E.E. Cummings*

E.E. Cummings (1894—1962) is considered one of the most important poets of the 20th century. Like my own grandfather, he served in the ambulance corps during WWI. His first collection Tulips and Chimneys appeared in 1923. James Dickey once wrote, "I think that Cummings is a daringly original poet, with more vitality and more sheer, uncompromising talent than any other living American writer."

Although Cummings is known particularly for his innovation, and is associated with modernism, his divergences are primarily built upon traditional poetic structures. His variations often consist of using words in unexpected ways — making it seem like he’s used the wrong word or placed it in the wrong part of the sentence. By doing so he elicits sudden stops and reassessments of language and meaning for the reader.

Rushworth M. Kidder wrote in The Christian Science Monitor:
----“His poetry, in many ways, is the chart of his search for a
----redeemer — for something that would save a world made ugly
----by the two world wars through which he lived, and made sordid
----by the materialism that spawned them. In his early years he
----sought salvation in love poetry. As he progressed he came to
----seek it more and more in a sense of deity, in a supreme source
----of goodness that appears in his poetry as everything from a
----vague notion of nature's beneficence to a vision of something
----very like the Christian's God.”

The following poem — which first appeared in The Atlantic in December 1956 — is clearly a sonnet, although it uses minimal rhyme.

Christmas Poem

from spiraling ecstatically this
proud nowhere of earth’s most prodigious night
blossoms a newborn babe: around him, eyes
— gifted with every keener appetite
than mere unmiracle can quite appease—
humbly in their imagined bodies kneel
(over time space doom dream while floats the whole
perhapsless mystery of paradise)
mind without soul may blast some universe
to might have been, and stop ten thousand stars
but not one heartbeat of this child; nor shall
even prevail a million questionings
against the silence of his mother’s smile—
— whose only secret all creation sings

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about E.E. Cummings: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Bruce Beasley

Bruce Beasley is the author of ten poetry collections, and has won several awards, including from University of Georgia Press, and Ohio State University Press. His books include The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems (2007, University of Washington Press), and his new collection Prayershreds (2023, Orison Books). In 1996 Charles Wright selected his book Summer Mystagogia to receive the Colorado Prize for Poetry.

Prayersheds is a fascinating collection, woven both from Beasley’s obsession with words, and our attempts at communication through words that we call prayer. His brain seems to continually be in a musical whirl of homonyms, homophones, etymologies, and nonce words combining familiar syllables for greater precision of meaning. Kathleen Norris insightfully compares his playfulness to that of E.E. Cummings. His word-wrestling doesn’t seem to be intended to distance himself from the reader, since many of the poems are quite accessible, however the poems sometimes take a path that require us to make our paradigm of what a poem should be more flexible. Rather than a book of prayer poems, this is more a book of poems about prayer.

The following poem first appeared as “The Responsive Amens” in the journal Subtropics, and it is from Prayershreds.

Verily

------------I

Shut your eyes―we were taught
in the Children’s Sermon
on how to pray―
shut your eyes tight until
you hear the pastor say Amen

but sometimes when I forgot to listen

for that end-signal word, sleep and prayer
would indistinguish themselves

------------II

Mandatory postrequisite
of creed
prerequisite for exit Amen

Vocally italicized Yes

that compelled and terminal
assent

It means Verily, so be it, decidedly it’s true,
means Here is where we go
back to normal-talk
We make it
mean

Please Lord let it end make it
mean Oh God
would would would
that it were so

------------III

To my body I will be as the
amen
is to the flesh’s
Let us pray Let us pray Let us pray

------------IV

Every amen
scissors the traced
outline of the prayer, ripping
the cut-out space of what we say to God

from the scrapped
silver silk of all we’d never say

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Salvatore Quasimodo

Salvatore Quasimodo (1901—1968) is an Italian poet of Sicilian heritage. In the late 1930s he dedicated himself entirely to writing, and although he was opposed to fascism he did not participate in the resistance to the German occupation during WWII. One of his major projects during this time was a translation of the Gospel of John. In 1945 he became a member of the Italian Communist Party.

