More thoughts on poetry for this National Poetry Month:
in Just
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
That poem has introduced many a child to the fun of free verse, where the words run unleashed, punctuation runs amok, and the imagination follows. And what is there not to love about words such as mudluscious?
Slate offers an appreciative essay on E.E. Cummings by poet Billy Collins:
In 1957, on television's Nitebeat, Mike Wallace asked William Carlos Williams if he thought that E.E. Cummings' poem "(im)c-a-t(mo) / b,i;l: e" was really a poem. (Television was different back then.) Williams said no. Maybe the question was too blunt; maybe the poet considered this print ideogram of a motionless cat too juvenile. But if William Carlos Williams, himself a leading experimental poet of the time, was not able to recognize that outburst of phonemes and punctuation marks as poetry, what hope was there for the average readers of the time—"mostpeople," as Cummings liked to call them—not to mention all the folks residing in Televisionland?
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