mr youse needn't be so spry

 mr youse needn't be so spry

concernin questions arty

each has his tastes but as for i
i likes a certain party

gimme the he-man's solid bliss
for youse ideas i'll match youse

a pretty girl who naked is
is worth a million statues

Well, it's been about 11 years since I added to this blog. Had I lost my passion for Cummings? Have his poems stopped being active in my life? No, of course not. Just a case of interest in blogging about them amongst all the other demands on my time as father, husband and so on. They live in me. They reverberate in me. They roam around and bounce around in me. They are so much to me that I can say they are me. I am them. 

Mr, you certainly don't need to be such a prick about what you think you know and how superior you believe you are. Take a good bite of humble pie and swallow hard. For a person as educated and erudite to speak in this street fashion only strengthens to me his point that even a man like him, A Hahvahd grad and intellectual leader of his era, understands that direct experience far outshines abstractions. All his learning, all his privilege, is still less than a pretty girl to a boy. 

I've carried this one with me through the greatest museums of Europe. It doesn't make me appreciate the Louvre or Pompidou any less, but only to keep it where it belongs in the pantheon of what matters in the world. And it's not that great art is not a sublime achievement. It is. Even the most sublime human achievement...perhaps. And yet when seen from the point of view of an individual human, a great love surpasses any art. If you have ever deeply loved, you know that nothing compares to that in strength or power. 

This poem also reminds me of Frost in his sly rebuke of a poem about kneeling at well curbs always wrong to the light. There is a strong vein of poetic pomposity that pervades the genre. Snobbery, plain and simple. Poets and critics of their day dismissed Frost as a lightweight because his poems rhymed. Fools would dismiss the protagonist of this poem by Cummings as simple. 

Let's be careful to not conflate intelligence with value, or education with human worth. 

Been too busy to post more, but still live daily with Cummings in my mind!

yes is a pleasant country:
if's wintry
(my lovely)
let's open the year

both is the very weather

(not either)
my treasure,
when violets appear

love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
(and april's where we're) 




The first line says it all. Having read just about every poem in his anthology, I believe there may be no other single line that sums up his views so well. And mine too. I interpret this to express that being positive is not only a nice place to be, but that it is a choice. Not only is it a choice, but it is a place you can travel towards.A destination and a place to dwell. So true. Like the "May I be gay..." poem, he finds a way to exhort us toward recognizing our agency in the world. 


The final stanza is just heartbreakingly beautiful. So simple. Cute, even. Deceptively so. We do tend to pass up the truth in favor of something more intellectually stimulating, and that is the risk here. Of course, this poem is romantic, and I err in that direction as well, but there is no disputing the truth of the lines. Who would question that love is a deeper place, or season, than our intellect? Not that one is more important than the other, but if you think of our selves as having weather, certainly love causes our most intense meteorological events! In fact, our language reflects this in the way we talk about intellectual interests that are so moving to us that we "love" them. They cross over. 


More broadly, I agree with his suggestion that we should use reason as a vital tool (vital to combat all sorts of craziness) but revere love as a seminal pursuit. Being in "April" is a very common reference in his poems for love, and he uses it again here. Elsewhere he discusses the abundance of life in spring and the "opening" and flowering as metaphors for what happens in our hearts. 


I hope it is clear that my musings here are all simply adoration. Nothing more. I write a few words off the top of my head that come to mind about these poems, but never in a million years of writing could I convey what they really mean to me. Or, more properly, I would need to write poems about his poems to express my connections to them. 


Such wonderful mentors and companions...

Pity this busy monster

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
                          A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

Oh the joy of truth. Oh the wisdom of parallelism. This poem has been a dear friend since the first day I read it back in my days at UC Berkeley. I came to recognize those many years ago that man"kind"
is not always so, and though the reference in "kind" may also mean "type", this does not blunt the truth of this poem. There is so much to mine here, and so many gems to discover.

I'll limit myself to commenting on two parts:
1. Progress being a diseases of comfort. How true this is, and how remarkable a statement. This is a testament to his genius with slicing up language to find a true expression. If ther is anything we must be aware of with progress, it is the fulfillment of a fundamental human desir for comfort. This fulfillment results in our pervasive diseases of body and mind that plague us today. We are our own worst enemies in this regard.

2. The presence of a great universe, next door. How many people have used how many words to expres the recognition of alternate lifestyles, philosophies and paradigms? How many work as well as this simple phrase I discovered long ago that there are indeed beautiful universes "next door" that do not involve drugs. The truth of this is far reaching, and one way it resonates is with Thoreau talking about our minds having deep rut and the importance of recognizing and then jumping out of them. Cummings sums it up so well here, that we should all just ste aside from the poverty of the dominant paradigm, and join a group of the willing in the universe next door. Genius.

May I be gay

may i be gay

like every lark
who lifts his life

from all the dark


who wings his why

beyond because
and sings an if

of day to yes

If ever there was a poem that succinctly expressed a fundamental tenet of my philosophy, this is it. Out of the crushing despair of the world, we must choose to lift our lives out of the darkness and make our days light. There is such vast wisdom in this poem. Such incredible depth. Even the simple phrasing that conveys that we have a choice about our days. That we choose our moods. That we may "sing" ourselves into a better place. What could be more true than that? And yet less followed?

I recite this poem to my sons quite often, and in my own head many times a day.

I resolve every day to hold tight the truth of suffering, to ackowledge daily the murderous horror of humanity, and by seeing this and letting it wash wholly through me, allow myself to sing myself into a place of light and yes because those are true too.

What better way to express the ineffable feeling of euphoric enlightenment than to call it "Yes"? I think there is no truer way. As with all of Mr. Cummings poetry, he isn't strange and creative with language for the sake of being cute, he is unorthodox because the truth he tries to express is not possible within the normal confines of our language.

Like Rumi said: Language is a tailors shop where nothing fits.

Cummings knew this as many of us do. He brilliantly reorganizes the language to find a truer expression of these ineffable ideas than has ever been conjured elsewhere in English.

This poem is such a deceptively simple and lovely little beacon of light. I treasure it immensely.

A first poem

seeker of truth

follow no path
all paths lead where

truth is here


This site is dedicated to my tremendous love and appreciation for the poetry of E. E. Cummings, and this first poem is a good place to start. Indeed, there is so much wisdom in his poetry that it is a place I will return to the rest of my life for inspiration and guidance. I looked around the web for a site dedicated to his poetry and have found none, so here it goes. This will be a purely amateur and devotional site, with nothing more than a poem posted with some of my views of how it is so beautiful. It will be of no interest to any one not already in love with his poetry, who doesn't also happen to be me!

This particular poem is so true it just oozes it. On first reading it back in college I was struck with a permanent impact and it has not left my mind since. I recite it to myself many times a day, and have done so every day since that first day.

We spend enormous amounts of our energy pursuing paths. We study religion, psychotherapy, football or whatever, in a conscious or numb attempt to fill our holes, and yet we don't. We patch them sometimes, or drug them over, but it is not fulfilling. When you follow a path, the paths all lead somewhere, true enough, but where they lead is back to themselves. They end in themeslves. They are themselves.

To be elsewhere, to be here, you must just sit down-here. And that here place, it can be called "truth". That he even used the word "truth" speaks to his appreciation for that unspeakable reality of things we know as beyond falsehood.

This poem is a great friend, a great beacon, a lighthouse of my mind. It guides me every day toward the recognition that I must be here now, here, now.