E. E. Cummings—Not for Mostpeople
E. E. Cummings has long been a passion of mine, and this personal essay gives a glimpse into my connections with this unconventional yet surprisingly traditional poet. First
published here on 23 May 2019. And yes, it’s an urban myth that his name should be all lowercased. The first time I remember hearing of E. E. Cummings and his poetry was when I was in high school, in grade ten. I don’t recall which specific poems I encountered in an English class that year (thank you Mr. Goodburn, who also introduced me to haiku), but here was a poet who scattered his words and letters and punctuation across the page in ways that completely upended poetry—or at least my perception of poetry at that time. I had written poems myself as a child, most of it rhymed and metered, and written badly, but here was a poet who took a much more creative and uninhibited approach to sharing his words. E. E. Cummings gave me permission to play. In addition to reading most of the poet’s output in poetry, and selections of his prose and drama, I’ve also become a modest collector, now with a bookcase full of Cummings. Back in high school, college, and graduate school, I still believed that the poet lowercased his name, and I continued to collect and read whatever I could find in used bookstores—before the opening age of Amazon. For years I wondered if there might be a Cummings Society, and even in the early days of the Internet I never discovered that there was. I had been an active member of the Haiku Society of America and the Lewis Carroll Society for a number of years, and hoped that there was a Cummings Society too, but despite searching in academic and other library databases, I never found it (I remember visiting Claremont Graduate School and researching Cummings scholarship at length around 1990—and I specifically remember searching for the society, with no luck). Then, around 1992, in an AOL poetry or writing chat room, I happened to talk with well-known poetry therapist John Fox, who later became president of the Institute for Poetic Medicine and authored books on poetry therapy (we later had lunch together at a restaurant in Palo Alto, California). In discussing our various poetic interests, such as haiku, I mentioned Cummings, and casually said that I was wondering if there was a Cummings Society. “Yes there is,” I remember John saying immediately. He knew Arthur Lerner through poetry therapy, and knew that Arthur was involved with the Cummings Society. After nearly a decade of searching, with one quick online contact, I finally knew that the society existed. And with information that I believe John got from Arthur, one email message later I had the address of Norman Friedman and finally confirmed that the E. E. Cummings Society really existed (the society now also has a blog). And from there I joined the society and subscribed to its journal Spring (where I learned that the poet himself preferred not to lowercase his own name), and later provided the journal’s copyediting, layout, and design. I soon became a contributing editor and continue to advise and contribute to the journal.
In addition, I also began writing
a number of papers, most of which I delivered at Cummings Society panels at
American Literature Association conferences—at the Bahia Resort in San Diego,
the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, a conference center in Long Beach, California, and at a hotel I forget in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. It was a supreme pleasure to get to know fellow Cummings
scholars, aficionados, and fans, especially Norman Friedman (whose books about
Cummings I already had, and who was particularly nurturing to me), Bernard F. Stehle Jr., Michael Webster (current society president and Spring editor), and many others. At ALA conferences, Cummings folks and haiku folks would often gather for dinner together (if there was a haiku panel as well—I organized the first one in 2000), and I remember Lee Gurga and I hamming up “may i feel said he” in an impromptu and over-the-top fashion with Norman and Bernard and Yoshi Hakutani in attendance. We loved the poetry, not just analyzing it, but we all liked to analyze and appreciate it too. The following
are those papers, the second of which I remembering drafting feverishly by
flashlight in a tent in Yosemite National Park just days before delivering it
for the centennial of Cummings’ birth, celebrated with a full day of panels at
the 1994 ALA convention.
let’s start a magazine something authentic and delirious you know something genuine like a mark in a toilet graced with guts and gutted with grace And there I found my website’s name, Graceguts, a portmanteau of beauty and grit, a name that I also hope is memorable and distinctive. In accordance with the “guts” half of that equation, I made the website’s theme colour red for blood. Even if no one has noticed, let alone mentioned it to me, this colour (with white and black) is vital to the website’s appearance and branding. For me, Cummings’ book 1x1 is perhaps the finest book of love poems I’ve ever read, and 95 Poems is my favourite of his collections, aside from the utilitarian Complete Poems. As a fan of Cummings and his poetry, I’m delighted to feature a few of his poems on this website—I could add so many more. Here are some of them:
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