In high school, a nun named Sister Angele required each student in our junior honors English class to memorize a poem she had selected for us. My selection was e e cummings’s poem “i am a little church”. At first, I grumbled about the strange language – how was I supposed to memorize something that barely sounded like it made sense? But the more time I spent with the poem, the more enamored I became with the style. I eagerly looked for more poems by cummings, and I discovered treasures: poems whose syntax I needed to unlock but whose content moved me once I did.
It is hard for me to choose a favorite cummings poem. [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] is one of my favorite poetic declarations of love. And these lines in Humanity I Love You are some of the most true and most funny and most sad commentaries on human behavior:
Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down
But I will share a poem that I loved in high school and taught to middle school students for many years. And, now that I am much older, it holds different layers of meaning for me.
old age sticks
up Keep
Off
signs)&
youth yanks them
down(old
age
cries No
Tres)&(pas)
youth laughs
(sing
old age
scolds Forbid
den Stop
Must
n’t Don’t
&)youth goes
right on
gr
owing old
The poem addresses an issue that could seem clichéd: the generation gap, or the inability of a younger generation to accept the advice or platitudes of elders. But the last line takes the poem beyond cliché. It reminds us that all of life is a cycle, that perhaps we shouldn’t worry about whether our advice is heeded or not. One generation will quickly replace another, no matter how many stops or don’ts we hand down.
In terms of structure, the use of the parentheses is unique. In some places, the parentheses seem to be adornments, but in the syllabication of the word trespassing, the punctuation is used both as visual trick and to add layers of meaning. The last syllable sing, isolated after the word laughs, resonates differently as something else that the young do in contrast with the old.
If you haven’t read much cummings, I recommend that you pick up 95 Poems as a starting place.
SOME PROMPTS for you
Let cummings’s seemingly wild abandon with syntax and punctuation inspire you. Write a poem that breaks the rules of grammar and mechanics, but does so in a way that is purposeful.
Or, if you are too much the grammarian to do such things, write a poem that contrasts two common opposites and offers a revelation or a-ha moment at the end.