[William A. Baurle]

Originally Posted by John Whitworth

I hate the word importance when used about poets. I shall quote an English philosopher, I've forgotten who. 'I don't think importance is all that important. Truth is.' Truth is when a poet speaks to you directly. Stevie Smith does that sometimes. But she is not, thank Heaven, important.

Where is ee cummings?

And how. Cummings' Complete Poems* was, without a shred of doubt, the book that I read in the least amount of time. I think it took me two or three nights. It's a fat book, but the poems don't run one after another as in some collections. At the end of each poem, however small, we go to the next page. So there's a ton of empty space. Nonetheless, there are a LOT of poems in this collection. We go from Cummings' beginnings as a beautiful, formal lyric poet, to some of the most eccentric experiments with style, form, syntax, and typography, that have ever been or probably ever will be. He goes from the ridiculous to the sublime at the drop of a hat, and he's as subtle as can possibly be. He'll make you cry one minute and laugh out loud the next (you have to check out some of his prose poems in the collection: they are beyond hilarious).

But I don't know which particular poetry book to select, since I've only read the Complete Poems (or is it Collected Works*? I don't remember and the book is buried somewhere abouts...), and I don't wish to nominate two in a row*, so I'll leave that to my betters.

*didn't know then that we could only choose 2 altogether.