E. E. Cummings Reads: Xaipe, One Times One and Fifty Poems

Rating:
Summary: cummings was a great poet and a brillant reader.
Review: After listening to this tape, one will understand how e.e. cummings attracted large audiences to his readings. Each syllable is spoken with care, and you can hear and feel the unique rhythms of his poetry. cummings has a musical voice with a range that conveys a variety of emotions. This tape is an insight not only to the work of cummings, but to the oral art of poetry as well.

Rating:
Summary: "but beauty is more now than dying's when"
Review: Side One of this cassette contains passages from two of Cummings' plays, HIM, and the blank-verse SANTA CLAUS, as well as the bewilderingly jazzy account of visiting Lenin's tomb, taken from his ponderous book EIMI. "Him" is a joyous ars poetica, and the blank verse of "Santa" is deft and enchanting.

But Side Two is the reason for buying this recording: eighteen of Cummings' poems written at the peak of his powers: odes to Spring and odes to Love, and a blithely undaunted championing of the proudhumble "i" against the drab machinery of egalitarianism. Nine of the poems are sonnets, all of the poems are in the nimble idiom that is so recongizably his own.

The small lyric "yes is a pleasant country" (14th of the eighteen poems) is as delicate and fine as anything by Robert Herrick.

The listener will finds herself memorizing these poems, perhaps without intending to. Cummings' mellow, sharp, distinctive, and occasionally cranky voice gives him the slight edge over the unremittingly stentorian yet much beloved Dylan Thomas as the premier reader of poetry in the twentieth century.

To paraphrase Cummings himself: "we thank you, estlin, for most these amazing songs."