Here’s a peculiar fellow.

Poetry and all.

Me up at does
by e e cummings

Me up at does

out of the floor
quietly Stare

a poisoned mouse

still who alive

is asking What
have i done that

You wouldn’t have

None too conventional. None too grammar-appeasing. All those sms/msn users and other such s acronymed methods of communication and perhaps the odd MySpace user should hold an e e cummings day! Celebrate the use of lowercase and random capitalisation, commas, full stops, apostrophes and quote word quote (that’s almost coding) in the wrong places.

Hey look, if he could claim it as poetry – be famous and all that while only leaving a few disgruntled literate geniuses in his wake then well there’s room for the emo in all of us to express things however we want to.

Onward ho!

Better still, let’s introduce e e cummings into our schools.

“Good morning English class, My name is Edward Estlin. Oh look, you don’t need my help, you just need to bluff your way into secondary school, onward through university and into the workforce where of course literacy is a given. We can always pay others who somehow actually learnt where a comma should go to write that next report. Or you know, you can always pull the word ‘art’ out of your handbag/backpack and claim the fame that follows. Good luck and good afternoon.”

Yet, I can actually find a little amusing quirk in his words. Make sense of this:

will you teach a wretch to live…
by e.e. cummings

(will you teach a wretch to live straighter than a needle) ask
her
ask
when
(ask and
ask
and ask
again and)ask a
brittle little
person fiddling
in
the
rain

And meanwhile, you msn users (and the like) have absolutely zero claim to e e cummings. Save the planet with exemplary grammar before we start to breed ignoramuses!