cours donnée par Mme Savinel le mardi 3 Février 2009 (début)

Voici les notes que j'ai prises sur le cours d'intro à Cummings. Je n'ai pas encore tout recopié. La suite viendra dans quelques jours.

E.E. Cummings


He plays with cliché (especially in his love poems)

“Buffalo Bill”
Form = a triangle (or a horse’s head)
3 points of the triangle : Buffalo Bill, Jesus, Mister Death
“break onetwothreefourfive” → “break” and then you cannot break the words apart.
+ Not separating them → it suppresses the series. Suppresses time.
Orality
Familiarity
“i” (not “I”). Why? Reduces the importance of the poet, of the lyrical voice ?
Flux of language
About disenchantment.
Buffalo Bill : burlesque ? Or tragic hero of the West ?
Impossibility to decide.
Death of heroism (heroism = a cliché. The blue-eyed hero = a cliché).


Cummings
His father was teaching at Harvard.
Cummings entered Harvard. Published his first poems right away.
“The New Art” = his speech.
Started working with editors.
War. Went in the ambulance corps.
Then back to New York.
Poetry + Painting
+ exhibiting in Paris and New York
1922 = Modern Artists in America (exhibition in Paris)
“Tulips and Chimneys”. Collection of poems. 1923.
Was married 3 times
Last wife = Marion Morehouse. A fashion model. He remained with her.
Travelled a lot. (Russia, Franc, Italy, Greece)
1938. “Collected Poems”. He kept all his poems (which was criticized).
Appointed professor at Harvard for 2 years. Gave 6 “nonlectures”


● Tension between conservative and innovative
An avant-garde poet formally but he was known to be politically conservative.
He criticized Roosevelt.
Rejection of systems, refusal of the cliché, of the ready-made phrase. Should lead to questioning of ideologies. But he was politically conservative.
Said that he heard more clichés in Roosevelt’s speeches.
Challenged habits (habits of reading for ex. You can’t read confortably. At least, at first).
Questions linearity.
Art becomes a critical experience (rupture and criticism).

● Tension between disrupted forms and preserved ones (he wrote sonnets)
Thinking about deviation.
Questioning absolute power of syntax.
A poem should always be a poetic event.
Plays with superlatives and comparatives.
He has been considered as a solipsistic emotional poet. Because he wrote a lot of poems about love.
Through love, a higher truth ?
Cummings : “love’s function is to fabricate unknowness”.
Finding the syntax of love, the syntax of emotion. (Syntax = putting together two things. A form of love.)
Binding and unbindind (important in Cummings’ poetry).
If you create a crisis in language, you create a surprise binding.

Ungrammar versus unwords
The word “ungrammar” comes from a book written by Irene Fairley : E.E. Cummings and Ungrammar.
The word “unwords” was invented by Cummings. Unwords are clichés, words that have no real meaning.
Ungrammar is the means to get free from unwords, to concert them back to significant words by compelling the readers to look down to the letter (to make sense of the txt) and even to make up their own syntactic coherence.

“Memorabilia” (things that are worth remembering)
Half burlesque poem about tourists in Venice. Common places of tourism.
Fragments of voices. Voice of the poet = occupied by other voices.
“gondola signore” = what the Italians are shouting at tourists.
“&” (an ampersand) : a visual sign. If you read it, the person who is listening to you cannot know that it is a visual sign. Associated to “look”.
The poem begins with a small letter.
“mezzo del cammin” : Dante. Beginning of the Inferno.
“The glory of the coming of the Americans” : the glory of the coming of the Lord. → a hymn. A cliché hymn. Pathetic dimension.
Plays on verticality of the poem.
Baedekers : a tourist guide
+ kodaks → tourists’ objects. Tension with “stop look & listen”
“are like unto the stars of Heaven” → a hymn again. Stars spangled banner.
Tension between high speech and low speech.
God is eliminated from the hymns. But he is present in a cliché : “God only, ... knows”. Then he writes “i...don’t. It’s a way to revive the cliché.
God only → gondola.
+gondala → dollar. What constitutes Americans. A cliché again.
Cincinnati : a town in the USA but with an Italian name.
God only knows / i don’t → disenchantment
Discourse of the tourist guide = interrupted by the commentaries made by the tourists.
“O yes / beautiful we now pass through the look / girls”
o yes beautiful = unwords
At the end, it is really difficult to make sense of the fragments. Extreme fragmentation.
“O to be in England
Now that April’s there” → R. Browning. Home-thoughts from abroad
→in the poem : “o to be a metope / now that triglyph’s here”. Cummings makes fun of the cliché of nostalgia. He is mocking the lyrical “o”. Ex : “O Education : O / cook&son” (a travel agency).
Flouting of linguistic rules, of poetic conventions, of clichés.
Eccentric use of the sign.
The poem has the shape of a monument (a tower → campanile)
He uses modernist use of fragments. Symphonic cooking.
He plays on the vicinity of sounds.
Cincingondolanati : a hybrid form.
Translations as passages.
Real education here = about looking, reading, listening.
Submerged signs.
A cryptic text.
The figure encrypted in the text = the Lord