Blog442

Blog442 Daily Notes on Poetry & Related Matters

18 April 2005: Re: E. E. Cummings, I think he was part trivial prankster. I also think he liked seriously making his work a little difficult to read. There's evidence, shown in a book called Cummings as Painter that indicates that he seriously arranged textual elements to make a design of aesthetic value. I find his best use of unconventional flow-breaks to be in the service of "disconcealment" (a word I coined some thutty yar ago and possibly my first literary coinage). Disconcealment is simply breaking a word into one or more fragments that reveal, or take out of concealment, smaller words of connotational value to the poem they are in. A worn example is the falling leaf poem:


l(a

le
af
fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness

The disconcealments, in order, are of the numeral l, one, the numeral l, again, and I-ness (individuality) as well as one-ness. But note, too, the "one-letter rhymes" the initial els make, and the little flip of "af" to "fa"--all inside the pretty little 1/3/1/3/1 form. The main intention of the poem, though, is to get the eye to follow it downward exactly as it would follow a leaf's fall (taking a while to make up just what the leaf was). The over-all verbal metaphor--a juxtaphor in Grummanese--is of falling leaf as loneliness, which Cummings's fusion of leaf and state makes all the more . . . a single thing. But it more powerfully juxtaphorically depicts a falling leaf as an erratic gapped trickle down a page of textual elements.

I consider this poem up there with the best American poems of alltime, partly, I suppose, because it was the poem that first made me aware of, and permanently enamoured of visual poetry. But do have reservations about it. My biggest is that it is a "mere" visual onomatopoeia--which is to say that what is says verbally is duplicated by its visual appearance instead of added to by the latter. Many Cummings fans would kill me for saying so, but his poem would be better as


l(a

map
le
le

af

)
one
l

iness

The charming af/fa is lost in this version, but le/le is almost as good, and the visual arrangement adds to rather than repeats the poem's text. I don't like the width of "map," though. I guess, on reflection, my version isn't enough better, if better, than the orignal to junk the original for it. On the other hand, the fierce opposition by stasguards to any editorial change in a poem after the poem has been in a book is ridiculous.

The poem also seems a mite sentimental to me since loneliness is not a state that means much to me, but I know it can to others, and think the defamiliarization of the language dampens the melancholyl boo hoo that the poem might otherwise excessively express.

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