review of
Richard Kostelanetz edited E. E. Cummings' AnOther E. E. Cummings
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 10-17, 2020

for the full review: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1265916-e-e

I, & the world, owe a great debt of gratitude to Richard Kostelanetz for the depth & scholarliness & passion that he's dedicated to his studies of the avant-garde. Until I read this bk, I'd somewhat dismissed Cummings as 'avant-garde lite', now I think he's a truly great writer that I'm happy to've finally come to appreciate.

Near the beginning there's a section of relevant quotes. Here're 3 selections:

"[Guillaume Apollinaire] achieved the final dismemberment of poetry as an exposition in the "calligrammatic" style, often undeniably effective, sometimes merely cute. The visual aptness of these poems is seldom matched by appropriate qualities of sound, which Apollinaire could easily have produced. His idiogrammatic ideas did not find such disciplined application as we find later in E. E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson.
—Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (1958)" - p vii

"Cummings was . . . the very model of a modern anarchist general; the kinky sexuality—surrogate whores, doll-women, weird dildos, and assorted promiscuities" —Robert Peters, Where the Bee Sucks (1994) - p viii

"Simultanism, the third voice of life, signifies an approach to immobility and this an extremely sensitive attunement to the infinite universe. Baudelaire, Bergson, and Cummings are all describing this state.
—Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (1958)" - p viii

Note that 2 of these quotes are from The Banquet Years, a bk that was important to me when I was in my early 20s in the 1970s. As for the middle quote.. well.. "An anarchist general"? Perhaps Peters is unaware of this being a contradiction — or perhaps, typically of so many people, he simply doesn't understand anarchism.

In a dedication "To the memory of S. Foster Damon (1893—1971) that follows this brief section of quotes it's stated that Damon "owned a rare copy of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, which delighted and bewildered Cummings. (p ix) It's worth noting that I made a movie of me sucking pussy while reading the entirety of "Tender Buttons" & that an excerpt from the audio from that is on my Significantly Different from the Other One CD. "Tender Buttons" is possibly my favorite of the Stein that I've read. I detested her The Making of Americans (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/42323-as-i-was-saying-the-making-of-america... ).

In Kostelanetz's Preface he states that:

"I wanted to do an anthology that would gather in one place this Other Cummings, much as an earlier anthology, The Yale Gertrude Stein (1980)"

[..]

"AnOther Cummings represents the fruit of twenty-five years of thinking and perhaps a decade of selecting" - pp xiii-xiv

I have a copy of The Yale Gertrude Stein & I'm glad I do but I think that one of the reasons why Gertrude Stein 'scholarhip' tends to the shallow b/c academics primarily read the work in excerpt instead of reading entire pieces. This attitude that 'that's enough to get the idea' leads to work like The Making of Americans being praised by people who've never read more than a few pages of it. Let's hope the same thing doesn't happen w/ Cummings. It's my DUTY now to read entire Cummings bks rather than just the delightful excerpts collected here.

From the Introduction:

"No one would dispute the opinion that E. E. cummings (1894—1962) ranks among the prominent modern American poets. What is surprising, and thus debatable, is that no other major American poet of his generation remains so neglected and misunderstood."

[..]

"Even when Cummings is acknowledged, it is usually for his more conventional lyric poems. Richard Ellmann's higbrow The New Oxford Book of American Verse (1976) is no different from Nancy Sullivan's more mundane Treasury of American Poetry in including only his lyrics, while he appears not at all in Helen Vendler's The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1985), even though he ranks among Harvard's more distinguished literary alumni."

[..]

"Only one scholar, Milton A. Cohen, has written a book about another dimension of his creativity—the paintings and drawings, on which he worked most of his daytimes; indeed, they have never been satisfactorily exhibited or sompletely examined." - pp xv-xvi

I'm certainly amongst the 1st to praise & support the work of the UNDERAPPRECIATED (see my documentary about the UNDERAPPRECIATED MOVIEMAKERS FESTIVAL: https://youtu.be/KwlfRxmRU3E ) but it's a little hard for me to accept Cummings into that category. After all, his writing has been widely published & distributed. I wd've known about it at a fairly young age, at a time when I wdn't've been very aware of a variety of poetics. AND, as this very bk makes clear, Cummings gave Norton lectures at Harvard in 1952 & had a show of his artwork at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester in 1945. As such, he might be 'neglected' in contrast to, say, an extremely popular author such as Stephen King, but he's nowhere near as obscure as I am or as many other people are.

