April 20 Tip: Learn about e.e. cummings and "lowercaseness"

Learn about e.e. cummings and "lowercaseness"

(The April 20 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/247534?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Poetryfoundationorg+Newsletter&utm_content=Poetryfoundationorg+Newsletter+CID_f676037e0528e804c81579c6c8ceb1e0&utm_source=Campaign%20Monitor&utm_term=Lowercaseness

Susan Cheever’s recently published biography, E.E. Cummings: A Life, is like the poet himself: playful, trim, and meticulous. Cheever, the author of more than a dozen books including American Bloomsbury, presents the major events of the poet’s life with a sympathetic eye. At times, Cheever’s work reads like an ode to a childhood hero—appropriately enough: Cheever’s father, the short-story author and novelist John Cheever, was a friend of Cummings, and Cheever’s memories of the poet have fueled what she now calls something of “an obsession.” The biography switches gears readily between modes of historical factuality and modern contextualization, and Cheever focuses on Cummings’s life as a man rather than his work as a gifted nonconformist poet. Such was her goal: to “bring him to life.”

Cheever spoke with the Poetry Foundation on the phone from her home in New York City about Cummings’s presence in her childhood, the evolution of biography as a genre, lower- versus uppercaseness, and why biography is essentially a marriage.