Guy Davenport wrote a defense of Cummings, if defense is the correct word, which kinda surprised me when 1st I read. it was more like a reminder that Cummings has something to offer, and I guess I hadn't bothered before to notice. I don't think I'm the only one who, when young, took the example Cummings offered to release from much dictated form. one could rumble the lines and jolt syntax, if so minded. not to say I really did. not till I read Creeley, perhaps credit Williams too, that lineation of my poems started to have an 'ear'. before that, linebreaks were fairly random. yet still, Cummings helped get the enforced Longfellow cadence (listen my children and you shall hear) out of the way. Cummings' tweaking of form sometimes comes across as superficial, by which rather ordinary expressions are tarted up artily. but sometimes, I note, there's a sense even of Stein in his work. seems like he deserves a better reputation. not to say he aint a profit-maker nowadays, but in the the, oh god, canon sense, he seems to have something to add. to us thorough moderns, post moderns, whatever the hell it is and we are now. sometimes I wish I were taught poetry, so that I may have been given a more thorough opprtunity. not to say that the meander by interest method hasn't its pluses. the whole idea of canon: it should change daily. think of that sponge Berrigan...