It's spring, people! And with that also the beginning of the Persian new year (and my new year, since, as some of you know, I am German-Iranian). Norooz (“new day”) is an ancient festivity observed by millions of people in the Middle East and Central Asia, basically anywhere Persians went or exerted influence. From Kurdistan in the west to India in the east, from Kazakhstan in the north to the holiday’s heartland, Iran, in the south: Norooz is truly a cross-country cross-cultural celebration. It’s lovely, based as it is on renewal, rebirth, and the return of life after the deep dark cold of winter. People visit one another for 13 days, giving gifts, and just cooking and eating lots. It’s a joyful family holiday, not at all like exploding scary New Year fireworks!
So, while we had a look at Persian punctuation a few weeks ago, Norooz made me think of spring, and spring makes me think of one of my favourite poets, e.e.cummings. Sometimes capitalised, sometimes not. Edward Estlin Cummings just loved nature, and wrote many poems about April, soft rain, budding trees, and little chirping birdies. And he also loved punctuation. Here’s a primer on one of the twentieth-century’s most significant avant-garde poets, and his obsession with turning our world upside down through rogue brackets, and commas cosying up in unexpected places.
¶
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and
changing everything carefully
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and
without breaking anything.
¶
I know, I know. I’m springing (pun intended!) the full poem on you out of nowhere. But then, spring is like a perhaps hand, just as stealthily approaching us through the depth of February, and then BAM! Green’s here! Okay, here’s the ever-dreaded question: what does it mean….? While some people will poo-poo asking this, I think it makes sense to go for content before grappling with the finer points of syllable count.
I think the poem is about not really a total renewal occurring in spring, but a recycling. Stuff gets re-arranged gently. There’s no total re-haul, just a…different structure. And the poem structures itself differently than what we’re used to as well. There’s rogue capitalisation, no blanks between letters and punctuation, and of course the three beautiful parentheses: short, medium, and long. So, our perception of how poems “normally” look like is shaken up – though moderately so! Cummings often breaks and shakes up all we thought we knew about words on the page, and this poem is tame in comparison to this one! But it’s supposed to be so, I believe, because he’s merely re-arranging the layout – just like spring our world. So, what nature does, the poem also does. The poem is nature, the poet spring. The work of poetry slightly tweaking that which is in order to make us experience our surroundings in different ways, unexpected ways. To experience ourselves, and our own changes and phases not as a 180 degree U-haul, but as a gentle shift here, and a compassionate repositioning there.
So, let’s pick the poem apart a bit more: if we take away the freaky punctuation, and collapse the alignment, it says “spring is like a perhaps hand arranging a window into which people look and changing everything carefully spring is like a perhaps hand in a window and without breaking anything”. That doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t have to. In one of the introductions to his work, cummings wrote that he encourages readers not to try and understand the poem, but let the poem understand you. Don’t try and enjoy the poem, but let the poem enjoy you. So, that’s what we’re now attempting to do: allow the poem to come to us, and just sit and witness it doing its thing. The ability to just sit and be without grasping at understanding is a difficult one, and asks for buckets of maturity. The poet John Keats called it “negative capability” in 1817, the acceptance of ‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ of which Shakespeare possessed plenty.
So, that’s what we want to do right now. Hone our negative capability. Bear with me.
¶
There are the poem’s bare bones without parentheses and then there are the parentheses. The first one ‘(which comes carefully/out of Nowhere)’ is pretty straightforward and unproblematic. The second one introduces people staring – and also arranging? – the strange and known things. The third parenthesis has people stare again, and potentially changing objects around, this time the flower, and, surprisingly, air. I’m not sure if people are the changers or if it’s spring. Maybe both. Spring, after all, has a hand like a human while people seem to be active through simply looking. I think it means that spring is ‘arranging’ a window, as in provide a window through which people can arrange, that is, look at the natural world in new ways.
And then, we have the two floating lines at the end of each stanza, releasing us into the white space of the page, into our thoughts, on an indefinite note: ‘everything’, ‘anything’. What does that refer to? We can make it refer to whatever we want. This is where we are invited to personalise the poem.
But this ambiguity of reference starts earlier: things are being moved. They’re strange and also known, they’re old and new. This makes the ‘fraction of a flower’ and the ‘air’ stand out all the more as concrete and specific in comparison. Cummings turns the expression “here and there” upside down to ‘there…and…here’. That’s all part and parcel of the gentle re-shuffling he’s describing and performing through the punctuation. Pulling the rug from under our feet, but ever so softly and imperceptibly.
