Words into Pictures Words into Pictures E. E. Cummings’ Art across Borders Edited by Ji(cid:284)í Flajšar and Zénó Vernyik CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art across Borders, Edited by Ji(cid:284)í Flajšar and Zénó Vernyik This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2007 by Ji(cid:284)í Flajšar and Zénó Vernyik and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-335-2; ISBN 13: 9781847183354 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations....................................................................................vii Acknowledgements..................................................................................viii Introduction.................................................................................................x Chronology.............................................................................................xviii Part I: New Contexts Cummings and the Brotherhood of Visual Poetics......................................2 Richard Bradford Reflecting EIMI: The Iconic Meta-Sonnet, Manhood, and Cultural Crisis in E. E. Cummings’ No Thanks.......................................................27 Gillian Huang-Tiller The Posterity of Idiosyncrasies: E. E. Cummings’ Influence on Post-War American Poetry...................................................................58 Isabelle Alfandary Part II: Political Cummings From Bad Boy to Curmudgeon: Cummings’ Political Evolution..............68 Milton Cohen Divine Excess: The Logic of General Economics in The Enormous Room.............................................................................90 Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder Part III: Cummings in Space “As usual I did not find him in cafes”: I-space, “i” space, and Spatial Cognition in E. E. Cummings’ Poetry..................................108 Taimi Olsen Sacred-Evil New York: Urban Spatiality in Tulips & Chimneys............126 Zénó Vernyik vi Table of Contents Part IV: Amongst Arts Crossing Generic Boundaries: Sculpture, Painting and Engraving as Compensations for E. E. Cummings’ Hermeneutic Short-Cuts..........156 Claudia Desblaches “With chasteness of sea-girls”: Björk’s Adaptation of E. E. Cummings’ Poetry......................................................................170 Emília Barna Part V: Identity and Subjectivity Beyond the Scope of the “I” in E. E. Cummings’ Leaf Poem.................188 Kurt Harris Notes........................................................................................................201 Contributors.............................................................................................210 Index........................................................................................................214 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1-1 Final Schema of No Thanks (Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia) 1-2 Final Schema of No Thanks (as it appears in the typescript edition of the volume) 1-3 First Schema of No Thanks (Houghton Library) 1-4 The first lines of the Sonnets, applied on the Final Schema 1-5 Structural chart of EIMI 3-1 Typology related to the reference frame 3-2 Cartographic fictional space in Tulips & Chimneys 3-3 Partitions of space in “i was sitting in mcsorley’s” 3-4 Binaries into a triad 3-5 Sacred fictional space in Tulips & Chimneys 4-1 E. E. Cummings 1894-1962, Noise Number 13, 1925, Oil on canvas, 59 9/ x 42 ¾ in (151.29 x 108.59 cm) Whitney Museum 16 of American Art, New York. Photograph by Geoffrey Clements. 4-2 Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533, National Gallery, London 4-3 Giovanni Battista Bracelli, “Duel pour la Toison d’Or” in Bizzarie di Varie Figure, 1624, Livorno ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This volume started out as a lack, something that its editors voiced when they first met in February, 2005. What began as a casual and friendly discussion over some food and wine, ended up as a long-term, close professional relationship and a common plan for a new volume of essays on Cummings. Strangely enough, chance, fate, or the hand of someone above, had a lot to do with this book. Nevertheless, however much does this strange encounter of an early date have to do with the material existence of this book, it would have never become anything more than a common dream, if it was not for a lot of people who made it turn into reality. First and foremost, our contributors deserve credit. They are the ones who filled with content the structure we provided. Their work and their original ideas made this into something unique and original, colorful and varied. At the same time, their excellent cooperativity, and unparalleled patience made them unusually pleasant to work with, while the friendliness and honest interest some of them showed, turned our relationship from a mere professional venture into something that we dare call friendship. However, all those essays, and all the effort their authors spent on writing them, would have been of no use, if Cambridge Scholars Publishing had not decided to agree and publish it. To some, this act of saying thanks to them may sound a mere formality, but it is not so. The fact that they trusted us from the very beginning