e.e. on slate

[amuse]

http://www.slate.com/id/2117098/fr/nl/

here is an excerpt: it's a good read! and i know quite a few people like his work, so maybe we could have a fave cummings poems section?

"No one else wrote like Cummings, and Cummings wrote like no one else" is how the poet's latest biographer, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, delivers the bad and good news in E.E. Cummings: A Biography. And a prescient Harriet Monroe tempered her praise by warning, "But beware his imitators!"

i love this one:

Buffalo Bill


Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeons justlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what I want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death


*for those of us who haven't a collection, the big g: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=poems+of+e.e.+cummings

[mono]

I apologize, amuse, that I have not yet reviewed this thread until now. The link you copied-and-pasted, I cannot help but say, offended me, and reminds of only another reason why I enjoy poetry by E.E. Cummings more than William Carlos Williams. The great artists, past and present, seem always the most insulted; just like Cummings' very unique style of poetry, many contemporaries of his time refuted Walt Whitman's free-verse, as compared to traditionally accepted rhyming verse - now both poets most readers hold in a very high regard, seeing that they both changed the trends of poetic art forever, and increased the artistic reverence required for diversity in self-expression.
A few of many favorites of mine by E.E. Cummings:

l(a

le
af
fa
ll

s)
one
l

iness

---

Songs VIII

in the rain-
darkness, the sunset
being sheathed i sit and
think of you

the holy
city which is your face
your little cheeks the streets
of smiles

your eyes half-
thrush
half-angel and your drowsy
lips where float flowers of kiss

and
there is the sweet shy pirouette
your hair
and then

your dancesong
soul. rarely-beloved
a single star is
uttered, and i

think
of you

---

One XXXIV

life hurl my
yes,crumbles hand (ful released conarafetti)ev eryflitter,inga. where
mil(lions of aflickf)litter ing brightmillion ofS hurl;edindog:ing
whom areEyes shy-dodge is bright cruMbshandful,quick-hurl edinwho
Is flittercrumbs,fluttercrimbs are floatfallin,g;allwhere:
a:crimbflitteringish is arefloatsis ingfallall!mil,shy milbrightlions
my(hurl flicker handful
in)dodging are shybrigHteyes is crumbs(alll)if,ey Es

---

Xaipe 54

maybe god

is a child
's hand) very carefully
bring
-ing
to you and to
me(and quite with
out crushing)the

papery weightless diminutive

world
with a hole in
it out
of which demons with wings would be streaming if
something had(maybe they couldn't
agree)not happened(and floating-
ly int

o

---

Xaipe 12

two

o o
ld
o

nce upo

n
a(
n

o mo

re
)time
me

n