when i was in high school, i had to choose a poet that i liked. our assignment was to write about some of their poems and what they meant to us. i found ee cummings fascinating and the more i read about him and his poetry, the more i liked his work. he certainly wasn't conventional. his use of punctuation, letter spacing and upper/lower case letters made the work so interesting (when i could figure it out, that is). edward estlin cummings was born in cambridge, ma on october 14, 1894. he seemed so much more in tune with the 1960's than someone born before the turn of the century. since he died in 1962, he never did get to see the revolution that would happen in the late '60s and where, i believe, he would've found even wider acclaim. he was married 3 times but only one, his final marriage to marion morehouse, stuck. his first marriage to elaine orr didn't even last a year. i’m guessing she tried to correct his grammar once too often. one of my favorite Poems of his is "l(a" or, as I like to call it: "a leaf":
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
the content outside the parentheses reads “loneliness” and within the parentheses it is “a leaf falls”. a single leaf falling does seem rather lonely, doesn’t it? but, wait, there’s more – count the number of times you see either the word “one” or the “l” that looks like a one. also, the way it is written is the way a leaf would fall – finally resting flat on the ground. i LOVE it.
as i write this, i am finding how incredibly aggravating it is to have my grammar and disuse of capital letters automatically corrected. so ANNOYING! if cummings had a computer back in the day, he probably would have
s
imply
g
i
ven
u
p