Poetry Revealed in the Land of the Sinking Sun

One day on the third story of the school building itself of the American School of Tangier I once had a revelation. (The room was, I believe the one just to the right of rightmost room visible on the top floor in this photo. I used to ride a skateboard down that ramp to the left, which required my turning the board right at the bottom to avoid collisions--quite a difficult move for someone with so few skills in that sport, but I never failed.) The revelation concerned poetry, and there were actually two revelations, but they both included E. E. Cummings.

One revelation was the poem "29" from 50 Poems, which begins

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

This is not the best part of the poem, yet it exhibits the characteristics of this poem that interest me. It is lyrical, yet a bit iconoclastic (where are the capital letters? where is the punctuation?) It is carefully metrical and rhymed, yet the rhymes peter out half-way through. Most importantly, the words mean in a different way than they usually do. There are no pretty how towns. No-one dances a didn't. Cummings is creating a weird meaningscape within a familiar, almost nursery rhyming, poem.

From this poem, I learned that poetry had more potential for transmitting sense and ineffability than anything else. Whenever I remember this scene, I imagine myself sitting in a pupitre, one row away from the windows, and I imagine myself looking out at the basketball court and allowing my eyes to wander across the rugby field into the ragged meadow just beyond the bounds of our small world, the meadow where I released the scorpions I had captured at the ruins in Volubilis, the meadow where I found a perfect white cat skull that today sits on a small wooden shelf on the landing that leads to the second floor of my house.

The other revelation I found in another famous poem of Cummings', one even stranger than the first. It is, appropriately, poem "1" in 95 Poems and begins with two letters (separated by an opening parenthesis), both of which carry the same meaning in this context: one.

l(a

What a way to being a poem--and at this point we don't even realize the the l is the beginning of a word that won't end for many lines, that the parentheses encircle a small image that "defines" the word.

le
af
fa

Here, we finally can make out a word ("le/af"), followed by a reversal of its last two letters. As the "af" of "leaf" becomes the "fa" of "falls," we see the leaf falling and twisting as it goes.

ll

Two letters only. That is the whole line and the entire strophe.

s)
one
l

The falling ends, then we repeat oneness twice again.

iness

Being just oneself (I-ness), just by oneself, is loneliness--falling away from the tree that joins us together as human beings.

From this poem, I learned that poetry could be visual, that the poet did not need to consider but sound in making sense. I learned something about the requirements of the visual. For this poem to make its true sense, you need to type it on an old typewriter (or view it in Courier as we have it here). On such a typewriter, the l of "lonelines" and the numeral 1 are the same character.

A simple set of memories, out of millions I've temporarily misplaced.

The American School of Tangier was a wonderful place to spend some time, and Paul Bowles, the American expatriate writer and composer, was somehow associated with the school at a point in time just before I arrived there. I never met him, but I read some of his books while I was there. But what I remember most of him is his voice (and finally his face) in The Sheltering Sky, a 1990 film by Bertolucci. The film ends with Bowles saying these words:

Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

I mention these words now because it has been years since I've thought of sitting in that room and learning about these two poems. I've no idea how many more times I'll remember learning the two essential lessons of these poems.

ecr. l'inf.