News, Notes, and Correspondence

• December 24-27, 1999 — Mike Webster sent us a tape of British old-time folk musician Martin Carthy's setting of "All in green went my love riding," and of David Dzubay's settings of seven Cummings poems for soprano and 6 instruments. Dzubay is Associate Professor of Music at Indiana University.

• On August 7, 2000, Maryette Charlton sent us a copy of the Whitney Museum of American Art Calendar containing a lovely photo by Edward Steichen of Marion Morehouse modeling a white fur-trimmed wrap from Vogue, April 27, 1929.

• On September 3, 2000, John Ordeman sent us the following quote from a review: "Incapable of true poetical originality, [the poet] had the cleverness to invent a literary trick, and the shrewdness to stick to it." Comments John, "The poet referred to was not Cummings but Walt Whitman. It's from an 1875 issue of Contemporary Review."

• Poet William Jay Smith was one of the speakers at a memorial tribute to Karl Shapiro (19 13-2000), September 14, 2000, at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in NYC.

• Virginia Spencer Carr gave a talk on Paul Bowles at the University of Delaware Library, October 10, 2000, on the occasion of the acquisition of Bowles's papers and manuscripts.

• Someone on the on-line auction site EBay with the e-mail address of jtll@midatlantic.net (6131), offered for sale a matted print portrait of a person identified as Cummings in a cowboy hat and holding a cigarette, ostensibly as he appeared in 1920. Sale apparently ended November 20, 2000. Those of us who knew the poet cannot recognize the likeness, nor is what is legible as his signature anything like Cummings' actual signature. To further compound the mystery, Michael Webster reports that this portrait was reproduced in a 1993 "Literary Companion Engagement Calendar" issued by the Library of Congress. What Friedman has taken for a signature is actually a notation in a later hand: "Cummings No. 2."
  

• In the Fall of 2000 Thierry Gillyboeuf published his bilingual edition of 50 Poèmes, Le Taillis Pré, Belgium, with an Introduction and Notes. He kindly dedicated this volume to your editor. His translation of 73 Poems is scheduled for June 2001. He is also working with Jacques Demarcq on i: six nonlectures, and with Demarcq and Isabelle Alfandary on EIMI. [end page 203]

• On March 2, 2001, Cecily Miller, Director of the Forest Hills Educational Trust in Boston, e-mailed us as follows:
 
I have just started working at the Forest Hills Educational Trust in Boston. Our mission is to develop public programs exploring the unique environment, art and history of Forest Hills Cemetery, one of the original garden cemeteries in New England. ee cummings (sic!) is buried here, and I would like to develop an afternoon program celebrating his life and his accomplishments. I was wondering if you know any people in the Boston/Cambridge area who would be interested in contributing their ideas and energy to conceptualizing and organizing such an event, or be an interesting speaker for a general audience.
I would appreciate any help you can give me, or any other resources which you can point me towards. Thank you!

• Yasuo Fujitomi informed us on March 21 that he was invited to speak at the 11th International Poetry Festival of Medellin, Colombia, June 1-10, 2000. His talk was on Japanese short poems, visual poetry, and Cummings' short poems.

• One of our staunchest supporters and contributors, Antonio Ruiz Sanchez of Cordoba, Spain, was married on March 23. He and his wife Charo spent their honeymoon travelling across Morocco.

• Nancy Porter-Steele emailed us from Canada on March 26 about "a recent delightful use of Cummings' poems in teaching":

As part of training people who are going to work with others, most of them as psychotherapists but some also in other situations, Curtis and I and our colleagues, calling ourselves EastWind Institute, have created a program that brings together some excellent teaching and practice from Shambhala Buddhist training, and some excellent teaching and practice from western psychotherapy. Recently we had one of our week-long intensives, and I had the joyful and difficult assignment to teach about some of the qualities of mind which are uncovered through extensive practice of mindfulness-insight meditation. I was to teach, on a Thursday in mid-March, about the qualities of exertion and patience, how they are associated with freedom from hope and fear, the non-aggression of not over- or under-reacting to our experience and continuing our self-existing journey with a light touch. And also, steadiness—balance and flexibility, even tempered yet colorful; riding the mind; humor providing a fresh start. And, to be sure, love for the journey—non-struggle; pain and pleasure awaken liveliness; heart free from resentment and expectation; we never tire of being good students.

These qualities can't really be told in prose. I decided Cummings' poetry would do it. And, I selected fifteen of his poems to read, one or more [end page 204] for each of the main categories of the topic (listed above), as the way to accomplish the teaching. What a success!

The group sat in meditation, as we normally do, for an hour before the "talk" began. Thus everyone's mind was settled and open to some extent. Then away we went, beginning with "since feeling is first." People asked for some poems to be read twice, and after each poem there was time / space for speaking the feelings and thoughts that were arising. When I had finished, with "may my heart always be open to little," one person suggested that the group create a poem, whoever wished speaking a line.

At lunch later, one of our colleagues said "We're all in our right brains." Yes, yes. Cummings did it.

• George Held informed us in his letter of April 9 that his new book of poems, Beyond Renewal, is slated for publication in summer of 2001.

• Jack Gottlieb wrote us on April 26 to announce the May 9th performance of his song cycle, "yes is a pleasant country" (CP 578), in NYC.

• On May 2, 2001, we received a copy of the "Manhattan Poetry Map," published by Poets House. No. 28 on this map is listed as "4 Patchin Place—E. E. Cummings, the Lost Generation Poet, lived here from 1923 until his death in 1962, walking daily to Washington Square Park, where he would sketch in his notebooks." On May, we wrote to Ms. Lee Ellen Bricetti, Poets House Executive Director as follows: "I was pleased to receive the 'Manhattan Poetry Map' yesterday, but I want to express my disagreement with the description therein of Cummings as 'the Lost Generation Poet.' Of course, it is true that, like the younger Hemingway, he had some terrible and debilitating experiences during service as an ambulance driver in Europe during World War I, but it is not true that he came out of those experiences, as Hemingway's characters did, in a deep state of disillusionment, as Hemingway's quote from Gertrude Stein would indicate. Yes, it is true that Cummings took an anti-war stance thereafter, but he never lost his faith in love and spring and life—something his critics say he could have used less of. And to say that Hemingway was disillusioned by war is quite double-edged, as he kept seeking out and joining wars thereafter wherever they could be found."


We received her postcard reply, postmarked May 8 / 9: "Thank you so much for your considered and illuminating recent letter regarding e.e.cummings [even she!] If (and when) we reprint the map, there are many quotable lines in your text! Thank you."

dark beginnings are his luminous ends

—E. E. Cummings (CP 420)

[end page 205]

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