Cosmopoetica

An acquaintance reminded me of another sonnet by Cummings that I like and whose lyric qualities defend it quite well from accusations of sentimentality (and, as my acquaintance noted, “lyric poetry is apt to involve sentiment, and therefore to condemn sentimentality out of hand is to discard a very large body of work in a lot of languages, IMHO unwisely.”)

“it may not always be so”

it may not always be so;and i say
that if your lips,which i have loved,should touch
another’s,and your dear strong fingers clutch
his heart,as mine in time not far away;
if on another’s face your sweet hair lay
in such a silence as i know,or such
great writhing words as,uttering overmuch,
stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

if this should be,i say if this should be-
you of my heart,send me a little word;
that i may go unto him,and take his hands,
saying,Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face,and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands.

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[CC photo (larger view)  by Tony the Misfit]

Today is the birthday of E. E. Cummings, born on this day in 1894. In a letter, Robert Lowell remarked about Cummings:

“He [Cummings] is a razor-blade without the handle.”

(Side note: the common belief that Cummings preferred his name to be printed in all lower-case is an enduring myth.)

A friend related a sad story on a mailing list this morning. A huge fan of Cummings as a college student, this friend worked on an Honors project intending to defend Cummings’ poetry. By the time he was done, he found himself agreeing with the critics about Cummings’ sentimentality and originality. He concluded:

“Haven’t been able to read Cummings much since, beyond the occasional anthology gem.  I long ago sold his Complete Poems.”

I remarked that this was a sad tale… and not for Cummings. Despite occasionally using the term myself, I’ve never managed to come up with a sufficient explanation of “sentimentality.” I know the dictionary definition and understand the general idea that it’s “unearned emotion” or “cheap shots” (as one of the list denizens remarked), but in practice it often seems to be a way of dismissing the work rather than acknowledge a failure on the part of the reader. I’ve not yet found a way to know if a poem or song or story is sentimental or if it’s just that the reader has lost the capacity he or she once had to appreciate it in the same way that, as we age (and learn), we lost the ability to appreciate so many things.

If developing a sophisticated poetry palate means dismissing Cummings, I’ll remain a troglodyte and continue to enjoy his “sentimental” writing. In honor of Cummings birthday, I’m including here few poems (excluding one I posted here before: “maggie and millie and molly and may”).

First, a poem I read as part of a custom wedding ceremony I wrote and performed for a friend:

“somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond”

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

I love Cummings’ phrasing: “unbeautiful … furnished souls” and, of course, the final lines (Cummings had a great knack for closure, an effect intensified by the miniature chaos of his typography):

“the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls”

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church’s protestant blessings
daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow,both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things-
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps.   While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
….the Cambridge ladies do not care,above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

And sometimes the typography and punctuation is just so perfectly suited that I’ll hear that “click of the lid of a well-made box” in the middle of one of Cummings’ poems:

“Buffalo Bill”

Buffalo Bill’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus

he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

Continuing with worldly matters, Cummings wasn’t afraid to get it on either:

“I like my body”

I like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which I will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh…And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you quite so new

And while some of Cummings’ political poems are probably the easiest to attack, my mind flashes to this poem often when I hear news about our current combat activities, maimed soldiers, dead civilians and no good end in sight:

“i sing of Olaf glad and big”

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but–though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments–
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but–though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation’s blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion    
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat–
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified    
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.

These are mostly well-anthologized poems, which isn’t surprising given Cummings’ consistent popularity (and there are many even more anthologized than these… I leave that to your Google-Fu). The best poems have naturally been recognized many times. But I’ll close with one I don’t see very often:

sonnet entitled how to run the world)

A always don’t there B being no such thing
for C can’t casts no shadow D drink and

E eat of her voice in whose silence the music of spring
lives F feel opens but shuts understand
G gladly forget little having less

with every least each most remembering
H highest fly only the flag that’s furled

(sestet entitled grass is flesh or swim
who can and bathe who must or any dream
means more than sleep as more than know means guess)

I item i immaculately owe
dying one life and will my rest to these

children building a rainman out of snow

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Jared asks:

“Is modern poetry so concerned with meaning that form is seen as trimmings?”

