eating cucumbers without permission...

I really want E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962.

His use of punctuation, and his syntax in general, is fascinating. What do you make of this?

if i love You

if i love You
(thickness means
worlds inhabited by roamingly
stern bright faeries

if you love
me) distance is mind carefully
luminous with innumerable gnomes
Of complete dream

if we love each (shyly)
other, what clouds do or Silently
Flowers resembles beauty
less than our breathing

There are three stanzas, which one would assume form some kind of semantic division — those breaks aren’t whitespace for its own sake. Yet, there’s a parenthesis spanning from the first stanza through to the second, which seems to be a discrete unit in its own right. Given the way the parenthesis plus the whitespace divides the first two stanzas into four, I hold that the intended reading is all four combinations — if i love You and/or if you love me it’s the glow-in-the-dark dwarves and the fairies. The punctuation acts as kind of shorthand.

Magical and romantic, but I can’t help thinking that “[L]uminous with innumerable gnomes” may well be the most ridiculous line I’ve ever read.

The third stanza is the really interesting one, because it doesn’t make any sense. “what clouds do or Silently Flowers resembles beauty” isn’t even remotely correct unless “Silently Flowers” is a proper noun, like the name of an estate, or “clouds” is a verb. That is, what befuddles or renders opaque action, or noiselessly blooms, resembles beauty. Or clouds could be a plural noun, and it could be “what (clouds do) OR (Silently Flowers)”; i.e., “what clouds do resembles beauty less than our breathing”, “what Silently Flowers resembles beauty less than our breathing”.

And that’s not even pondering whatever significance the capital letters have. Just think of the extra interpretations if each one implies a preceding full stop.

I shall refrain from cutting and pasting any more of his work (it’d be too hard to stop), but do yourself a favour and read some.

Oh, except for this bit from his introduction to New Poems, which reminded me very much of Warren Ellis. Maybe it was just the phrase “collective foetus”…

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.