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ohclaire's review
2.0
the good: love poems, interesting use of shape
the bad: literally everything else. also all of the poems i enjoyed were towards the end :/
the bad: literally everything else. also all of the poems i enjoyed were towards the end :/
rynstagram's review
2.0
There are some great lines and phrases but very few full poems that I liked.
Nuggets (b/c I annotated but didn't make notes):
from the foreword: "Like all obsessions, the Making obsession has disadvantages; for instance, my only interest in making money would be to make it. Fortunately, however, I should prefer to make almost anything else, including locomotives and roses. It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my 'poems' are competing." From ONE, I. "Five Americans": II. Mame: "(i, seeing, ceased to breathe)" III. Gert: "joggle i think will do it although the glad / monosyllable jounce possibly can tell / better how the balloons move..."
From ONE, IV: "things are going rather kaka / over there, over there. / yet we scarcely fare much better--" From ONE, VI: basically Jesse's Girl, but e.e. cummings style ("Jimmie's got a goil..." ONE, XIX: "this young question mark man // question mark / who suffers from / indigestion question / mark is a remarkably / charming person // personally they tell // me as for me / i only knows that / as far as / his picture goes // he's a wet dream // by Cézanne" from ONE XXI: "...outside it was New / York and beautifully snowing. // Inside snug and evil." ONE, XXV: "oDE": could be about Carol (old ppl) from ONE, XXXVII: "...and lest // punished bottoms interrupt philosophy" LOL from ONE, XXXVIII: "Thumbprints of an angel named Frederick found / on a lightning-rod, Boston, Mass." "Meanwhile the tea regressed."
from ONE, XXXIX: "since the thing perhaps is / to eat flowers and not to be afraid." from ONE, XL: "flittercrumbs,fluttercrumbs" from THREE, III: "...mysterious witty hatless" from THREE, VIII: "they are building a house down there by the sea,in the / afternoon." "(here the absurd I ... i am altogether foolish"
from FOUR, V: "in spite of everything / which breathes and moves, since Doom / (with white longest hands / neatening each crease) / will smooth entirely our minds // --before leaving my room / i turn..." from FOUR, VI: "....collide // oncemorewiththeimaginable,love,andeatsunlight(do you believe it? i begin to and that doesn't matter)..." "...we were / two alert lice in the blond hair of nothing"
from FOUR, VII: "wholly to be a fool / while Spring is in the world // my blood approves, / and kisses are a better fate / than wisdom / lady i swear by all flowers..." "for life's not a paragraph // And death i think is no parenthesis"
FOUR, IX: "supposing i dreamed this) / only imagine, when day has thrilled / you are a house around which / i am a wind-- // your walls will not reckon how / strangely my life is curved / since the best he can do / is to peer through windows, unobserved // --listen, for (out of all / things) dream is noone's fool; / if this wind who i am prowls / carefully around this house of you // love being such, or such, / the normal corners of your heart / will never guess how much / my wonderful jealousy is dark // if light should flower: / or laughing sparkle from / the shut house (around and around / which a poor wind will roam" FOUR, XI: "because / you go away i give roses who / will advise even yourself, lady / in the most certainly (of what we / everywhere do not touch) deep / things; / remembering ever so / tinily these, your crisp / eyes shall contain new faeries // (and if your slim lips are amused, no wisest // painter of fragile / Marys will understand / how smiling may be made as / skillfully.) But carry / also, with that indolent and with this flower wholly whom you do / not ever fear, / me in your heart // softly; not all / but the beginning // of mySelf" **FOUR, XIII: "Nobody wears a yellow / flower in his buttonhole / he is altogether a queer fellow / as young as he is old // when autumn comes, / who twiddles his white thumbs / and frisks down the boulevards // without his coat and hat // --(and i wonder just why that / should please him or i wonder what he does) // and why (at the bottom of this trunk, / under some dirty collars) only a / moment / (or / was it perhaps a year) ago i found staring // me in the face a dead yellow small rose" from Four, XV: "...(and who // does not ask for more than / just enough dreams to / live on)" from Five, I: "And send life out of me and the night / absolutely into me..." Five, II: "touching you i say (it being Spring / and night) 'let us go a very little beyond / the last road--there's something to be found' // and smiling you answer 'everything / turns into something else, and slips away.... / (these leaves are Thingish with moondrool / and i'm ever so very little afraid') / i say / 'along this particular road the moon if you'll / notice follows us like a big yellow dog. You // don't believe? look back. (Along the sand / behind us, a big yellow dog that's....now it's red / a big red dog that may be owned by who / knows) / only turn a little your. so. And // there's the moon,there is something faithful and mad'"
epicpinkfluffyunicorn's review
challenging
fast-paced
4.75
ion remember much ab it but the first poem was so good. cummings is jsjt so good man
clairemcnerney's review
2.0
the good: love poems, interesting use of shape
the bad: literally everything else. also all of the poems i enjoyed were towards the end :/
the bad: literally everything else. also all of the poems i enjoyed were towards the end :/
ladymedievalist1's review
Love cummings' foreword:
"At least my theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. 'Would you hit a woman with a child?--No, I'd hit her with a brick." Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement."
And finally,
"Ineluctable preoccupation with The Verb gives a poet one priceless advantage: whereas nonmakers must content themselves with the merely undesirable fact that two times two is four, he rejoices in a purely irresistible truth (to be found, in abbreviated costume, upon the title page of the present volume)."
"At least my theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. 'Would you hit a woman with a child?--No, I'd hit her with a brick." Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement."
And finally,
"Ineluctable preoccupation with The Verb gives a poet one priceless advantage: whereas nonmakers must content themselves with the merely undesirable fact that two times two is four, he rejoices in a purely irresistible truth (to be found, in abbreviated costume, upon the title page of the present volume)."
darwin8u's review
5.0
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
- Cummings, Is 5
Cummings 88 poems feel rough
stitched:-:stretched like Guernica
colored by Chagall -- 5new moons
blue hooked ¿and? baitedborn to
electric days & postWar night --
mares harnessed to wet dreams
of hopebithard & starssewed
tight
(O visions lost from EE's herds
sounds&other than;this his iamb's words
And death i think is no parenthesis
- Cummings, Is 5
Cummings 88 poems feel rough
stitched:-:stretched like Guernica
colored by Chagall -- 5new moons
blue hooked ¿and? baitedborn to
electric days & postWar night --
mares harnessed to wet dreams
of hopebithard & starssewed
tight
(O visions lost from EE's herds
sounds&other than;this his iamb's words
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