ee cummings - little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn't know where

little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn't know where 

to find them(and found a secondhand set which click)little 

gould used to amputate his appetite with bad brittle 

candy but just(nude eel)now little joe lives on air 

Harvard Brevis Est for Handkerchief read Papernapkin no laundry 

bulls likes People preferring Negroes Indians Youse 

n.b. ye twang of little joe(yankee)gould irketh 

sundry who are trying to find their minds(but never had any to lose) 

and a myth is as good as a smile but little joe gould's quote oral 

history unquote might(publishers note)be entitled a wraith's 

progress or mainly awash while chiefly submerged or an amoral 

morality sort-of-aliveing by innumerable kind-of-deaths 

(Amérique Je T'Aime and it may be fun to be fooled 

but it's more fun to be more to be fun to be little joe gould)

Hi everyone, happy Thursday! I figured it was about time to break out the ee cummings. In order to really understand this poem, you need some background. Joe Gould was an actual person who graduated from Harvard, and the rest of his short life on the streets begging for money, claiming that he was writing an "oral history of our time" (mentioned as "little joe gould's quote oral \\ history unquote", but mostly he was drinking a lot and doing drugs. A lot of movies, novels and poems have been based on the story of Joe Gould (go figure, doesn't sound like that interesting of a story). 

Now that we have backstory, we can delve into the poem itself. The first two lines are meant to emulate the nursery rhyme of little bo peep ("little bo peep has lost her sheep and doesn't know where to find them"). A few other points probably need clarification to:

"nude eel" - supposed to sound like new deal

"Harvard Brevis Est" - Harvard is brief (in latin)

"a myth is as good as a smile" - plays on the phrase 'a miss is as good as a mile', but also insinuates that Gould was keeping secrets

"Amérique Je T'Aime" - "America I love you", a reference to a popular song at the time under the same name.

Now that we've got the verbiage out of the way, we can get into the meat of the poem. Most of what I got out of this poem is the college reference. "Harvard Brevis Est," our time as college students is brief, and when we get out, we better not end up like "little joe gould" who doesn't have teeth to his name. That's one of the reasons I went to RIT, to have a better chance to not be jobless. I also like the last line, which basically insinuates that it's much more fun to be the fooler than the fool. I hope you all end up liking this poem as much as me, even with the insane second stanza. Until I post again,

Signing off ~Sam Zimmerman

Tyler Knott Gregson: Untitled

Tyler Knott Gregson is someone who I discovered through Tumblr by seeing one of his love poems. The vast majority of his poems are love poems and the sad, lonely hearts of Tumblr love him all the more for it. As someone who wouldn't necessarily call love poems their thing I can't deny that his stuff on love really is truly fantastic. Tyler Knott Gregson is someone who deeply understands love in all of its forms, and I would highly reccommend any of his works, although forewarning that you will have intense feelings of all kinds. A lot of time my breath catches in my throat reading some of his stuff, not going to lie. 

Sam and I are discussing doing a week of just love poems, and if that's the case then you'll probably see him again from me, but I don't really want to talk about love at the moment, I think.

I like this poem but I'm not sure if I completely understand it. What exactly is the swimming supposed to be? As previously stated a lot of his stuff is about love, so swimming could be falling in love, except then what does that make the treading water? If the treading water is living life, just getting by, then what exactly does that make the swimming? 

Something about the swimming is taking risks, I feel like I know that much, especially given the "trying to keep your head above the water" line. There's trying to float and then there's keeping your head above water- the latter definitely has the anxious connotation of trying not to drown. There's a sense of danger there that's kind of carried over to the swimming part. 

And swimming is kind of dangerous, especially with how terrifying drowning would be. My mom's deathly afraid of water- has never gone swimming, never been in the ocean, can be in a pool, but not comfortably and especially not at a point where she can't stand with plenty of room between her head and the water. I used to be thankful I didn't inherit that, except now that I don't swim all that much and I need to learn how to drive and probably have her driving anxiety, I think I've changed my mind. It comes up fairly often in Would You Rather stuff if you'd rather drown or be burned alive, and I always choose being burned alive. I've had people tell me that burning would be so much more painful and so much worse and you'd be watching your flesh melt but at the same time, drowning just seems terrible. I don't have my Mom's fear of the water, but I can appreciate the sheer terror of drowning.

(In my opinion the worst way to die is Death by Molasses, by the way. It's like drowning except worse, because molasses.)

Yet we shouldn't forget how much we love to swim. Swimming is a risk of not swallowing water or knocking yourself unconscious or a million other things that can go wrong when you're underwater, but it's a freeing experience of propelling yourself and cutting through liquid and floating and it's something that we should keep doing. Whatever swimming is supposed to represent here, our lives should still have a measure of risk in it. There's something comparable between the feeling of zipping across a pool underwater and the feeling of taking risks. In Brave New World the Savage complains of no love, no hurt, and how are these people living with no risk? Mustafa Mond calmly explains that monthly or so citizens have their blood flushed with endorphins and adrenaline and then flushed out, and they merrily go about their lives. They realized that the sense of risk was necessary, but took care of it in other ways.

So may we never forget how much we truly love to swim or to take risks, for that matter.