Innovation and Multimedia in the Poetry of cummings and Mayakovsky

Abstract

In her article Innovation and Multimedia in the Poetry of cummings and Svetlana Nikitina discusses how e.e. cummings and Vladimir Mayakovsky foreshadowed the digital revolution of today in their multimedia experiments in poetry. Although they spoke different languages and lived in different societies, the two modernist poets display similarities in their modernist aesthetics. Both are artists as well as poets who blur the line between the two forms of art. Their synesthesia inoculates them against postmodern disintegration of meaning or form. Although cummings is a staunch individualist, and Mayakovsky the tribune of the collective, they both rebel against traditional poetic forms and invent a new language of multisensory and multimedia processing. Both make orthography and page design sculpt the spontaneous experience they want to convey. By showing Mayakovsky and cummings as consummate makers of words, images, experiences, and new social orders who treated their verbal material as a physical medium, Nikitina supports the claim that the poets' visual sensibility and multimedia orientation prevented them from sliding into postmodern deconstruction and created the center that could hold. Svetlana Nikitina, Innovation and Multimedia in the Poetry of cummings and page 2 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 11.4 (2009):