"Some of his affectations were disaffecting, such as not capitalizing the first person singular. (Spelling his name entirely in lower-case letters was someone else's invention that should be forgotten.)" - p xvi

Thank you, Kostelanetz, I didn't know that. All these decades, I thought that Cummings spelled his name in all lower-case as a self-effacing continuation of "not capitalizing the first person singular" — it's good to have that misinformation revealed.

"As the epigraph to this essay suggests, Cummings observed a clear distinction between ordinary speech and poetry. The former was common language; the latter, exceptional language. Thus, contrary to current fashion, he enthusiastically used such traditional devices as meter, alliteration, resonant line breaks, and even rhyme." - p xvii

Ok.

"A second rich Cummings device was the use of one part of speech to function in place of another. Thus, verbs sometimes appear as nouns:

my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give

As Malcolm Cowley carefully observed in the New Republic (Jan. 27, 1932), nouns also "become verbs ('but if a look should april me') or they become adverbs by adding 'ly,' or superlative adjectives by adding 'est' (thus, instead of writing 'most like a girl,' Cummings has 'girlest'). Adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions, too, become participles by adding 'ing' ('onlying,' 'softlying,' 'whying,'); participles become adverbs by adding 'ly' (kneelingly')."" - p xviii

That, predictably enuf, interests me much more than the use of tradtional means, Cummings manages to skew familiarity, it's still familiar but it's bent out of shape or sculpted anew. As such, it's akin to Modern Art of roughly the same time &/or earlier: Cubism (Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)), Futurism (Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)), etc.

"Though Cummings was nearly an exact contemporary of Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), the two never met and probably had no effect upon each other; nonetheless, Cummings illustrates Mayakovsky's dictum: "Neologisms are obligatory in writing poetry."" - p xxii

"Cummings probably worked as hard at his paintings and drawings as he did at his writing, the former being done by day and the latter at night. More than 2,000 completed paintings exist; the Houghton Library at Harvard reportedly has over 10,000 sheets of drawings. His literary eminence notwithstanding, Cummings had remarkably few exhibitions and scare dealer representation." - p xxiii

This bk was copyrighted in 1998. Much has changed since then as to what's easily searchable online. Going to https://eecummingsart.com I find "Paintings, Drawings & Sketches for Sale" by Cummings available from "Ken Lopez Bookseller". The work is browseable by subject (Landscapes, Portraits, Abstracts, Nudes, Still Lifes, & City & Interiors) &/or by medium (Oil Paint, Watercolor, Ink, Pencil). I find the artwork to be generally uninteresting, maybe there's good reason why it's unknown in relation to Cummings's writing. Take an oil painting labeled as "full moon, tree, and mountain" (Item # 0901) made on "1945-02-14" ( https://eecummingsart.com/gallery/artwork/901/ ): there's broadness of gesture, prominent brushstrokes, slightly garish colors. In other words, nothing as new as "Adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions, too, become participles by adding 'ing' ('onlying,' 'softlying,' 'whying,')".

I find a drawing that's vaguely more interesting to me: Item # 0011, described as a "figurative abstraction", no date ( https://eecummingsart.com/gallery/artwork/11/ ). It's vaguely Chagallesque & I like Chagall. It's small, ripped & appears to have what might be a glue stain. The price online is $1,750. I might buy it if the price were 10% of that — but then I've spent most of my life in poverty. In general, I find the work slightly above amateurish — but not by much.

The 1st porm presented by Cummings is under the heading of "Deviant Traditional Verse":

"guilt is the cause of more disauders
than history's most obscene marorders" - p 3

&, yes, I find that very elegant. By taking the ends of dis-orders & mar-auders & switching their places, Cummings directs the reader to mentally (or audibly) slightly distort the pronuniciation. "order" & "auder" are close enuf to each other to still 'work' but far enuf apart to result in implied neologisms. What wd a "disauder" be? What wd a "marorder" be? & how do these implied new meanings tie in to Cummings's philosophical claim?

