Chain Reading

I have been trying to get through cummings' Collected Poems 1922-1938 for a while now. I have owned it since 1996 (I see from the flyleaf) and have dipped into and out of it over the years as the fancy took me. This is most definitely the way to handle a collection this size, and possibly just to handle e e cummings. I have managed to get rather tired of him over the past couple of weeks, I must say – a lot of magic, a great deal, and lines and lines to kill and die for, but slipperiness too, and some nearly Ogden Nash-ish facileness sometimes. He seems to be schizophrenic about women – sometimes he gets into an insolent unpleasant channeling-Henry-Miller mode; at other times he's a lyrical courtly cross between Orpheus and Sir Galahad, just gallant and plain enchanting. And boy does he love spring. That weird punctuation thing he has has always vaguely irritated me, and now it frankly enrages me. What's so damn meaningful about not putting a space between parentheses and the letters immediately preceding and following them, I ask you? All that said, when I edit my Best Poems Ever, he will definitely have more than one in that collection. Final word – he's cool, but in small, select doses.