"God Pity Me Whom(God Distinctly Has)" 、 "Humanity I Love You" by E. E. Cummings

Poet Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on this day in 1894.

"God Pity Me Whom(God Distinctly Has)" by E. E. Cummings

god pity me whom(god distinctly has)
the weightless svelte drifting sexual feather
of your shall i say body?follows
truly through a dribbling moan of jazz

whose arched occasional stepped youth swallows
curvingly the keeness of my hips;
or,your first twitch of crisp boy flesh dips
my height in a firm fragile stinging weather,

(breathless with sharp necessary lips)kid

female cracksman of the nifty,ruffian-rogue,
laughing body with wise breasts half-grown,
lisping flesh quick to thread the fattish drone
of I Want a Doll,
wispish-agile feet with slid
steps parting the tousle of saxophonic brogue.

*

Ever since its first flowering, jazz has had a powerful influence on American poetry; this scintillating anthology offers a treasury of poems that are as varied and as vital as the music that inspired them. From the Harlem Renaissance to the beat movement, from the poets of the New York school to the contemporary poetry scene, the jazz aesthetic has been a compelling literary force—one that Jazz Poems makes palpable. We hear it in the poems of Langston Hughes, E. E. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, and Gwendolyn Brooks, and in those of Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Simic, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Mark Doty, William Matthews, and C. D. Wright. Here are poems that pay tribute to jazz’s great voices, and poems that throb with the vivid rhythm and energy of the jazz tradition, ranging in tone from mournful elegy to sheer celebration. READ more here: http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/195165/jazz-poems/

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Poet Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on this day in 1894.

"Humanity I Love You" by E. E. Cummings

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you

*

Cummings, in his radical experimentation with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, created a new kind of poetic expression. Because of his powerful work, he became a generation’s beloved heretic—at the time of his death he was one of the most widely read poets in the United States. Now, in this rich, illuminating biography, Susan Cheever traces the development of the poet and his work. She takes us from Cummings’s seemingly idyllic childhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, through his years at Harvard (rooming with Dos Passos, befriending Malcolm Cowley and Lincoln Kirstein). There, he devoured the poetry of Ezra Pound, whose radical verses lured the young writer away from the politeness of the traditional nature poem towards a more adventurous, sexually conscious form. We follow Cummings to Paris in 1917, and, finally, to Greenwich Village to be among other modernist poets of the day—Marianne Moore and Hart Crane, among them. E. E. Cummings is a revelation of the man and the poet, and a brilliant reassessment of the freighted path of his legacy. READ an excerpt here: http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/212479/e-e-cummings/

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