The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions

Two Modernists & A Beat

Two Modernists & A Beat Cummings, Zukofsky, and Ginsberg 1. A Poem By E.E. Cummings A friend’s horrified reaction to this poem—“Is this a poem?”—made me want to write about it. The poem appeared in E.E. Cummings’ book, 95 Poems (1958). l(a le af fa ll s) one l iness Cummings insists, rightly, that what we encounter in a text is not “words”—the products of our breaths and bodies—but “letters.” (“Language” is something you do with your “langue,” your tongue; reading is something you do with your eyes.) The primary verbal components of this poem are the words “loneliness” and “a leaf falls,” but Cummings has rearranged the letters of these words so that new patterns emerge. What he has produced is a formal poem, but its formality is an arrangement of letters rather than words. The poem has nine lines: a single line is followed by a space and then by three lines throughout: one line, three lines, one line, three lines, one line. It takes a moment to see the two statements. “A leaf falls” is within the parenthesis; “loneliness” is outside the parenthesis. Because Cummings has 39 40 The Dancer and the Dance rearranged the spacing of these words, he can find other words within them. “One” appears in “loneliness,” for example. The French words “la” and “le” appear in the opening lines. “Af” from “leaf” and “fa” from “falls” are inverted mirrors of one another. It is as if Cummings finds the beginning of the word “falls”—fa—within the word “leaf”—af. “One” is also important. On the typewriter—the instrument Cummings used to produce his poems—an l (first letter of the word “loneliness”) and a 1 (the numeral) are the same symbol. The “one” who is lonely is both “one” and “1.” The poem is a sort of haiku—it’s as if the ideogram for the word “loneliness” were a falling leaf. Indeed, the poem’s very shape suggests the downward falling of a leaf. Further: the French words “la” and “le”—words meaning, respectively, “the” (feminine) and “the” (masculine)—point to the poem’s central problem: male and female are separated from one another, a fact which gives rise to “loneliness.” Line five, the very center of the nine-line poem, has “ll”: a “one” (1) and a “one” next to one another—which is what the poem longs for.The two l’s are letters in the word “falls” but they are also both letters in the word “loneliness”; in “loneliness,” however, the letters are widely separated from each other. Cummings’ little poem—the opening of the volume in which it originally appeared—seems to me a brilliant and dazzling display of new possibilities of text even as it names one of the oldest of human problems: loneliness. (The “title” of the poem is the numeral “1”: it is the first of the “95 Poems.”) Loneliness: You can feel it in the fall of a leaf, in the disconnection of an isolated part from the whole in which it once functioned—which, incidentally, is also a description of Cummings’ technique: isolated letters are separated off from the words of which they were part—and so they make new words. Finally, Cummings allows us to return them to what they originally were: a leaf falls; loneliness. Further: Isn’t a page—the thing on which the poem manifests—also a “leaf”? In a very short space, Cummings forces us to attend to what we are doing right now: reading. And he insists that reading is an isolating experience: it doesn’t involve another person, only letters, text. Isn’t reading itself therefore a mode of loneliness? To do it we have to be “by ourselves”—alone. Reading allows us to contact another—in this case E.E. Cummings—but it is not the same kind of contact we would have if Cummings were standing before us in living presence speaking his poem. Reading gives us letters, not words. As author, Cummings is absent, not there—and he knows it: his little poem is an acknowledgement of the distance between writer and reader, while at the same time, of course, it brings writer and reader together. A leaf falls. We turn the page. Loneliness. 2. Louis Zukofsky: A Poet Worth Fighting For A Review Of Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems, Edited By Charles Bernstein (The...