E. E. Cummings by the Numbers

Abstract

A WEBSITE ADVERTISING ‘A Groundbreaking Advancement in the Field of Obsolescence’ introduces the USB typewriter, whose ‘circuitry transforms beautiful old manual typewriters into retro-futuristic marvels’. A steampunk melding of the mechanical and the digital, twentieth and twenty-first century technologies, this digital typewriter affords those desiring a break from digital devices the opportunity to ‘type with good old fashioned ink-on-paper while electronically recording [their] manuscript to an SD card’.1 Describing E. E. Cummings and other avant-garde typewriter experimenters of his time as code poets manqués, Rita Raley might have found this device a useful vehicle for expressing their in-between, retro-futuristic status. Here, she imagines them ‘upgrading their medium and exchanging their typewriter keys for the units of programming languages, and the result would in part resemble the contemporary mode of experimental writing and net.art called “codework”’.2 Although he was necessarily constrained, in Raley’s words, ‘by what the media [of his time] allow[ed]’, Cummings’s own mingling of natural language and code comes closer to the notion of the USB typewriter, and codework itself, than she allows. A code poet avant la lettre, he practised a digital prosody whose underlying mechanisms anticipate those of codework. In composing poems ‘by the numbers’, Cummings also digitised traditional concrete poetry, the dynamic operations of his own works arising from the submerged code governing their visual displays. In equal parts poet and programmer, he transformed his mechanical typewriter into the equivalent of a hardware device supplied with the necessary software for running a poem as an executable file. In doing so, Cummings anticipated what Gillian Huang-Tiller describes as ‘the heterogeneity, multiplicity, and self-reflexivity of postmodern poetry’.3 His fragmenting of word units, aberrant syntax, and unmooring of grammatical markers reveal a ‘pre-postmodern’ sensibility, while his digital sequencing of the poems considered here suggests a new mode of organisation: digital prosody.4 These poems call into question the view of Cummings as a modernist poet. As Huang-Tiller expresses it, ‘his self-reflexive experimentation further challenges established boundaries between modernism and postmodernism’.5 Retrofuturistic, these coded, digitised works gesture towards our own era; in Jean-François Lyotard’s formulation, ‘New languages are added to the old ones … machine languages, the matrices of game theory, new systems of musical notation’.6