Poetry Collection--Gabriel Molina

E. E. Cummings is considered "among the most innovative of twentieth-century poets," according to Jenny Penberthy in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Much of his poetry consists of a minimal number of words, each chosen and placed particularly, in quite an unusual fashion. Here is an example:


!blac
k
agains
t

(whi)

te sky
?t
rees which
h fr

om droppe

d
,
le
af

a:;go

e
s wh
IrlI
n

.g


As you can see he was very experimental, especially for the time period.


Cummings wanted to become a poet since childhood, and he began by writing a poem a day. He eventually went to Harvard where he became fascinated with modern poetry and the use of dynamic language instead of adhering to conventional structure.




The collection I looked at is included in a book of E. E. Cummings selected poems. The collection I focused on is called "The Poetry of the Eye." The clear theme of this collection is experimentation on the part of the poet. The introduction tells us that these poems were written in response to Cummings's discovery of cubism in art, and we can see in the contained poems that they are his literary interpretation of such an art style. Essentially, it is cubist poetry. The poem "Picasso," which describes Picasso's works and their effects on the observer, clearly supports this notion. What we see as we move through the collection is increasingly complex poems, where the meaning is more and more scrambled. In the first few we mainly see experiments with spacing and line breaks. Then we see experimentation with position on the page. Then incorporation of symbols, then capitalization, then scrambling of the letters of particular words, eventually to poems that basically look like a child was dancing on the keyboard. However, it is lots of fun to take the time to try to decipher them.


Another recurring theme I find in these poems are descriptive thoughts of the poet condensed into a short phrase or clause, then broken up and restructured. Many of them are structured similar to the example above: in a thin column, where lines are broken mid-word and syllables or other phrases in parentheses are incorporated in the midst of the text. "l(a," "s(," and "n" are all examples of this.




My close analysis is of the poem "l(a" :

l(a

le

af

fa

ll

s)

one

l

iness

When I first saw this poem, I didn't even attempt to decipher it because all I saw was letters. However as we read Cummings's poetry, we start to learn his patterns and deciphering becomes easier. If we read this poem disregarding what is included in the parentheses, we can see the word "loneliness." Inside the parentheses, if we conquer the strange line breaks, we read "a leaf falls." So the entire text without line breaks would read "l(a leaf falls)oneliness." In the eccentric structure of the poem we see a little bit of the influence of cubism on his poetry. We also see the recurrence I mentioned earlier, where Cummings makes a poem out of just one word, with an interrupting phrase in parentheses. I don't know if there is any significance to the poet regarding a leaf falling, but it at least provides a simple yet powerful image to the reader to accompany the word "loneliness."


Comparing the structure of these poems to what I would create, I don't know if I could write a poem in such a cubist fashion as Cummings does, nor would it be original to do so. However, I deeply appreciate the simplicity of his messages, in contrast with the complexity of his structure. I could absolutely envision writing poetry with just a simple message that means something to me or creates an image of a part of who I am. I feel compelled to explore how to make simple messages like these complex in other ways. Cummings focused on structure, what could I emphasize?

Works Cited

"!blac by E.e. Cummings." - Famous Poems, Famous Poets. N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Jan. 2016.

Cummings, E. E. "The Poetry of the Eye." E.E. Cummings: Selected Poems. New York: Liveright

          Pub., 1994. N. pag. Print.