viviD

windown 
the brease

a nocean 
th see

th shelleye 
sands and

th ese 
seseas

s and s 
and s

repeat at 
re peat

the blue 
wind 0

f or for 
itself

alonglong
the see-groped

beech 
streed

so softly 
you're foot

a playce 
on ssand

an sesand 
on e seasand

of sommer 
a fell

"And so the poem flows on from 'the see' through 'th ese,' and into divers renderings of ebb and flow, of fragmenting and recombining; of 'seseas' developing ashore, or withdrawing in steps from the sand, in the process visually and pun fully relanguaging 'on e seasand of sommer' into vivO memorableness."

With a season of "fell" to follow (I now add).

My main interest at the moment in the poem (which I like as much as ever) is what it may owe Cummings, directly or indirectly. Certainly the capital Dee as attention-grabber in its title. "nocean" is Joyce and Saroyan, but the splitting off of the en in "an" and attaching it to "ocean" is Cummings, the pioneer of intrasyllabic flow-breaks. I give the narrow lay-out of the poem to Cummings, too, but really don't know who in American poetry began that. He was certainly a pioneer in "freedom of shape" in English-spreaking poetry, though.

More Cummingsesque intra-syllabic flow-breaks follow as well as the Cummingsesque infraverbal text-repeat ("textpeat" can I dare call it?) of "se" in "seseas," as in Cummings's poems about the coucough, for instance. Mustn't forget all the Cummingsesque textual symmetries as with the esses in "seseas" and "s and s." "wind O" is beautifully Cummings, the first American magician of the O, it seems to me--and again, there is a wonderfully effective Cummingsesque flow-break from one stanza, when the "O" completes itself as "Of"--this time, not in the next line but the next stanza! With the eff using "or" to make another Cummingsesque infraverbal textual symmetrification. The final Cummingsification, except for intrasyllabreaks, is "so softly," with its "so so" and one of Cummings's favorite words, "softly," and favorite locutions, for that matter, "so softly."

Have I belittled the poem by showing its use of Cummingsifications? I certainly don't think so. I think I've put the lie to the notion that one can't use the idiosyncrasies of Cummings without seeming a trivial copycat. Huth's poem is a masterpiece that uses Cummings no more detrimentally than rhymers use whoever invented that device.

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