Forget Henry James and Isabel Archer. I’ve been waylaid this Sunday afternoon by a favorite poet from my salad days at USC. Yet here’s a curious fact. This poet lived on the same street in Cambridge (Mass.) as Henry’s older brother, William. And ee, the poet who eschewed capitals, only exists because Professor William James introduced a fellow Harvard professor to the woman he would marry; and she gave birth to Edward Estlin Cummings.
So just now, from my library, I pulled out a thick 866 page Complete Poems (1913-1962), a gift years ago from daughter Bonnie.
Two articles ‘filed’ in the book of poetry were from 2014, when Susan Cheever wrote a biography about Cummings. One review “Capital Case,” by Paul Muldoon in The New Yorker, included two of my favorite ee poems: “Buffalo Bill’s defunct” and “she being Brand.” I had my daughters in their early years memorize the first poem, with its delightful “watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefour pigeons-justlikethat.” And for years as a high school English teacher in the Napa Valley, I used the second poem with recalcitrant male students who thought poetry was for sissies. The poem purports to be about driving a new car with a stiff clutch but is about sexual intercourse. “Is this a poem?” I would be asked, getting looks that suggested the male students knew what the poem was about and could not believe I’d given it to them.
Here’s what I call a mysterious conjunction. My friend Dorie recently bought a children’s book in New York City for Noa, her granddaughter: Enormous Smallness by Mathew Burgess about ee cummings. I read it and realized I’d not read any prose by the poet. His first book, The Enormous Room, was an autobiographical work about his time in Paris in 1917. An ambulance driver, Cummings ended up imprisoned for writing satirical letters that censors deemed traitorous.
My point is that Dorie’s book made me want to buy both Enormous Smallness and The Enormous Room. Then on July 5th, my daughter Bonnie wanted to visit the Lancaster Library’s book sale. While she was selecting cookbooks for chefs she knows in D.C., I looked at “classics” on a nearby table. What did I find? A 1934 Modern Library copy of The Enormous Room.
Seriously, what were the chances of that? What does ee say in the first line of his Introduction, written in New York City in 1932. DON’T BE AFRAID. He repeats this again on page four at the end. To be continued…
My nomination for the most eye-catching title in recent memory: "A Mysterious Conjunction Overrides a Promised Blog" Who could possibly scroll by that one without at least a peeK? Bravo!
jkl