The range of his translation work is broad, including Greek Tragedies, Shakespearian plays, and the 20th century poetry of E.E. Cummings and Pablo Neruda. His own poetry became increasingly influential. In the 1950s he received many awards, including the 1959 Nobel Prize in Literature. Toward the end of his life he travelled through Europe and to the United States for readings and lectures.

The following poems were translated by Jack Bevan

Day Stoops

You find me forsaken, Lord,
in your day
and have no grace
locked from all light.

Without you I go in dread,
lost road of love,
and have no grace,
fearful even to confess,
so my wishes are barren.

I have loved you, fought you;
day stoops
and I gather shades from the skies;
how sad my heart
of flesh.

Amen
For Sunday in Albis

You have not betrayed me, Lord:
I am the first-born
of every grief.

This post was suggested by my friend Burl Horniachek.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

John Wheelwright

John Wheelwright (1897—1940) is the author of three poetry collections. He was born into an elite Boston family. After his father had a mental breakdown, and committed suicide in 1912, Wheelwright converted from the traditional Unitarianism of his family, to become an Anglican. During his years at Harvard, however, he found himself clashing with church dogma, particularly in his socialism. In his activism, he showed sympathy for Marxism and Trotsky. Faith in Christ is an important theme throughout his poetry, such as in a series of poems about Thomas.

He made close connections with some major American poets of his day, such as E.E. Cummings whom he knew at Harvard. One of Wheelwright's best-known poems is "Fish Food" — an elegy at the death of his friend Hart Crane, who drowned himself by jumping off a steamship in the Gulf of Mexico.

At age 43 John Wheelwright was killed by a drunk driver. His Selected Poems were published in 1943, and his Collected Poems (New Directions) in 1972.

On a Rococo Crucifix

Guarded by bursts of glory, golden rays, —
Christ, when I see thee hanging there alone
In ivory upon an ebon throne;
Like Pan, pard-girded, chapleted with bays;
I kiss thy mouth, I see thee in a haze,
But not of tears, of heartbreak there is none ...
Is it, oh, Sufferer, my heart is stone?
Am I, in truth, the Judas who betrays?

To hang in shame above a gory knoll,
To die of scorn upon a splintered pole, —
This was not beautiful, I know, for thee ...
Would I have whispered upon Calvary,
"An interesting silhouette, there, see!"
While God groaned in the dark night of his soul?

Seed Pods

Where the small heads of violets
are shrunk to smaller skulls,
in meadows where the mind forgets
its bull fights and its bulls;
the dust of violet or rose
relinquishes its scent
and carries with it where it blows
a lessening remnant
of heresies in equipoise
and balanced argument
with which the mind would have refleshed
the flower's skeleton,
but that it found itself enmeshed
in the web of oblivion.
Therefore, when Gabriel sound the horn
and dust rise through the ground,
our flesh shall turn, on our last morn
fleshless as the horn's sound.

Thanks to Burl Horniachek for recommending this and other poets for Kingdom Poets!

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

E.E. Cummings

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) was the son of a Congregationalist minister. Although he became quite critical of those involved in organized religion, such as in his poem “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls”, his father’s influence on him was significant. A major poetic influence was Ezra Pound.

One poem of a spiritual encounter begins:
------------------------no time ago
------------------------or else a life
------------------------walking in the dark
------------------------i met christ

“Cummings was a scoffer in his youth, then more and more a Christian,” said Malcolm Cowley in Yale Review; “...he believes in the resurrection of the flesh.” In his early poetry it seems that his most important topics were love and sex — in his later poetry he is focussing on love and God. In his journals he frequently calls out to “le bon Dieu” — often praying for inspiration. Cummings himself is quoted as saying, “As I grow older, I tend towards piety.”

He is best known for the visual innovations in his poetry, such as spelling “I” with a lower case “i” — and for defying other language conventions, such as using verbs for nouns, or dislocating words from their normal place within a sentence. A good example of this is the word “most” in the first line of the following sonnet.

i thank You God for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any - lifted from the no
of all nothing - human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about E.E. Cummings: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca