At the age of 50 he wrote a book about himself — A Pickle for the Knowing Ones or Plain Truth in a Homespun Dress. He wrote about himself and complained about politicians, clergy and his wife. The book contained 8,847 words and 33,864 letters, but no punctuation, and capital letters were seemingly random. At first he handed his book out for free, but it became popular and was re-printed in eight editions. In the second edition Dexter added an extra page which consisted of 13 lines of punctuation marks. Dexter instructed readers to "peper and solt it as they plese".posted by phunniemee at 11:34 AM on November 27, 2012 [1 favorite]
This isn't a complete catalog of Cummings' typographical rhetoric, but I don't have much to add. The main oversight is the visual aspect of Cummings' poetry, which is often rather corrupted by typesetters who don't know what to look for. The clearest example of this is the poem "insu nli gh t" which is heavily visual, but the image gets lost a little bit in print. Here is what it looks like in his typewritten manuscript (which is in the Houghton Library):
- The elimination of capital letters at the beginnings of sentences.
- The use of the lower-case "i" on most occasions.
- Irregularities of line arrangement, where the line may be extremely short, or where lines may be staggered as they descend the page, or where they may be arbitrarily grouped into stanzas with little regard to the movement of rime or meaning.
- Words may be spaced out on the page so as to indicate the tempo of reading.
- Word-dismemberment. Words are taken apart in Cummings' work in at least four ways: by syllabication, by letter-dispersion, by the omission of letters, and (occasionally) by anagramming and spoonerism.
- Word-mixing. Words are run together in two ways: by fusion, either of whole words with each other, or of parts of words, and by permutation, where words are broken apart and redistributed in the interstices of other sentences.
- Rhetorical capitalization, which sometimes emphasizes, but quite frequently for no discoverable reason letters midway of words are honored.
- Rhetorical punctuation, which may perform an ordinary job of emphasis but more often than not it bespeaks the scattering of a lavish hand whose innocence is laced with wiles.
- Mimetic typography, where, in an analogical way, the visual appearance of the poem echoes its meaning.
- Typographical irony, or the use of numerals, ampersands, equalization signs and the like where one would ordinarily expect the dignity of word.
- Verbal camouflaging, in which the spelling of words is so distorted as to make their recognition difficult.
insu nli gh t
o
verand
o
vering
A
onc
eup
ona
tim
e ne wsp aperYou are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments
posted by xingcat at 11:30 AM on November 27, 2012 [3 favorites]