Product Description

Product Description
A new volume in the Liveright series of Cummingsreissues, offset from the authoritative Complete Poems1904-1962. The poems in Etcetera were discovered in threeCummings manuscript collections and selected from more than 350unpublished pieces. Many of the poems are from his early years and allconvey his freshness and youthful spirit, exhibiting his celebrationof love and delight in common natural phenomena. Etcetera was firstpublished by Liveright in 1983. This newly reissued edition ispublished in a uniform format with Is 5, Tulips & Chimneys, ViVa,XAIPE, and No Thanks. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

ee cummings is amazing
As a long time ee cummings fan, I found this book to be just as wonderful as the rest of his writing, although this one isn't as well known.If you can appreciate his artistic use of words, you will not be disapointed byetcetera. ... Read more

Product Description
The myth of E.E. Cummings stressed isolation, the difficulty of love, and the realities of death. This volume includes extracts from critical essays that examine important themes in Cummings' poetry. Studied works include "All in green went my love riding," "Memorabilia," "i sing of Olaf glad and big," "somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond," and "my father moved through dooms of love."

This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English, New York University Graduate School. History’s greatest poets are covered in one series with expert analysis by Harold Bloom and other critics. These texts offer a wealth of information on the poets and their works that are most commonly read in high schools, colleges, and universities. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

good old friends
Nice to have a copy of this book again; my old one was from the 1960s. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

A Man Of Means
Cummings is a wonderful poet and three cheers for C. Sawyer-Laucanno for attempting to give us a full-scale new reading of the complete works, while trying to clear a space so we can understand his complicated life a bit better.

I wound up seeing the life clearly, and noticing for the first time the extreme high reaches of class privilege that made Cummings' poetry possible.I suppose I had been reading this through the screen of Cummings' novel, THE ENORMOUS ROOM, with its bleak descriptions of prison poverty and deprivation, so without really thinking about it I just assumed that EE Cummings was sort of our American Genet, born of poverty, a hero of the underclass, an outsider artist who just scraped by, like Darger.Far from it, Sawyer-Laucanno reveals.Everything he did seems to have been paid for by generous friends or family, and even in the French jail he was able to buy cartons of cigarettes, razors, books, and fruit from the concierge, because he had a huge trust fund.

Later, during the 1920s when he was writing all his masterpieces, the discerning Scofield Thayer became his patron.Thayer was a complicated case; as editor of THE DIAL his taste helped usher in a new American modernism.He married a beautiful and refined heiress, Elaine, and when Cummings fathered her daughter through an adulterous union, he assumed paternity of little "Mopsy" in a an act of upper-class generosity.A few years later, he granted Elaine a divorce and she married Cummings, although only for two months.Thayer began a descent into madness that lasted until his death in 1982.He had apparently been gay the entire time and nurtured a secret passion for underage boys which got him in hot water from time to time, and perhaps he was in love with Cummings himself.Why not, everyone else was.Cummings must have had something, erotically speaking, for many women were drawn to him and not a few men.In any case we can see, bleakly, how spoiled and privileged Cummings was.No matter what harm he did to others, or to himself, someone would come along with a large checkbook and clean up after him.It's appalling the selfishness, and yet if great poems come in the wake of such self-love, what real harm and what real benefit?It's a stumper.

Sawyer-Laucanno argues that Cummings' play, HIM, is a major ignored work of the American theater.Such is his conviction that it fairly sweeps the reader into feeling the same way, or at any rate wanting to see a first rate production.My idea is that HIM might make a really good movie--by Lars Von Trier perhaps.I can see it on the screen of my imagination, thanks to Sawyer-Laucanno's persuasive, always elegant argumentation.

As for the reviewer in the Washington Post Book World, I honestly don't know what to make of someone whose idea of the three great American poets is Whitman, Frost and Cummings.What kind of mind comes up with that combo?It's like the boys who formed the "Troika" in the later episodes of BUFFY.