¶
Treading lightly is what the poem is all about. And so spring is ‘like a perhaps hand’ – we’re stumbling over the unusual sequencing of words, but not enough to fall, it’s just pleasantly surprising – perhaps, perhaps not. Stuff is being moved ‘carefully’. Nothing breaks or breaks open. It just slowly unfolds, or combines into different patterns. Everything has already been there, dormant, and it just takes a hand or a different kind of looking for novel forms to emerge out of pre-existent matter. Much like a kaleidoscope! I’m tempted to go off into a tangent how Renaissance poets engaged in explorations over form and material, and how philosophical questions on etherial ideal forms and their imprinting on shapeless matter go back to the ancient Greeks, but…suffice it to say that the ideas the poem juggles are very very old. I don’t know if cummings set out to declare himself as heir of Plato! But that’s what I am teasing out of the poem’s proposal that nothing in nature is born or dies, but just takes on different and temporary forms depending on arrangement.
Everything is always changing. I have a little garden, and have learnt that nothing in nature is ever fixed. The seasons are always becoming, taking turns. Nothing ever stops changing. Not even dead plants. They become stalks, hollowed-out hotels for minuscule insects. Then they slowly decompose, crumbling between my fingers in May when I make space for new plants which draw nutrients from the earth of their declining predecessors. Nature is always doing even when, to my limited human capacity, it feels like it simply is. In fact, nature is, and is eternal, because it is doing. Nature is a verb. And so is poetry.
Of poetry, cummings wrote it is a constant making. And with that assumption, he, again, aligns himself with the venerable poets (or makers) of old like the stars of the Middle Ages Geoffrey Chaucer and William Dunbar. And indeed, poetry comes from the Greek, meaning, precisely, making. Our cummings poem is making, too. The only “stationary” verb in the simple present refers to people. They ‘stare’ and ‘look’. All other verbs are in the gerund form, they are all ing-ing. The poem imitates nature. Imitates spring.
What about the punctuation? Well. This poem’s really quite manageable regarding cummings’s usual punctuation antics! Spaces between word-punctuation-word, however, have dissolved, and we’re negotiating increasingly long and potentially disruptive parentheses. Are they really that, though? Disruptive? Are they not rather part of the whole living breathing thing, separating and also not separating? I confess, brackets are my favourite punctuation marks (yes, even before the ! with which I have spent many happy years now). Brackets brought me to punctuation in the first place, and I find them endlessly fascinating, because they allow two things to go on at the same time, while also holding them apart. There’s the main sentence, and then there’s the inset bracket. There’s the official message, and the qualification, secret, mystery, the whispered dissent, held safe, held in privacy in the half-moons of brackets. By deleting even the slender space between the bracket and its surrounding letters, cummings closes ranks between the outside and the inside. There is a typographical wall, but there is also no wall. That which is inside and outside the bracket belongs together, and is also itself separate from the sign. There is and there is not. I think cummings’s parentheses, here, ask us to practise negative capability. Just like spring does.
Cummings loved turning our perception upside down like that (and much more). Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894, and Harvard-educated, cummings’s career as a poet took off in the 1920s when he led the avant-garde of modernist poetry in English. Unlike some of his contemporaries, however, he appealed to both the professional literary critic as well as the general reader, and it’s easy to see why: his poems are small gems, intimate, and simple (or so they seem), rather than grand epics like the works of Pound or Eliot, or majestic in style and content like Auden’s. cummings’s poetry shows a kind of child-like delight, unaffected and genuine. Cummings loves puddles after rain, star-gazing, bird song, and kissing. He loves sex (check out this poem, muy caliente!), and is devoted to imagination, intuition, and all that “The Man” tells us is useless.
Cummings’s pieces are sometimes whimsical, sometimes candid, always tender. They explode syntax, because, well, feeling resists the system, whether linguistic or social or economic. Cummings harboured a deep disgust towards the kind of American commercialism establishing itself during his lifetime, fuelled by urbanisation, a rapacious capitalist system, and a deliberate encouragement of herd-thinking, fostered by politicians who like their people numb and dumb. Reading cummings’s poetry means mistrusting pre-conceived order, on the page and otherwise. It means attending to process, not product. It means clambering across parentheses that come as windows to look into and out of at the same time. To stare at the miracle of spring. To experience our own transformation, slowly, deliberately. Wonderingly.