Quasi, good work on the new posts. I have been offline and had not seen the editions until today. I like this thread very much. Thanks for starting it. J
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Quasi, good work on the new posts. I have been offline and had not seen the editions until today. I like this thread very much. Thanks for starting it. J
To Janine: Actually Tarachan started the thread but I was delighted to try and widen it's purview. Thank you for your participation. quasi
Some famous quotes from the avant-guard poet: "A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long."
"America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still."
"At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks."
"Be of love a little more careful than of anything."
"Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink."
"I imagine that yes is the only living thing."
"I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more."
"I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes."
"I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance."
"I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart."
"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."
"It takes three to make a child."
"Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination."
"Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own."
"The earth laughs in flowers."
"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter."
"The sensual mysticism of entire vertical being."
"The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful."
"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
"Unbeing dead isn't being alive."
From "Sonnet"
A wind has blown the rain away and blown
the sky away and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand. I think I too have known
autumn too long
(and what have you to say,
wind wind wind - did you love somebody
and have you the petal of somewhere in your heart
pinched from dumb summer?
O crazy daddy
of death dance cruelly for us and start
....
Edward Estlin Cummings
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.
e. e. cummings
if were to care
and mine to share then dare yer snare
and blare a pair of deuces
to trump the chumps
pokering the slumps that hold aghast
the feastless masts full of winds
assailed until recent curtailed
minds wind, as tops, to spin,
grin, bruise shins, mend, and later drink sin
....
The Capitolized Life of e.e.cummings (biography by Marty Eich)...http://titan.iwu.edu/~wchapman/ameri...eb/eecbio.html Short version including the mairrage with Anne Barton (probably one of his least successful unions) quasimodo1
If you were born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the last decade of the 19th century and your father is a professor of Sociology and Political Science at Harvard University and later in your growing up, your father decides to forgo Harvard to become a minister of a south Boston church, your odds of becoming an advante guarde poet genious would still not be very good. But then, nobody gambles in a church that e.e.cummings described in poetry like this... " i am a little church" by e.e. cummings
i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april
my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness {1st two stanzas}
Quasi, love that last poem. It is great! Thanks for keeping this thread so active. I have thoroughly enjoyed it so far and look forward to many more great e e poems. Wow, many of these I have never heard before.
The following is part of a bio. written about the childhood days of e.e.cummings. taken from:
http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/eecummings.html
(CR by subdivision of U.Unitarian Church).....The family, including a younger sister, was very close. Both parents doted on Estlin, assuming that he would someday be famous. Father Edward was conservative in his theological outlook, but his sermons usually dispensed folksy wisdom of a good-natured sort. Although Estlin frequently and accurately complained that his father did not understand his unique personality, both parents were always loving and financially supportive. Estlin proved to be a self-absorbed individual with an independent outlook and considerable courage.
By the time he was four, Estlin was drawing animals, such as elephants, with hints of perspective. Freehand sketching became a lifetime habit. His father purchased a large farm in New Hampshire called Joy Farm, and father and son would roam the acreage with their bull terrier. The farm was used for a summer retreat throughout Cummings's life. He enjoyed cutting wood, long walks, and bicycle tours. Other than rowing, he had no interest in team sports. His father was tall, rugged, and strong while Estlin was short and somewhat delicate.
(who sharpens every dull...)
who sharpens every dull
here comes the only man
reminding with his bell
to disappear a sun
and out of houses pour
maids mothers widows wives
bringing this visitor
their very oldest lives
one pays him with a smile
another with a tear
some cannot pay at all
he never seems to care
he sharpens is to am
he sharpens say to sing
you'd almost cut your thumb
so right he sharpens wrong
and when their lives are keen
he throws the world a kiss
and slings his wheel upon
his back and off he goes
but if a living dance upon dead minds by E. E. Cummings
but if a living dance upon dead minds
why,it is love;but at the earliest spear
of sun perfectly should disappear
moon's utmost magic,or stones speak or one
name control more incredible splendor than
our merely universe, love's also there:
and being here imprisoned,tortured here
love everywhere exploding maims and blinds
(but surely does not forget,perish, sleep
cannot be photographed,measured;disdains
the trivial labelling of punctual brains...
From INTRODUCTION of New Poems by E. E. Cummings
The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople-- it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings;mostpeople are snobs. Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to mostpeople? Catastrophe unmitigated. Socialrevolution. The cultured aristocrat yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultravoluptuous superpalazzo,and dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming with every conceivable species of undesirable organism. Mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness. If mostpeople were to be born twice they'd improbably call it dying--
you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now'and now is much to busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.
Life,for mostpeople,simply isn't. Take the socalled standardofliving. What do mostpeople mean by "living"? They don't mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science,in its finite but unbounded wisdom,has succeeded in selling their wives. If science could fail,a mountain's a mammal. Mostpeople's wives could spot a genuine delusion of embryonic omnipotence immediately and will accept no substitutes.
-luckily for us,a mountain is a mammal. The plusorminus movie to end moving,the strictly scientific parlourgame of real unreality,the tyranny conceived in misconception and dedicated to the proposition that every man is a woman and any woman is a king,hasn't a wheel to stand on. What their synthetic not to mention transparent majesty, mrsandmr collective foetus,would improbably call a ghost is walking. He isn't a undream of anaesthetized impersons, or a cosmic comfortstation,or a transcedentally sterilized lookiesoundiefeelietastiesmellie. He is a healthily complex,a naturally homogenous,citizen of immorality. The now of his each pitying free imperfect gesture,his any birth of breathing,insults perfected inframortally milleniums of slavishness. He is a little more than everything,he is democracy;he is alive:he is ourselves.
. . . .
Quasi, This 'Introduction' I have in one of my books and I have read it now several times. I love it! Thanks for posting it here. Yes, it is a prose poem indeed; I never thought of it that way before. This thread is great because it is varied with biography, quotes, poems and now this introduction. You keep coming up with new things to add to it. Good thinking on your part - makes the thread interesting. I like to check in daily to see what is new here.
To Janine: It is an amazing intro and does give depth to e.e.cummings, the man. Thanks for noticing. Isn't there a member who uses the last line as part of the avatar? quasi