deserves genuine and heartfelt thanks, just as their willingness to publish a volume that has a potentially limited audience. In addition, they proved very understanding, flexible and helpful throughout the long months that this project required, for which we are really grateful. In particular, we would like to thank Dr. Andy Nercessian, our editor, for showing interest in our project, for taking all the risks that it involved, and for being very understanding about the delays that we encountered. Carol Koulikourdi also deserves all our respect and thankfulness, for answering all the questions that arose, for assisting us with our problems, and devoting so much energy to make sure that everything went smoothly. Amanda Millar, the person responsible for the volume’s typesetting, should also be remembered as someone who contributed a lot to the Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders ix project and made up for the delays by being even more efficient than usual. Some of the artworks and poems reprinted in this volume are the properties of various galleries and publishing houses. Therefore, we would also like to thank them for allowing us to reproduce them here. We are grateful to Boni and Liveright and W. W. Norton, for letting us reprint poems of E. E. Cummings. The Houghton Library of Harvard University and the Small Special Collections Library of the University of Virginia also deserve our thanks for letting us reprint copies of manuscripts in their collections. In a similar vein, the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, for their permission to print Cummings’ Noise Number 13, and the National Gallery, for kindly agreeing to the reproduction of Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors also deserves credit. Carcanet Press holds the rights to Charles Tomlinson’s “Lines,” New Directions to the poems of William Carlos Williams, and Faber and Faber to Hugo Williams’ poem. The arrangements regarding these rights are still in process at the time of the volume’s publication, and the author of the essay quoting them holds full responsibility for their satisfactory conclusion. We would also like to thank Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel and the Department of English and American Studies at Masaryk University, Marcela Malá and Zuzana Šaffková and the English Department at the Technical University of Liberec, and Jaroslav Machá(cid:254)ek and the Department of English and American Studies at Palacký University, for tolerating all the inconveniences and missed deadlines they had to suffer. This book would not have ever materialized without their flexibility and understanding. And last, but not least, our love and thanks to our families and friends, and loved ones who could not get the attention they deserved while we devoted our time to making this book materialize, and who supported us nonetheless. INTRODUCTION The reader holds a new volume of essays on E. E. Cummings in her hand. One that tries to shift the focus of interest of Cummings studies to fields that are somewhat less researched, or traditionally somewhat neglected. Although we do not claim that the book deals with heretofore uncharted territories, it nevertheless does contain essays that focus on less well-wrought topics. Therefore, it can be said to attempt to make the treatment of the oeuvre of E. E. Cummings, if not more, at least differently balanced. The title of our volume, Words Into Pictures, has a peculiar ring to it. In one phrase, it brings together the verbal and the visual, two forms of art traditionally considered to be distinct and separate; a tradition that was most clearly voiced by (and to some extent also instituted by) Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his Laokoon. In fact, this title, by positing the possibility of transfer or metamorphosis between words and pictures seems to be in clear violation of Lessing’s clear-cut system of verbal vs visual. The book apparently ignores the dictum of associating “temporality with literature and spatiality with painting and sculpture” (Landwehr 2002, 12), a division that allows literature to be only temporal, and painting to be only spatial, and that labels all experiments that try to blur the boundaries and experiment with spatial poetry or temporal (or narrative) painting as imperfect, perverse or second-rate. As W. J. T. Mitchell puts it, quoting Lessing himself: [I]t is “prescribed as a law to all poets” that “they should not regard the limitations of painting as beauties in their own art.” For poets to “employ the same artistic machinery” as the painter would be to “convert a superior being into a doll.” It would make as much sense, argues Lessing, “as if a man, with the power and privilege of speech, were to employ the signs which the mutes in a Turkish seraglio had invented to supply the want of a voice.” (Mitchell 1995, 155) Hidden in this prescriptive separation of the two types of art by Lessing, behind his “moral, aesthetic imperative” to differentiate between “verbal and visual mediation” (154) is, in addition, the preference of the written over the pictorial, the attribution of superiority to the verbal arts. By arguing “that the artist, unlike the writer, could only portray a single