by cummings2 » Sat Feb 03, 2007 10:47 pm
Ah! the master eec. There is some debate whether or not his handwriting has been misread and that at one point he signed E.E.C. but... that's little trivia stuff comapred to the big picture.
You are absolutely right Marc his work's romance, longing and nostalgia hasn't quite been suficiently recognized, yet when one reads his work it [i:9bc9081d91]is[/i:9bc9081d91] very moving.
There are few good sources of eec studies. Even though his work has been analysed and counter-analyzed all the way from scholars to aficionados my personal opinion is that most of the intelligentsia on the subject obscures a lot of what you have found already in his work without shedding much light on anything else, for that is that I believe the best way of approaching eec (Mallarme, Pound, Huidobro et. al.) is to read with spacial awareness prior to reading any interpretaton of the text. The poems are meant to force the reader into reading and extracting from "the Code" a message that by the very form in which it was delivered it's both visual (spatial) and ephemeral (related to both individual and time)
[url=http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cummings/Landles10.html]This article[/url] found in the Modern American Poetry section hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is actually quite good in it's simple approach to eec while not becoming too ambitious and therefore either ambiguous or confusing. Instead it focuses it case of study on two poems, one of which, BTW is a favorite of mine. In general their section on Edward Estlin is quite good and several poems are "worked on": [url=http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cummings/cummings.htm]MAPS on UIUC[/url]
Book wise I think "The Magic maker" and "EEC the Art and his poetry" are the better ones. I have found much more "insight" from reading his little book called "i: six non-lectures"
The thing for me, is that ee was a master at bringing language to a crisis (along with Pound and Mallarme) in a line of poetics that has as a source Vicente Huidobro's "Altazor", at least this is what I've argued before and what no less than three Nobel prize winners have argued in various writings. However, one of the beauties of ee' work -as I see it- is that along with the usage of syntax and spacial manipulaton he is sufficiently sensitive and masterful of both painting and language where he restores language in a visual form that manifests once we decipher the code of his poems. This is where his genius is unmatched.
I think that in the book you got you find:
"Somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience..."
-One of my many favorites of his.
Great stuff Marcus.
-BTW, that ad is a crackup :lol: