it may be fun to be fooled - Dylan Thomas, E. E. Cummings, Louis MacNeice

I am in the process of writing up what I read in May, much like I did in April.  Is this a good idea?  When I finished up April, I did not write another word until more or less now.  So I have doubts.  Yet here I am.

Last month I read Dylan Thomas’s debut, 18 Poems (1934); this month, Twenty-five Poems (1936).  Why did he change the representation of the number in the title?  Was it to make me look up the titles over and over again, never getting them right the first time?

Two years later, Thomas is marginally more coherent, with the sound-to-sense ratio moving a little ways towards “sense.”  His biological metaphysics is presented more directly.  “Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels” and so on, from the first poem, “I, in my intricate image,” where the poet is born.  A conceit of D. H. Lawrence is that we are all, we humans, just another species of animal, however much civilization we build around ourselves.  Thomas goes a step back on the phylogenetic tree, believing that animals, and thus all of us, are specialized plants.  “My images stalk the trees and the slant sap’s tunnel… / I with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles” etc.  Not exactly the way biologists draw the tree now, but close enough for a poet.

These poems, like the last batch, are likely more fun to bellow than to read silently:

from Altarwise by owl-light, Stanza V

And from the windy West came two-gunned Gabriel,
From Jesu’s sleeve trumped up the king of spots,
The sheath-decked jacks, queen with a shuffled heart;
Said the fake gentleman in suit of spades,
Black-tongued and tipsy from salvation’s bottle.

This Dylan is beginning to sound like that other Dylan.

***

E. E. Cummings, No Thanks (1935).  More Cummings poems, like he had been writing for a decade, but carpentered onto a complex frame of four sections, each section built out of sequences of three free poems capped by a sonnet.  There is a snow, star and moon quarter, and also one more that I could not figure out.

There is plenty of this kind of fun – how much do you like puzzles, or grasshoppers:

And as I now expect from Cummings, there are some earthy poems (see #24, “let’s start a magazine”) and some sex poems, divided into the sensual and the silly, as in this excerpt from #16:

(may I touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she

We all enjoy mocking Hemingway, yes?  That’s #26:

what does little Ernest croon
in his death at afternoon?
(kow dow r 2 bul retoinis
wus de woids uf lil Oinis

And look, #27 is an authentic Joe Gould poem.  Someone should publish a Joe Gould sourcebook.  The Joe Gould Saga.  If you do not know what I am talking about, I urge you to read Joseph Mitchell, “Professor Sea Gull” and “Joe Gould’s Secret,” or at least watch the 2000 movie.

Cummings wrote the book on a Guggenheim fellowship, but such were the hard times of the Depression that no one would publish No Thanks, thus the title, except for his mother, who paid to have it self-published.  Shoulda called it Thanks, Ma!

***

Finally, I read the first sixty pages or so of Louis MacNeice’s Collected Poems, roughly up to or just past his trip to Iceland with Auden.  Unlike the poems of Thomas, Cummings, Neruda, and all of those Spaniards, MacNeice’s poems are about concrete, material things, with scenes and settings, and they make rational sense.  I love them, but have nothing to say about them.  Maybe the next batch.