The Voice of the Poet: e.e. cummings

The Voice of the Poet

by E.E. Cummings

Featuring rare archival recordings of the featured poet reading his own work! Each program in Random House Audio Voices' exclusive THE VOICE OF THE POET series is accompanied by a book containing the text of the poems and a commentary by J.D. McClatchy.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Audio CD

First published March 29, 2005

About the author

Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School.

He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.

In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.

After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.

In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including "Buffalo Bill ’s.” Serving as Cummings’ debut to a wider American audience, these “experiments” foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years.

In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.

The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence.”

During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.

At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.

source: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/e-...

Reviews

[Jonathan Tennis · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Voice of the Poet series is a neat way to hear a poet read their own work. For a number of the influential poets of the last century, this is the only way to hear the emphasis as they intended it. This is the first of the series that I listened to / read. There is an accompanying book so you can follow along if you choose.

I gave this book / audiobook combo 3 stars because it was enjoyable but much of what I have read of E.E. Cummings just simply doesn't resonate with me.

[Peggy Rowland · Rating 4 out of 5]

55 years ago, e. e. cummings was my poetry wake up call. A linguistic rebel! Who knew this was possible. I was 10, small Midwestern town and stumbled across his poetry at the library. Now I’m 65, and heard his voice reading his poems to me. So memorable.

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 3 out of 5]

jake hates
all the girls(the
shy ones,the bold
ones,the meek
proud sloppy sleek)
all except the cold
ones

paul scorns all
the girls(the
bright ones,the dim
ones;the slim
plump tiny tall)
all except the
dull ones

gus loves all the
girls(the
warped ones,the lamed
ones;the mad
moronic maimed)
all except
the dead ones

mike likes all the girls
(the
fat ones,the lean
ones;the mean
kind dirty clean)
all
except the green ones

That was my favorite poem on this CD because it brought to mind Shel Silverstein's fun poetry. (Good Reads forces everything to the left margin, so the word placement is incorrect.)
A great line from another poem, as timely as ever:

a politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man

And this one:

listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

Much of e.e. cummings's work makes no sense to me, although his later poems are sometimes more graspable. I do like his playful use of word and letter placement and random punctuation. This CD comes with a booklet so you can read along and see how he placed things.
Many years ago I had one of those magnetic refrigerator poetry sets. You could just grab words you liked and move them around until you liked your "poem." A lot of cummings's poems remind me of the long ago fridge creations my friends and I used to make after a few margaritas. For example, we might have come up with this if ol' e.e. hadn't beat us to it:

stride after glide massacre monday did
more) ask a lifelump buried by the star
nicked ends next among broken odds of yes
terday's tomorrow (than today can guess

See what I mean?

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had no idea a recording of E.E. reading his work even existed, so I was super excited to borrow this from my local library. I took a while to read through the booklet of poems first (cus that's how I like doing it), but afterwards, hearing Cummings read his own work, and being able to mentally compare it to how I ended up understanding a poem, was a real treat.
There's a whole series of The Voice of the Poet. I'll probably borrow Sylvia Plath's next.

Support your local library!

[Donna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I chose the audio figuring listening to the author's cadence and feeling would enhance the poetry. Oh my it did not!! He had a most interesting dramatic way of vocally intertrepreting his work. Some of it was amusing, but some of it was difficult to listen to.

It was worth a try.