reasons are becoming a little fishy. Those reasons are turning into a fascism of their own.
“I would say there is something wrong with someone who doesn’t despise Cummings by age 20 or so.”
There won’t be any real poetry written by jaded adults, in fact, I don’t even think you’re one.
August 7th, 2004 at 11:24 am
No, I didn’t mean that there was anything wrong with liking spring, but that this was an unreliable barometer of anything else. Even evil people like spring, so when Cummings condemns the enemies of spring and flowers and innocence, etc… just who does he have in mind? Poetry can come from jaded adults as easily as from sentimental children.
August 7th, 2004 at 11:49 pm
Gee Jonathan, I think you can use your imagination on this one. When did you become such a literalist?
August 22nd, 2004 at 9:30 pm
Children are rarely-if ever-sentimental.