Rot Gut With Beer Chaser

I’m about sixteen years old.  I’m eating Tasty Yeast to keep my complexion in line.  I’m deep in that period and I have a summer job working in the steel mill.  This is my first experience outside of the family where the idea of a big drinking night is my father and Uncle Carl having a clandestine “shot.”  That was their idea of a fantastically bad night.

So I am assigned one afternoon to what they call a “bull gang.”  A bull gang is a group of roving laborers, a team.  Whenever they have to load seventeen thousand pounds of sheet metal now, they call for bull gang number one or bull gang number two or bull gang number three.

It is now three o’clock in the afternoon on my first day in the bull gang and we are working in the forty inch soaking pits.  The forty inch soaking pits are really an off-shoot of Hell, where Dante got his original ideas.  The heat is incredible.  Dirty, heat, crud, and that smoke is rising constantly, and they lower these ingots down on a platform that’s covered with oil.  The oil burns as it’s lowered down.  Shushoooooo, cooooo, boooooauggh chingaaaaaah chuuumb cahunnnnng!  Blablablablablablabla chucchu chuchuchuchuchuchuchuchu owoooooooo!  Kabooooom!  They’re loading these things in and out.

I’m in a bull gang that is assigned to cleaning out the scale and the crud out of the bottom of a soaking pit.  They don’t allow the soaking pits to cool off—they keep the heat on while you work because it takes so much money to reheat them so they leave them on all the time.

So they lower us down there and we’re wearing asbestos suits.  We’ve got big long metal bars with big scoops on the end and you run around real fast and you chip away at the scale that forms on the metal.

You have thick wooden shoes.  The minute you touch the ground the shoes start burning.  You are allowed two and a half minutes in the soaking pit and then you jump back up on this little lift, up you go.  And they’re lowering the other guys down and you run over and sit down on the bench Ahhhhhaaaaaaaaaaoh boy, oh, Charlie, what am I doing here?  We work all day at this and it is now ten minutes to four.  The shift is out at four o’clock.

They take all of us out, they put all of us in our little bus and they’re taking us back to the dressing room.  A dressing room way at the end of the forty-inch mill where all our clothes are hanging in wicker baskets from the ceiling.  They hang them from the ceiling so the rats won’t get ‘em.

MORE ROT GUT TO COME

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Regarding a happy, Cummings-related matter, even I wrote a poem. My father’s uncle had given him a small pistol from the 1920s that might have still worked if one could have still found bullets for it. My father gave it to me. It was unregistered and thus illegal in New York, when the police offered $50 for turning in any firearm, no questions asked. (I’d tried to sell it to an antique dealer, but he said it was illegal for him even to look at it.) I took it to the local police precinct and got my $50. I knew just how to spend it and made a poem/one-of-a-kind artists’ book about the experience:

In addition to his original signature on his handwritten postcard, my Cummings collection includes: 1 bibliography of his works; 3 biographies of him; 2 books of critiques of his work; 1 book describing and illustrating his numerous paintings; 1 book lauding his innovative typographic layouts (edited by author, critic, and visual poet, Richard Kostelanetz); 1 book of selected letters; 2 non-fiction books he wrote—The Enormous Room, a description of his life in a French prison during World War I,  and Eimi, about his negative experience during a trip to the Soviet Union in 1931; 1 exhibit catalog of his memorabilia (NYC Public Library); 2 books with his introductions (one is of an early compilation of “Krazy Kat” comics); 3 videos about him and 6 audio cassettes of his reading of his works; 2 books of a play each by him; 1 book of his lectures (i: six nonlectures); various periodical essays about his work; 3 books of typewriter facsimiles of his poems; 10 first editions of his poetry books; 1 U.S. Forever postage stamp.

