e. e. cummings

outside it was New York and beautifully snowing. Inside
snug and evil
("i was sitting in mcsorley's")

olaf (upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit i will not eat"
("i sing of olaf glad and big")

cause dying is

perfectly natural; perfectly
putting it mildly lively(but

Death

is strictly
scientific
&artificial &

evil & legal
("dying is fine)but Death")

e.e.cummings, with the denial of the tyranny of capitalization and his other graphic rebellions, seems like the kind of poet I should dislike--pretentious, and pretentiously gimmicky, and sort of silly because of that. Yet I admire his balls-out approach to what he thinks poetry should be. He and Auden write some of the best love poetry from the last hundred years (none of cummings's quoted here), but clearly I'm enamoured with the way he uses poetry to gaze at (human) evil, which is often gruesome, but also sometimes suprisingly small.

And cummings can sure put an image together--look at that parenthesis in the first line from "olaf."