E.E. Cummings "No Thanks"

Cummings is never far from mind as Thanksgiving approaches. Last year I posted his poem THANKSGIVING (1956) and wrote a little about what it meant to me. This year I thought about Cummings in a different conjunction. Wikipedia has this about his book No Thanks:

No Thanks is a 1935 collection of poetry by E. E. Cummings. Cummings is also often referred to as e.e. cummings due to his creative use of orthography in some of his work, and his perceived bias for the lowercase form of his name. He self-published the collection with the help of his mother and dedicated it to the fourteen publishing houses who turned the collection down. The book is unconventionally bound not on the left but rather the top, like a stenographer's pad. This was his most difficult collection of poems to publish.

His dedication always impressed me, as I imagine it must most young people who come upon it:

Perhaps this came into mind today because earlier in the day I got a new title up at Lulu.com. The whole work feels rather perfunctory to me, but I had reasons for wanting to rush it out—mainly a 30% off sale at the site that only has a few hours left to run.

Many friends of mine have used it or any other of various POD sites to get their manuscripts out in perfect bound form—as such we don't have to ask our mothers to spot us $300, the sum his is reported to have given in order to enable his self-publication. We also don't need to indulge in the perhaps somewhat peevish bitterness Cummings did (however justifiable) in this case or in others, as was one of the centers of attraction to his work when we were young.

We being brand new, we have other things to be peevishly bitter about if we choose that path; but being older, it becomes less appealing. Meanwhile, as the Master stated, youth keeps right on

gr
owing old.

It may take me a day or two to put something more splashy about the new book up here at the site.