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1 October 2005:
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I may not have anything more to say about influence--unless someone starts a dialogue with me on it, which seems unlikely. So back to my Cummings essay, which I'm adding to again, and thus non-completing. Among the poets it will now treat is Stephen-Paul Martin. I don't think the two excerpts above from his 1988(!) Runaway Spoon Press book, Until It Changes, is a great example of a work influenced by Cummings, but I'm trying to showcase as many good poets in my essay as possible, and the poems do work in the flexible-indentation zone Cummings, as much as any 20th-century American poet made available to poets, and they feature a kind of disconcealing word-break that may be said to derive from similar word-breaks Cummings pioneered in: e.g., Martin's breaking "roughly" out of "thoroughly" in the first, to warp his text onto a new track (and add a kind of orthographic clang when "oughly" as "oh lee" becomes "uhf lee). The use of the word-break to go from "inversion" to "version" to "perversion" is interesting, too, although I don't think Cummings played that game much, if ever.
In the second Martin poem, two syllabreaks occur. And "thoroughly" returns as a sort of rhyme for the same word in the poem above it, which precedes it in Martin's book. The stacking is all Martin's doing, and gives the poems, as a sequence (and as units), a kind of bulky slow narrative formidability/plod--almost a kind of meter that ain't nothing gone to stop.
Subtly Cummingsesque, however, is the concern with making aesthetically appealing visual designs of texts. Some of the other units of Until It Changes achieve this to a greater extent than these, I should add. I picked these as specimens mainly because of their text-breaks.
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Use the box below to respond to this entry. Negative feedback is especially welcome. It will get to me anonymously, so you need have no fear it will result in my using my immense influence to wreck your literary career, if you have one. On the other hand, if you want to hear back, please include your e.mail address with your message. --Bob
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