e.e. cummings:
It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my “poems” are competing.
They are also competing with each other, with elephants, and with El Greco.
Every time I read this [writes Daniel Handler aka Lemony Snickett] I find it bracing—the giddy admission that the poet finds his own work just crowding together with all of the other stuff—bits of nature and culture just barging in, so haphazardly and intrusively that almost as soon as he closes parentheses full of them, in come elephants and El Greco, along with the same poems themselves. It shrugs off the deep fantasy of art: that it is given a rapt, focused audience, and in turn has a real, traceable effect. This is easily discarded because we knew it was wrong all along. Nothing makes the mind wander than someone telling you they need you undivided attention. Even in your most fiercely focused hours of reading, when you lose complete track of your immediate surroundings, when your coffee gets cold while you finish the chapter, you are still not alone with the book, because everything in your mind, every memory each word prompts, every pressing concern, even as the book turns your eyes in a different direction, clouds the sun of your attention. You might lose track of time, but time does not lose track of you. Your life continues, with all of its trappings and wanderings competing with everything else, and as far as how the book affects you, it is no more traceable than a grain of salt in soup. The effect is real, but there’s no mapping it, because the map is not the territory and the territory is the changing landscape of your mind and the changing world it observes and inhabits. I have a basement filled with boxes filled with letters from children filled with questions, and the one they ask most is, is it real? I know the answer isn’t, “No, the real thing is a man sitting at a table with a legal pad.” My work has not led them astray, even if they are confused; it has not harmed them, even if they are upset. The landscape is too enormous for anything as stupid and square as that. The story is real, even if it’s not true—they are living in the space it provides, thinking about what they like, not what people hope they are thinking. This is how literature works, freely offering itself, or failing to, every which way along with everything else in the world. Just this paragraph alone is competing with everything else in the world. Just this paragraph alone is competing with everything I thought I would write about here, and didn’t—a story about Odetta, a mistake in my favorite Virginia Woolf novel, a poem by a South African about guilt and reading, what a jazz musician said about a long-ago funeral he watched online—not to mention everything already crowding in your brain, elephants and El Greco.
So let me say to you now, if you can hear me over all that, what I think about the curtailing of literature, and I’ll say it like the punk I’ll never be. Fuck what the author says, and fuck whatever terrible thing may be found in their words. Fuck removing the book from view, and fuck snatching it from someone else’s hands. Fuck separating the art from the artist, and fuck forgiving any author for anything. All these actions, the motivations behind them, are not just improper about literature, but predatory toward it. A book moves in the world.
. . . Books are like people in this way. And if you find yourself feeling that the book is problematic, all that means is that you have a problem with it, and that’s easily solved. Leave the book behind, put your clothes back on, and go home.
. . .