Blissful biography of much-loved poet
Before reading this great slab of a book, I had little idea of who E.E. Cummings was, besides knowing he had an unconventional attitude towards punctuation.Thankfully, Sawyer-Laucanno manages to shed much light on the poet and his work in a way which is both accessible to newcomers and meaningful to more seasoned Cummings enthusiasts.

In particular, I liked the way in which the author juggles so many competing demands. He had access to a wealth of archive material and Cummings had a long and eventful life.Yet S-L manages to give play to all aspects of Cummings' activities whilst maintaining the pace and flow of his narrative.

I especially appreciated the almost equal weight given to critiquing Cummings' work as opposed to describing his life.An analysis of how "Buffalo Bill's defunct" came into being, based on early drafts of the poem, gives a particularly rare and precious glimpse of how a fully-formed poem is grown from a few choice phrases.

Another dilemma which L-S addresses, is the fact that Cummings was an enthusiastic and successful painter.It would have been easy to overlook or underplay this aspect but here the paintings are seen as an integral part of Cummings' artistic achievement.

I spotted one or two faults.I don't think Dylan Thomas would relish being called an English poet - he was a Welsh one - and there is a misplaced bracket (horror!) on p.533.

I think E.E. Cummings would have appreciated the way this biography manages to find space for a number of small anecdotes aside from the great sweep of the life story.I loved the description of the humming birds bobbing goodbye before migrating south from Joy Farm.This was both heart-warming and highlighted Cummings' love of natural history.

Overall, I found "E.E. Cummings: A biography" to be absolutely compelling.At first daunted by its length I soon found myself regretting it was so soon coming to an end.Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno more than meets the challenge of enlightening us about Cummings' life.He is no mean story-teller and this work is a masterful achievement.

Bad Stuff
Accusing someone of plagiarism in public is always a difficult issues. In other words, you'd better be pretty damn sure before you say anything. That's why I was so surprised to see the recent review in Harpers claiming that this book was, for all practical purposes, ripped off from a previous Cummings biography (by Kennedy) which is still in print. I won't recap the entire thing here, just issues this review as a warning and suggest you read the May 2005 issue of Harpers.Sawyer-Laucanno, while he wouldn't exactly admit that he stole material from the oprevious book, he did admit that he couldn't explain how the similarities occured... and Sourcebooks also refused to take any responsibility. It's an interesting read, but my advice would be to just go with the original biography by Kennedy since he's the one who seesm to have done all the original research for both volumes.

Solid Biography
This new biography is the first based on complete access to Cummings's papers and also quotes extensively from his poetry in exploring links between his life and work.It is quite readable and makes a good case for the significance of Cummings's poetry without claiming too much.

Mostly words, but spacing and punctuation are unusual
I read poems by E. E. Cummings before I went to Harvard, and might consider him my favorite American poet if Richard Brautigan had not written so many great little novels that seen far more comic to me than any mere poem.Cummings has the breadth, though, to require some small print for the index of poems by first line on pages 602-606 of this book, which must be a couple hundred poems at 53 lines per page.The items in the usual index on pages 591-601 have 54 lines per page, but with many more capital letters and the two columns of text covering an extra quarter inch of the page, items in the index do not seem so tiny.31 of the 32 photographs are printed by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and the photo on the cover, taken by Manuel Komroff, was by permission of Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library.The pictures in black and white include a major abstract oil painting by Cummings in 1925 and numerous sketches.

The index does not attempt to capture every mention of each name in the book.The entries for Ernest Hemingway do not include page 389, on which two poems in NO THANKS are called "really nothing more than a swipe at Hemingway" playfully "provoked in part by Cumming's reading of Hemingway's celebration of bullfighting, DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON:

what does little Ernest croon
in his death at afternoon?
(kow dow r 2 bul retoinis
wus de woids uf lil Oinis ".

