Poet Ishion Hutchinson recently described e.e. cummings as ‘a great gateway drug’ to give to a young person who’s disinterested in poetry. Agreed. I discovered cummings (who rebelliously always spelled his name in lowercase) when I was thirteen. Every few years since, I pick up a cummings collection and dip in, soon becoming immersed, amused and sometimes baffled (but enjoying the challenge– dear reader, you know me by now).
Finding myself between novels, I’ve had cummings’s 73 Poems on the bedside table all week. This was the poet’s last collection, published in 1963, a year after his sudden death from a stroke. The poems are all short and make for good bedtime reading, unlike T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ that kept me up and gave me stressful dreams (lesson learned). 73 Poems is an eclectic collection that is hard to sum up – joyous, reflective and yearning are words that come to mind.
Hutchinson explained that cummings is a great gateway drug because ‘he has a sharp ear for the inner music of language.’ This is true. Even the poems that break spacing rules and look odd sliding down a page, when read have rhythm and phrasing that rolls lyrically off the tongue.
What I particularly like about cummings is the way he creates words by working with morphemes or bringing together words into unusual (or nonsensical) collocations. Some examples from 73 Poems, without the line breaks as this blog is already irritating Word’s automated editor:
- of all things under our blonder than blondest star…
- …these more than eyes restroll and stroll some never deepening beach locked in foreverish time’s tide at poise…
- …and (stealing towards the blissful pair) skilfully wafted over themselves this implacable unthing…
Reading these lines again, I feel cummings is winking us.
With cummings at my bedside, I can replace the prayer of my early childhood (the ‘now I lay me down to sleep’) with this version:
Poem 44
Now i lay (with everywhere around)
me (that great dim sound
of rain; and of always and of nowhere) and
what a greatly welcoming darkness –
now i lay me down (in a most steep
more than music) feeling that sunlight is
(life and day are) only loaned; whereas
night is given (night and death and the rain
are given; and given is how beautifully snow)
now i lay me down to dream of (nothing
i or any somebody or you
can begin to begin to imagine)
something that nobody may keep.
now i lay me down to dream of Spring
Good night, dear reader.
Paola Trimarco 