27 May 2005: Today I caught up with my entries. With this one, I'm back on schedule. I have nothing to report, though. So, here's one of the poems by Cummings that Gudrun M. Grabher discussed in Boston yesterday:
there are so many tictoc
clocks everywhere telling people
what toctic time it is for
tictic instance five toc minutes toc
past six tic
Spring is not regulated and does
not get out of order nor do
its hands a little jerking move
over numbers slowly
we do not
wind it up it has no weights
springs wheels inside of
its slender self no indeed dear
nothing of the kind.
(So when kiss Spring comes
we'll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss
lips because tic clocks toc don't make
a toctic difference
to kisskiss you and to
kiss me)
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I like this poem very much--but am somewhat contemptuous of its point of view. I think spring is every bit as mechanical as a clock, just much more complex. But the childlike state of total irresponsibility that seems to me the target of this wish-fulfillment of a poem is wonderful to dream along the poem to. Certainly, in our best moments we do seem to transcend time, and no one captured such best moments better than E.E. (Note, for instance, his perfect use of a . . . mispunctuation at the end of the poem--the absent period. A sentence is thus freed to untictoc into time
less n e s s
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