Author Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno also calls this "a parody of Longfellow's line in A Psalm of Life, `Dust thout art, to dust returnest.' "Modern versions of Genesis 3:19 have "you are dust, and to dust you shall return" for the familiar curse on Adam, but the King James version might have used a poetical thou, not thout.No doubt there are a few mistakes somewhere.I tried to find the verse with that line on the internet, and what Longfellow wrote was:

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
"Dust thou art, to dust returnest,"
Was not spoken of the soul.

There are 12 lines for Harvard entities in the index, between Harry Wadsworth Clubs and Anthony Haswell, of HASWELL'S MASSACHUSETTS SPY OR AMERICAN ORACLE OF LIBERTY fame.The Preface reveals that the author shares the anti-war feeling found in many of Cummings's most famous poems, and reports that "At one of the early [fall of 1969] California Moratoriums against the war I whipped up a crowd with `my old sweet etcetera,' `plato told / him,' and `the bigness of cannon / is skillful.'When I got to `i sing of Olaf glad and big' a number of young men at the gathering set their draft cards on fire."(p. xiv).People who have some copies of poems already will want to have them nearby while reading this book to remind themselves of all that the original said, especially about his aunt and Olaf.Cummings was forty-seven when World War Two took the United States by surprise and Cummings wrote in his notes, among his definitions of War, "when the angry Jehovah gets back His Own."(p. 441).This book offers translations into English of the phonetic poems written in "a parody of bigoted (probably drunken) speech" on pages 442-443 before putting the entire `plato told' poem on pages 443-444.

E. E. Cummings developed some unique spacing and punctuation techniques that are constantly quoted throughout the book.It is inspiring to read about so many people who admired what he did and supported his work, but he could also be highly critical of such friends.The English philosopher A. J. Ayer is only listed in the index under Morehouse, Marion, affair with A. J. (Freddie) Ayer, 414, 423-424.Back in June, 1937, things like that were starting to happen a lot in Europe, and modern readers shouldn't be as surprised as someone like E. E. Cummings's father, who had been an Instructor in Political Economy offering Harvard's first course in sociology, (p. 3), but then became an assistant minister at South Congregational Church when Cummings was about six, but lost his position in a church merger in 1925, and then became a director of the World Peace Foundation.(p. 284).People who are suspicious of pointy headed intellectuals who try to believe more than they read in the newspapers might not like this book, and people who watch TV all the time will find nothing in this book that is familiar, not to mention fair and balanced, but anyone who believes that an intellectual life can be the bedrock supporting future generations might find this book educational as well as enjoyable. ... Read more

Product Description
Reissued in an edition newly offset from the authoritative Complete Poems 1904-1962, edited by George James Firmage. E. E. Cummings, along with Pound, Eliot, and Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. He is recognized as the author of some of the most beautiful lyric poems written in the English language and also as one of the most inventive American poets of his time. Fresh and candid, by turns earthy, tender, defiant, and romantic, Cummings's poems celebrate the uniqueness of each individual, the need to protest the dehumanizing force of organizations, and the exuberant power of love. No Thanks was first published in 1935; although Cummings was by then in mid-career, he had still not achieved recognition, and the title refers ironically to publishers' rejections. No Thanks contains some of Cummings's most daring literary experiments, and it represents most fully his view of life-romantic individualism. The poems celebrate an openly felt response to the beauties of the natural world, and they give first place to love, especially sexual love, in all its manifestations. The volume includes such favorites as "sonnet entitled how to run the world)," "may I feel said he," "Jehovah buried. Satan dead," "be of love (a little)," and the now-famous grasshopper poem. Tulips & Chimneys and is 5 were reissued in 1996, XAIPE and ViVa in 1997. ... Read more

Product Description
An eye-opening selection of Cumming's moreavant-garde poetry and prose.As a poet, Cummings was a pioneer not only in linguistic and typographic inventions, but also in sound and concrete poetry. But his prose is no less experimental; he wrote memoirs, essays, and fiction that are constantly provocative and often radically experimental. To read the avant-garde Cummings is to read a writer who consistently broke with established norms, "never to rest and never to have: only to grow." To not read the avant-garde Cummings is to not read Cummings. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Excellent Source of Information
I bought this book as a reference book for a research paper on E.E.Cummings.It is not a biography yet has a lot of great information on his life and poetry.It is organized in sections for different types of his poetry.I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in E.E. Cummings!

