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Daily Notes on Poetry & Related Matters

26 September 2005: Certainly Charles Olson, who is considered influential, particularly on the language poets, read Cummings. Yesterday, I came across something he'd written that was quoted by Bob Cobbing and Peter Mayer in their Concerning Concrete Poetry while researching Cummings's influence on the concrete poets (who named him one of their four or five main forerunners): "If a contemporary poet leaves a space as long as the phrase before it, he mneans that space to be held, by the breath, an equal length of time. If he suspends a word or syllable at the end of a line (this was Cummings' addition) he means thtat time to pass that it takes the eye - that haair of time suspended - to pick uyp the next line.. If he wishes a pause so light it hardly separates the words, yet does not want a comma - which is an interruption of the meaning rather than the sounding of the line - follow him when he uses a symbol the typewriter has ready to hand: 'What does not change/ is the will to change'

"Observe him, when he takes advantage of the machine's multiple margins, to juxtapose:


   'Sd he:
     to dream takes no effort
        to think is easy
           to act is more difficult
     but for a man to act after he has taken thought, this!
 is the most difficult thing of all'

"Each of these lines is a progressing of both the meaning and the breathing forward, and then a backing up, without a progress or any kind of movement outside the unit of time local to the idea." Charles Olson: Poetry New York 1950

My comments:

Odd piece. Why should a "/" be considered less obtrusive than a ","? Being unusual, it would be more intrusive. In any case, it would seem one more item Cummings passed on to succeeding generations of poets. I don't know that he used a "/" in any of his poems, but he certainly used parentheses for similar purposes, and opened up the possibility of using such special textemes ("paramorphemes," I call them) in poetry-- in odd places in poetry. The Olson passage seems to me strong evidence that Cummings had a direct influence on Olson. I don't see that Olson did much with his "open field" than Cummings had, or Pound, although he had a different rationale for it than they.

Regarding Cummings, one question keeps recurring to me: how could such a creative poet and painter stick throughout his life, so far as I know, to typewritten poems? He didn't even slant his lines! Yes, I am fully aware of the value of pushing a form and/or set of devices for all they're worth, and how easy it is to dilute whatever talent one has by trying too many things. Still . . .

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