The irony is that one of the more vital strands of living poetry is the “post-avant” which–to the extent anything can be said about such a diverse group–veers even more sharply away from meaning in the sense of denotation, narrative and story (I gnawed with my poetry teeth on John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean which remains a stellar introduction to poetry and a foray into what most post-avant poetry is not. Whatever the post-avant is, Cummings and the imagists are certainly involved as early participants and influencers. I don’t even know how to read a good portion of the poetry coming out of that assemblage…and I really have tried. I’ve just not been very luck that way. So far.

But sometimes I come across something that resonates as strongly with me as the best poetry from the mainstream (or, as some on the post-avant “side” like to call it “The School of Quietude” (SoQ).

For instance, a few snippets of Lance Phillips that I blogged about some time ago (in fact, back when I was reading hard, trying to “get” some post-avant poetry):

The acts   I’ve immediate acts
Cloud full with hand then mouth’s
a lightning of mercury   of hair’s memorable lust

–from “Portion’s sweetest root”

and

Secularist, am says head
says diagram from I
bulks poppy

–from ”The how”

There’s all manner of fascinating (and sometimes incomprehensible) stuff grouped together under the rubric of the post-avant. Most who live and work in that space appear to consider the work of a poet like Cummings to be as naive as the readers who cite Cummings’ poetry as an example of a concrete and visual poetry given the number of changes since then. The diversity of the post-avant can be found in the work of individual poets like Tony Tost, who has published in all the right post avant places (Jacket, Fence, Coconut) and who I sometimes don’t understand at all, but who writes powerful poems, including a poem I’ve never been able to get out of my head:

“Swans of Local Waters”

Their color is not a product of the water’s
depth; their quiet is not the lake’s. These
are accidents floating in simple water,
taking in nature calmly, in little sips; actions
which, like literal swans and lakes, are
sometimes scattered. What the swans look
like: white, with feathers. It’s getting cold.
Someone has made a fire. A flame’s identity
depends upon what it burns — identity is
like a swan for it comes and goes as it pleases.

I don’t know how to talk about my father,
so I am going to describe the lake: it’s blue,
with swans. I can film it. There’s still a fire
by the lake. The swans are safe in the water.
It’s getting cold. Almost dark. I have a list
of things that get more definite at night.

1) The shape of fire.
2)

–from Invisible Bride

(not-so-incidentally, if you scroll to the second full comment on this post by Ron Silliman, you can read an assessment of the whole SoQ/post-avant friction that I’m only now coming to fully appreciate).

But I want to come back to Cummings. Jared notes the darkness in “maggie, molly, milly and may” and asks:

…what is the “horrible thing / which raced sideways while blowing bubbles?”

In some tangled way deep in my aesthetic nether regions, Cummings description invokes something of the same horror–and I use that word deliberately and without overstating the case–that I feel when I read Eliot’s:

ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Cummings could indeed mix the morose and the joyful, though my favorite Cummings poems are unambiguous and don’t perform much of that mixing:

“Buffalo Bill’s”

Buffalo Bill’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus

he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

And, of course, we can’t forget poor Olaf, glad and big…

Finally, Cummings could write heart-breakingly beautiful poems… I almost suspect he wrote a few of these just to show he could, to lay a few emotional cards on the table. I’ve performed three wedding ceremonies in my life–including marrying my ex-wife to her second husband–but the most exciting was my friend Sean’s wedding, because I not only wrote a complete custom ceremony that managed to please all the various religious and non-religious and bleeding-blue police and mystical-hippy factions, but in which I included the most beautiful poem Cummings wrote: “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond.”

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Here is one of the first– if not the first–”real” poems that became mine. One of the first that sang to me and probed into a space I only vaguely knew existed, the place where my head and heart come together. I’ve never forgotten it:

“maggie and milly and molly and may”

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

–E. E. Cummings

This is no childrens’ poem–though it’s often presented that way–but a piece that presages and invokes (too) many emotions and obsessions and themes that are a fundamental part of my existence: memory, loneliness, terrifying submerged things, the proverbial world in a grain of sand, inescapable solipsism.

It may simply be me hearing my own musical concoction, the way I alone think that ELO’s Time predicts and recapitulates with forward momentum about a dozen different musical trends (seriously, listen to the three song opening sequence, post-prologue: Twilight – Yours Truly, 2095 – Ticket to the Moon), but but it’s no less real for that. Or maybe that’s as real as it gets.

[beginning the game - on to jared... and others?]

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“He [Cummings] is a razor-blade without the handle.”

–cited in The Letters of Robert Lowell

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