Indeed another look at e e cummings
This collection gives an indispensible insight into E. E. Cummings' overall projects as a poet, helping a reader to understand his 'standard poetry' more fully.It is a smart collection of Cummings' most experimental and innovative works.A must-have for any reader of his poetry.

the poet who would not be refused.
E. E. Cummings is perhaps the most misunderstood poet of his generation.His verse has been decried and described as simplistic, sentimental, fatalistic, misanthropic, myopic, and just plain unapproachable, despite the fact that it has had such wide popular appeal.

No poet who has enjoyed such popularity as Cummings has been so largely ignored by the scholarly establishment.Professors scarcely mention his name, and many anthologies of 20th Century American verse simply choose not to include him, as though he were only a minor figure.In fact, there could be no statement more off the mark than one that dismisses this artist as a minor figure.If there is proof of this, Richard Kostelanetz has given it to us in this excellent compilation.

For anyone who is only vaguely familiar with E. E. Cummings, this book is a good place to begin to delve further into the mind, life, and work of a consummate artist and one-of-a-kind individual.To be truthful, the only knock against the book is that it doesn't give us enough of Cummings.But, to Kostelanetz' credit, we must acknowledge the wide and varied cross-section of work available to us here.

Here we find for the first time selections that would have been previously unavailable or largely unattainable for most readers.There is everything from poems to biography to theatre.Included are some of Cummings' letters, some of his criticisms, a ballet scenario, a film scenario, a bit from the non-lectures delivered when he was the Norton Professor at Harvard, an untitled novel, poems set to music, and much more.Hardly any aspect of Cummings' literary career goes untouched.

In addition, Kostelanetz includes small essays at the beginning of each section that are both cutting and insightful despite their brevity.In these essays, Kostelanetz comments on everything, from the fact that Cummings was an accomplished painter to the fact that Cummings was perhaps the most prolific sonnet writer of the past 100 years.Each little piece offered adds something to one's appreciation of the genius that is E. E. Cummings, even the miniscule note that betrays the convention of spelling the author's name with lower-case letters as something assigned to him by outside forces.

For those who are tired of the same old anthologies, tired of those books that won't take chances on publishing anything too far outside the mainstream, AnOther E. E. Cummings is a must have.This collection, by no means complete in itself, is nonetheless the last, necessary piece to anyone's Cummings puzzle.Indeed, no collection should be considered complete without it.

Amazing!
I was briefly introduced to e.e. Cummings in college and I loved his poems.I randomly picked this book up in a bookstore because it seemed fairly complete and interesting.It is.It has some background info. oncumming's and some hints on how to read him.The poems in this book areamazing!I would recomand this book to anyone who is fascinated with e.e.cummings. ... Read more

Product Description
XAIPE (Greek for "rejoice"), which first appeared in 1950, contains some of E. E. Cummings's finest work. Among many poems can be found "dying is fine)but Death," "so many selves(so many friends and gods," "when serpents bargain for the right to squirm," "no time ago," "I thank You God for most this amazing," and "now all the fingers of this tree(darling)have." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A comment about this edition
I love e.e. cummings' work.This is no exception.I don't want to review the content of this book, just a note on this edition.The newer edition from Liveright in paperback is probably much prettier, but if you're into retro 70's dustjackets (kelly green and orangy brown) and you'd like to read the poems the way they looked (because with cummings in particular, the look of the poem IS important) fresh out of the typewriter, this edition is for you.

Xaipe: poetry for both eye and ear
In an afterword to "Xaipe," the book of poems by E.E. Cummings, George James Firmage notes that the title is derived from a Greek word whose simplest transliteration is "khi-ra" (with accent on the first syllable). Firmage further notes that the book was published by Oxford in 1950.