Also: 2 eb poems about him I made into artists’ books. (One shown above.) The other artists’ book is based on the text of a delightful and easily understood Cummings poem, “In Just–.” (As he did not title his poems, they are usually referenced by the poems’ first lines. I gave my book its own unconventional title) I especially like Cummings’ line: “when the world is puddle-wonderful.” My book, held together by two brass, round paper fasteners, consists of a front and a back cover, three translucent sheets each with parts of the poem, then the complete poem:

Cummings, in 1938, wrote a smug introduction to his Collected Poems (now superseded). He frequentlycombined withoutspaces, wordsandpunctuation. The intro begins:

The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople.

-it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings:mostpeople are snobs.

Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to mostpeople? Catastrophe unmitigated. Social revolution. The cultured aristocrat yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultra voluptuous superpalazzo,and dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming with every conceivable species of undesirable organism. Mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness. If mostpeople were to be born twice they’d improbably call it dying-

you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:the mystery which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now;and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.

(Gravemarker photo: Tony Fischer. Forever portrait photo: Edward Weston.)

    E. E. CummingsForever(stamp).

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And it was never stopped.  Three shifts a day, six guys would come into this office on each shift, six guys would leave.  The same six all the time.  Each one was well over a hundred years old, these men.  You could smell the coffee.  Everything permeated.  It was permeated—  the air with coffee and the smell of old salami sandwiches.  And old files full of ancient shipping slips.  And the smell of ink.  And corduroy jackets, and these three guys were just sitting there at their desks.  The other three were out checking, which is something they always do in these offices.

You could see the freight cars moving by and then I noticed something.  They weren’t saying a word.  The minute I opened the door, one of them went “Shush shush shush!”

I said, “What?”

“Are you the new…?”

You could hear the mill booming all around.

“Shush shush shush!”

I noticed that, sitting next to one of the desks was a pail full of water, and these three men were watching this pail with fantastic intensity, looking at the pail.  And on the edge of the desk was a one-foot ruler.  It was balanced half off the desk and half on the desk and on the end of the ruler, hanging out in space, was a piece of cheese.  And the three of them were watching the ruler.  Directly under the piece of cheese on the floor was the pail of water.

I said, “What are you guys doing?”

One of them whispered, “We’re catching mice.”

“You’re catching mice?”

“Yeah.  Shush.  He’ll be out any minute now.”

All that night we stood in the darkness and watched mice creep up out of the file cabinets, sneak along the ruler, and make a fatal grab for that piece of cheese.  Suddenly the ruler would tilt—in he goes into the water.  It was a good night.  They got seven that night.  All the while the mill is roaring around us.  And right at this very moment, tonight, there are three men checking and three men sitting in the office of the forty inch soaking pit shipping end.  And probably catching mice.  Out there in the darkness.

END OF SOAKING PIT AND MICE

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E.E. Cummings

Cummings was (and still is) a highly regarded American poet best known for using all lower case letters and for sometimes playing with the layouts of words on the page. Sometimes he makes readers work, re-constructing his innovative layouts and word-usages:

In Harper’s Magazine of March, 2014, Ruth Franklin, in a laudatory essay, writes: ”…the perfect age to discover E. E. Cummings. With his refusal to play by grammatical rules, his shameless sentimentality, his sexual frankness, and his easy quotability, he is the ideal poet of youth.”

He wrote not only outright sexual poems, but some of the most conventional and lovely love poems, and his marriage to beautiful fashion model and photographer, Marion Morehouse (the love of his life), lasted 28 years—until his death in 1962.

He complained that publishers’ typesetting for printing in books could not properly produce the layouts he required for some of his typewritten poems, so in recent years, a publisher began publishing typewriter-set books of his poems:

Typewriter poems: standard sonnet form; layout manipulation poem.

(Two of his most admired poems.)

