ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 95
insulting, and either I should be ashamed for thinking it of myself,
or ashamed of writing it. I, to be honest, can’t decide, and should be
mocked for so publicly perplexing myself, and dragging you into it,
no less.
The word “think” appears as many times as “rootish,” and, though
I am doing my best to do so about this abysmal and irrationally
opaque bit of literary flotsam, I can only shrug and affirm that I
have no idea what I could have been thinking. My research yields
the idea that “manliness” is meant to stand in for “virtue,” a word
derivable from the Latin “virtus,” but I have clearly misunderstood
the virtues of clarity of purpose and meaning for the reader in this
monstrosity of a poem.
By means of contrast, I want to leave you with a brief example of
a poet whose abstraction and immediacy so obviously surpasses this
nonsense as to shame the critic who attempts to compare the two.
That poet is ee cummings, whose transparency is beyond reproach,
and whose intent is not less noble than a Hector. The second of my
discoveries is a poem, previously unknown, by cummings, which
I recovered from a shoebox previously sequestered and valiantly
guarded by my great-grandmother, who, citing Wittgenstein, insisted I must be silent upon this matter. I will ignore her.
Having previously written imitations of his work, I believe I am in
a position to authenticate the work. Here is his poem, reproduced
in full, with the caveat that I have modified certain spellings with
the intent simply of bringing it in line with a reasonable reader’s
expectations:
)now this kiss loving earth as speaking was
less speaking as less like such less shall be and
parting moon winding as certain these
wend waiting for some least most mouth of night
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