Xaipe is a curious collection of sequentially numbered poems. Many of the poems are very visually oriented; Cummings plays with with word division, punctuation, and the arrangement of words on the page. He often warps and reshapes language like a sculptor using clay; reading some of these poems is like deciphering a series of strange hieroglyphics.

Much of the book is also ear-oriented. Cummings demonstrates his mastery of rhyme, meter, alliteration, and repetition. He even includes a number of sonnets; sonnets, that is, as channeled through his experimental sensibility.

The tone of the book varies: cynical, satiric, revelatory, even tender. Cummings often uses seemingly invented words: "livingest" (from poem #1); "unteach" (#5); "fingeryhands," "whying" (#14); etc.One of my favorite poems is #22, a sonnet that begins "when serpents bargain for the right to squirm."

But is there an overall theme to "Xaipe"? I'll leave that to each reader to answer. But I sensed in the book as a whole a distrust of officialdom and a wariness of war, and a sense of skepticism about humanity; I felt at times that Cummings was resisting the rationality and formality of language and seeking a pure experience and attentiveness that actually transcends the written or spoken word.

"Xaipe" feels like a prolonged experiment, and while the experiment may not be wholly successful, it is nonetheless marked by flashes of genius. Definitely a volume of poetry worth exploring. For a stimulating companion text, try something by the philosopher J. Krishnamurti. ... Read more

Product Description
ViVa is the third book of Cummings's poetry to be reissued in editions newly offset from the authoritative Complete Poems 1904-1962, edited by George James Firmage. E. E. Cummings, along with Pound, Eliot, and Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. He is recognized as the author of some of the most beautiful lyric poems written in the English language and also as one of the most inventive American poets of his time. Fresh and candid, by turns earthy, tender, defiant, and romantic, Cummings's poems celebrate the uniqueness of each individual, the need to protest the dehumanizing force of organizations, and the exuberant power of love. The poems in the Complete Poems 1904-1962, and in the individual poetry volumes that are part of it, are the most complete and textually accurate editions of Cummings's work ever issued. The editor has gone back to the poet's original manuscripts to ensure the absolute accuracy of the transcriptions, including the spatial arrangement of the typography, which now conforms as precisely as possible to Cummings's very specific intentions. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A stimulating volume from a sculptor of words
"ViVa," by E.E. Cummings, is a collection of 70 poems numbered with Roman numerals.The afterword by George James Firmage notes that an earlier edition of the book (one riddled with errors) was published back in 1931.

"ViVa" shows Cummings to be one of the most distinctive and inventive poets in the English language.He uses a lot of eye-catching, and apparently made-up, words: "fasterishly," "infrafairy," "uneyes," "firsting," "nonglance," etc.In many of his poems he experiments with punctuation, word structure, word order, and capitalization in startling ways--he's like a sculptor playfully molding the English language into strange new shapes.

But I must admit that I found some of his poems too experimental--to the point of incomprehensibility.Still, even his most impenetrable poems are stimulating in odd ways.Many poems imitate people's speech; some raise theological questions.There is a sadness to much of the book in the form of poems that touch on the despair, loneliness, and dislocation of modern life.But these are balanced by some truly striking and beautiful love poems.There is also a satirical element present in the book.

When Cummings' experiments succeed, he really dazzles; consider poem XXXVIII, where the words seem to really dance and crackle across the page.His imagery at its best is fresh and invigorating."ViVa" is not an easy read, but it's a remarkable work from a true original.

Somewhere I have Never Travelled,but gladly beyond....
While I was not familiar with many of the works of e.e.cummings, I heard apoem used in a scene in the movie"Hannah and Her Sisters". Abeautifully touching love poem"Somewhere I have never travelled".It affected me so deeply I had to find out who wrote this piece.Iresearched it and found it in Viva. This collection by e.e.cummings is sointensely beautiful,complex and challenging,you may think your'e in overyour head. It is not for just its lyrical complexity but even the way it istyped it is a puzzle worthy to piece together and watch its beautyunfoldin your hands.If you love poetry on levels beyond the rhyme this is thereason to get Viva. Viva la difference!Exquisitely done. ... Read more

Product Description
Focusing largely on the controversial website Wikipedia, the author explores the challenges confronting teachers of college writing in the increasingly electronic and networked writing environments their students use every day. Rather than praising or condemning that site for its role as an encyclopedia, Cummings instead sees it as a site for online collaboration between writers and a way to garner audience for student writing.

