Before I’d ever heard the names Kafka, Joyce, or Woolf, I happened upon the poems of E. E. Cummings. I was thirteen, in the depths of the early aughts internet, and there uncovered a new, transformative relation to language—a tool for blunt and oblique communication, melding ardor with sarcasm, a sly winking lampoon of verse’s gravity, paired with visual ferment—it could do so much!
I stole his sole novel, The Enormous Radio, a threadbare hardback edition based on the author’s time as a WWI ambulance driver and predating publication of his avant-garde poems, from my middle school library. It still resides on my bookshelf.
It’s obvious why this playful assault on semantics might appeal to someone in the pickle of puberty. Not to mention the brilliant implications an adolescent can draw from its penner’s surname. Yet it’s cannier still to regard the graceful authority he dedicated over four decades to the craft.
Cummings’s oeuvre expanded Dada, Cubism, Surrealism, and stream-of-consciousness. While contemporaries indulged in nihilistic dread, the poet never shied from sincerity, whimsy, and romance. Later work saw incorporation of the pastoral, and the 1950 collection Xaipe (pronounced “kay-eye-ree”) immortalized his unshakeable, mutable spirit.
Upon high school graduation, I submitted the following excerpt to accompany my senior yearbook photo:
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
And though I came to beat myself up with embarrassment in intervening years, boxed in by the haughty, forbidding milieu of 2010s Brooklyn, I’m old enough now to be touched by such schmaltz. Or maybe I’m young. I don’t know.
-David Fishkind