SEVENTEEN POEMS BY E. E. CUMMINGS

I casually disliked E. E. Cummings for the longest time. His experiments with spelling, punctuation, and grammar seemed like a simulation, a false show. In other words, pretension. And it was hard not to pin on him the waves upon waves of copycats, bursting through the door which he had cracked open, with reams of “experimental” poetry, all but a fraction of it terrible. Still, a poet of Cummings’ stature calls for serious consideration, whatever one’s hunch. (“It’s not you, it’s me?”) And I realized that I had never really dug into his work, just casually read a poem here and there, now and then, when it crossed my path. So one afternoon I sat down with his Complete Poems and read them backwards… meh… eh… the poems slipped in one eye and out the other… until, finally, something stuck. There it was, in his very first book of poems.

Or, rather, there they were: the unbeautiful ladies with comfortable minds, Kitty the teenage prostitute, the ur-pimp Dick Mid. Characters so tragically alive that they couldn’t be stuffed into a tidy sonnet. To do so would conjure shade without color, shape without form. Ah, form!!! Here was a disquieting, disjunctive form, not for its own sake, but for disquieting, disjunctive lives. Ultimately, for disquiet and disjuncture. Floating fragments of the poems got stuck in my head and started to wreak havoc, like puffs of asbestos. Death’s littlest pal… god gloats upon Her stunning flesh… unseen things,things obscene… unspontaneous… cute… you corking brute… These poems are a sexually charged pervigilium, Prufrock on amphetamines, racing through the streets, catching snatches through alleyways and windowpanes, ravenous for it all. When you’re a bookmaker and something disquieting gets stuck in your head, there’s only one place for it to go — I starting putting ink on paper.

I set to work with the zeal of a convert, printing a typographically experimental edition. It had twenty-four pages, three colors and a twist on every page. Then a piece of art stopped me in my tracks. One look at a Bill Brandt photograph, depicting some Nowhere Everytown, and I realized that I had gotten the poems all wrong. I had missed the forest for the trees; I had missed the town for the chimneys. The photograph perfectly capturedthe poems, while my typographic experiments had matched them only superficially. I had done what I had accused Cummings of doing: I had experimented for experiment’s sake, making a false show – a simulation – a pretense. So, the edition – days away from being finished and ready to sell – went into a box. I left the only finished copy at a bar after five pints.

A year later my failed first attempt was long forgotten – but the poems weren’t. They were stuck with me. In the garden… you corking brute. On a drive home at night… god gloats upon Her stunning flesh. Cranking at the press… unseen things,things obscene. Ok: let’s give it another try. This time I built the edition not around the poems, but around the photograph which had so perfectly and accidentally captured the poems. Everything came together, and I am proud to present you with, on my second attempt, No Reply’s edition of Chimneys.

This is an important edition for us. After the addition of an etching press to my workshop and hours spent with master gravure printer Ray Bidegain, I am pleased to announce that intaglio will become a mainstay for No Reply. There are only a handful of presses regularly employing both relief and intaglio in their books, and I will be thrilled to be among them. This is our first edition to employ intaglio printing from the workshop. Intaglio is the mirror of relief printing (of which letterpress is one type). While relief inks and prints from a raised surface, intaglio inks and prints from recessions. This allows for a degree of detail (and, I think, a depth of expression) impossible with letterpress. Each gravure is inked and wiped by hand, then pulled by hand on dampened paper using an etching press. The process is slow – one print might take half an hour – but well worth the effort. An intaglio gravure is a singular thing to behold.

OPTIONAL EXTRAS

The edition is offered with an optional cloth slipcase, featuring an intaglio spine label.

While I consider the first attempt at this edition a failure, it is likely to interest some. Therefore, I am offering copies alongside the final edition. If anything, collectors may be interested in seeing a side-by-side comparison of two attempts at the same text from the same bookmaker. The first attempt is sewn and perfectly readable, but does not have a cover. I am not sharing any photos, in order to keep its typographic experiments a surprise. I suspect that many will enjoy it – and may even enjoy it more than the second attempt – but agree that, while it is a good piece of printing, it’s just not right for these poems.