Applying an understanding of Commons-Based Peer Production theory, as developed by Yochai Benkler, this text is arranged around the following propositions:

-- Commons-Based Peer Production is a novel economic phenomenon which informs our current teaching model and describes a method for making sense of future electronic developments.

-- College writers are motivated to do their best work when they write for an authentic audience, external to the class.

-- Writing for a networked knowledge community invites students to participate in making knowledge, rather than only consuming it.

-- A plan for integrating networked writing for an external audience helps students understand the transition from high school to college writing.

-- Allowing students to review and self-select points of entry into electronic discourse fosters "laziness," or a new work dynamic where writers seek to better understand their own creativity in terms of a project's demands.

Lazy Virtues offers networked writing assignments to foster development of student writers by exposing them to the demands of professional audiences, asking them to identify and assess their own creative impulses in terms of a project's needs, and removing the writing teacher from the role of sole audience. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Love the concept -- "your writing class may never be the same"!
The author, Robert Cummings, Director of First year Composition at Columbus State University, has come up with an imaginative and truly creative way to reach the computer-savvy Freshman students we see in our university classrooms today. Instead of viewing the Wikipedia as an enemy of academic research, he embraces it. Thinking about the comments of a football coach colleague who advised, "Train your players for the environment in which they will perform," Cummings came up with the idea of having his students write and submit text for Wikipedia.

Stressing that the standard way of teaching Freshman writing classes -- by assigning readings and essays from the standard texts -- reflects a disconnect between the "students' future writing lives" and the reality they'll face in their careers, Cummings illustrates how he uses the Wikipedia as a teaching tool that provides his students with a real-world "genuine audience."

English faculty and reference librarians will be very interested in Cummings' rationale for using Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) in the Freshman English classroom, and consider the practical outline and guide he offers to accomplish his real-world application. After considering his sample Wiki writing assignment of "Writing About Film in Public Spaces," and perhaps trying the idea for oneself, readers can then determine for themselves if they agree with his statement that: "There's no guarantee your writers will solve global warming, but your writing class will never be the same."

Highly recommended for college and university libraries and faculty seeking to make their Freshman classes more lively and practical.

R. Neil Scott
Middle Tennessee State University ... Read more

Product Description
Four months after Cummings's death in September 1962, his widow, the photographer Marion Morehouse, collected the typescripts of 29 new poems. These poems, as well as uncollected poems published only in periodicals up to that time, make up 73 Poems. This is the final volume in Liveright's reissue of Cummings's individual volumes of poetry, with texts and settings based on E. E. Cummings: The Complete Poems 1904-1962. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

1
if poetry were fun
and not crushed
(english classes say
desks should be small
and never written on)
and not cramped
by rules or meter
or other things you can
(feel)
only talk about

if poems were made
(only as cups are made
to hold water and wine)
only to hold images
and feelings and
the feeling that
things will only end
(when they should)

and if you were meant
to read these
and they
--rustle; quiet; rustle--
to read you

then you
would find this book
(this incomparably beautiful
little book)
and you would a
find a tree
(together)
and you would sit down
beneath it
and lock eyes
and be happy

Not up to his own standard.
This collection utterly brilliant in many ways, but the poems do not contain the same multi-toned language or endless imagery of so many of his earlier ones, or the satirical tone of others.
He does however, explore a wider range of subjects and sentiments.
All in all, it certainly outdoes the later work of authors like Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who is actually still alive), Allen Ginsberg, and WIlliam Wordsworth. ... Read more