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21 June 2005: I was going to continue with my discussion of awarenesses and poetry, but have a workshop coming up Saturday to get ready for, and have actually started working on it just now, and don't want to (probably can't) get distracted from it. So, I'm limiting this entry to a small insight I just got into E. E. Cummings's scrambled grasshopper poem. (I'm using a sampling of Cummings as an introduction to visual poetry.) In his poem, Cummings prints his final anagram* of "grasshopper" as "gRrEaPsPhOs." I found three disconcealments** in this: the disconcealments of "great," "phosphorus" (or "phosphorescence") and, chiefly because the word, "leap," is nearby in the poem, "greet."
Just now, I noticed for the first time that Cummings spells his first anagram of "grasshopper" in lower-case (with dashes between the letters), his second in upper-case, and the above, his third, alternately in lower- and upper-case. Small, large, vibrating in scale. Once he spells the word correctly, he returns it to lower-case. Amazing how often one can find new, aesthetically effective tricks in even the best-known of Cummings's (uninfluential) poems.
*an anagram is a word whose letters have been scrambled: "bBo," for instance, is an anagram for "Bob."
**a disconcealment in my poetics is an alteration of a word that results in the coming to the fore from within of one or more (poetically resonate) smaller words. It usually results from a word-break like Cummings's "l one l iness," but it can be anagrammatically caused, as in this instance, or by boldfacedness, or elsehow, as in "po&try."
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