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4 October 2005:
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Above is a poem by John Vieira from his Runaway Spoon Book, Self-Portait with Demons (1997), that I'm using as a specimen of Cummings's influence in the essay I've been sputtering into semi-existence the past several weeks, on and off. Here's what I wrote about it yesterday while at school: "On the surface, this poem doesn't seem all that Cummingsesque. It has text-scatter, and
syllabreaks (which in some cases evolve into letter-breaks). What seems most
legitimately Cummingsesque about it, though is the playful glide into a sort of
advertisement for gaiety/sensuality--a kind of spring that equals writing (note the "wh" that a letter-break has made into "wr")
that equals steps in ballroom dancing. As in so many of these examples, it's stretching to
link it to Cummings. Still, it works off devices he first or close to first put into effective
play.
About the next one, I only said that it had syllabreaks and text-breaks, pointing out in particular the LA/AL and CA/AC examples of the latter.
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