There is plenty of sex, something I didn't associate w/ Cummings in my 'avant-garde lite' image of him:

" she,straddling my lap,
hinges(wherewith I tongue each eager pap)
and.reaching down,by merely fingertips
the hungry Visitor steers to love's lips
Whom(justly as she now begins to sit,
almost by almost giving her sweet weight)
O,how those hit thighs juicily embrace!
and (instant by deep instant)as her face
watches,scarcely alive,that magic Feast
greedily disappearing least by least—
though what a dizzily palpitating host
(sharp inch by inch)swoons strenly my huge Guest!
until(quite when our touching bellies dream)
unvisibly love's furthest secrets rhyme." - p 6

It's interesting to me the way I'm unnerved by Cummings not putting spaces after punctuation — but, then, why is it 'needed'? The punctuation serves its conventional purpose w/o the space, the space becomes superfluous. BUT, THEN, in line 7, he has the space: "and (instant" & I wonder whether that's a typo or whether he's fucking w/ the reader. I shd mention that the 1st line is actually substantially indented but I've never gotten such indentations to work here on Goodreads.

In general, I love the language, his wordplay always keeps things lively & surprising.

"helves surling out of eakspeasies per(reel)hapsingly
proregress heandshe-ingly people
trickle curselaughgroping shrieks bubble
squirmwrithed staggerful unstrolls collaps ingly
flash a of-faceness stuck thumblike into pie
is traffic this recalls hat gestures bud
plumptumbling hand voices Eye Doangivuh sud-
denly immense impotently Eye Doancare Eye
And How replies the upsuirtingly careens
the to collide flatfooting with Wusyuhname
a girl-flops to the Geddup curb leans
carefully spewing into her own Shush Shame

as(out from behind Nowhere)creeps the deep thing
everybody sometimes calls morning" - p 11

There's that switching again. "helves surling" cd've been 'shelves hurling', more specifically: 'shelves hurling out of speakeasies' — & isn't "ingly" lovely on its own detached from its usual end position?

But how do you feel about science there E.E.?

"of Course life being just a Reflex you know since Everything is Relatives or

to sum it All Up god being Dead(not to

mention in Terred)
LONG LIVE that Upwardlooking
Serence Illustrious and Beatific
Lord of Creation,MAN:" - p 22

[indentation on line 4]

People seem generally so content to use punctuation as is generally done, Cummings loves to shake it up, I find it so refreshing.

"emptied.hills.listen.
,not,alive,trees,dream(
ev:ery:wheres:ex:tend:ing:hush

)
and Dark
IshbusY
ing-roundly-dis

tinct;chuck
lings,laced
ar:e.by(" - p 26

Even if one finds it nonsensical, i.e.: not contributing to semantic content, so what? There's a sense of liberation to it.

"BALLAD OF AN INTELLECTUAL" is practically long by Cummings standards, a whole 2pp w/o much space. It seems a bit sarcastic about the intellectual &, yet, I'd say that Cummings was one so..

There's even an "EROTIC POETRY" section. I have mixed feelings about erotica in general. It's usually too 'soft porn' for me. Still, I like Cummings's, I can relate somehow. Maybe it's just the heterosexuality of it.

"there is between my legs a crisp city.
when you touch me
it is Spring in the city;the streets beautifully writhe,
it is for you;do not frighten them,
all the houses terribly tighten
upon your coming:
and they are glad
as you fill the streets of my city with children." - p 66

"skies may be blue;yes
(when gone are hail and sleet and snow)
but bluer than my darling's eyes,
spring skies are no

hearts may be true;yes
(by night or day in joy or woe)
but truer than your lover's is,
hearts do not grow

nows may be new;yes
(as new as april's first hello)
but new as this our thousanth kiss,
no now is so" - p 69

It's odd, to me at least, that I picked the above 2 to quote from. Neither is particularly explicit, as some of the others are, & the 2nd is downright romantic. My slip is showing.

Under "LANGUAGE EXPERIMENTS" this one is printed on the page sideways w/ the left margin parallel to the bottom of the page:

"life hurl my
yes,crumbles hand(ful released conarefetti)ev eryflitter,inga. where
mil(lions of aflickf)litter ing brightmillion of S hurl;edindodg:ing
whom areEyes shy-dodge is bright cruMbshandful,quick-hurl edinwho
Is flittercrumbs,fluttercrimbs are floatfallin,g;allwhere:
a:crimbflitteringish is arefloatis ingfallall!mil,shy milbrightlions
my(hurl flicker handful
in)dodging are shybrigHteyes is crum bs(all)if,ey Es" - p 84

&, like most or all sensible & kind people, Cummings is against war:

"Lis
-ten


for the full review: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1265916-e-e ( )

I find this book, though an admirably good attempt, to be lacking in content. To be frank, there aren't enough of Cumming's poems in the book, and although Kostelanetz has either written or compiled one or two good essays, I think that perhaps an investment in the Complete Works of EE Cummings would be a much more insightful perspective. ( )