One writer stated that Cummings had copyrighted the lower case writing of his name, and it’s frequently seen in lower case in books and magazine articles about him. But I believe that’s a misunderstanding–I’ve always encountered his actual signature in caps exactly as per the original postcard to the 8th Street Bookshop I have preserved in a clear plastic envelope for use as a book mark for reading books by and about him:

Cummings lived a good part of his productive life in a small apartment on Patchin Place, a short, gated mews in Greenwich Village, on the north side of 10^th Street, west of 6^th Avenue. He was a dedicated New Yorker from after his ambulance service and unjust incarceration in WW I until he died.

He refused to make money out of anything but his writing, so, until the last few years of his life when he’d gained some notoriety/sales and speaking fees, he lived in basic poverty. After having several of his books published, he dedicated his No Thanks poetry book to the major publishers who had given a “no thanks” to its manuscript:

Cummings also wrote standard-seeming poems like that below.

Clues: “anyone” = the average person protagonist of the poem;

“noone” = anyone’s loving wife:

 More than 50 years after his death, Cummings is still highly regarded by many:

Susan Cheever, from her Cummings bio: Modernism as Cummings and his mid-twentieth century colleagues embraced it had three parts. The first was the exploration of using sounds instead of meanings to connect words to the reader’s feelings. The second was the idea of stripping away all unnecessary things to bring attention to form and structure: the formerly hidden skeleton of a work would now be exuberantly visible. The third facet of modernism was an embrace of adversity. In a world seduced by easy understanding, the modernist believed that difficulty enhanced the pleasures of reading.  In a Cummings poem the reader must often pick his way toward comprehension, which comes, when it does, in a burst of delight and recognition.

Brad Leithauer, The New Yorker: Whether Cummings was pursuing the ugly or the beautiful, his prime strength lay in his unexpected concisions—Those passage in which his weird locutions enable him to speak with greater briskness and distillation than ordinary discourse allows….For this reader, Cummings will forever remain a poet who energetically explored  a number of cul—de-sacs: the limits of intelligibility, of punctuational eccentricity, of fragmentation, of—literally—unreadability.

Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate: By erasing the sacred left margin, breaking down words into syllables and letters, employing eccentric punctuation, and indulging in all kinds of print-based shenanigans, Cummings brought into question some of our basic assumptions about poetry, grammar, sign, and language itself, and he also succeeded in giving many a typesetter a headache. Like Pound, who never wrote an obedient line, Cummings reveled in breaking the rules of grammar, punctuation, orthography, and lineation. Measured by sheer boldness of experiment, no American poet compares to him, for he slipped Houdini-like out of the locked box of the stanza, then leaped from the platform of the poetic line into an unheard-of way of writing poetry…. No list of major 20^th-century poets can do without him….

Susan Cheever: He cared about playfulness, he cared about sexuality, he cared about whether you’d have a drink with him, he cared about could you string a line together….I still wonder: he so magnificently rejected everything we care about today: money, status, prestige, Harvard. And I’m just in awe of how he managed to do that. I think it was easier to do that then than it is now. He lived a really 19th-century life in the 20th century—I mean that in a good way.

EDWARD ESTLIN CUMMINGS AND THE DOG HE LOVED

At sixteen, at the family’s New Hampshire summer home, Estlin had an experience I’m sure he never forgot—as I can’t forget having read about it in Suzan Cheever’s biography, E. E. Cummings: A Life. (My wife loves dogs so much that I will never relate this story to her.)

Estlin and his young sister were in the family’s new canoe on a lake. Their dog, Rex, lunged at a hornet flying around their heads, capsizing and sinking the new, supposedly unsinkable, folding canoe. Rex, eventually out of energy, tried to save himself by climbing up on Estlin’s sister. She submerged, came up, submerged and came up again, Rex still on her, refusing to let go. Estlin now feared she would surely drown. To save his sister, he grabbed the panicking dog and held him underwater until he stopped struggling.

Their father happened along in another boat and saved the two children, but Rex was dead. They found Rex’s body and brought it home for burial. As Cheever writes:

“The family put up a marker, and Estlin did what he so often did

when his feelings threatened to overwhelm him

—he wrote a poem.”

How horrific this act of necessary killing must have been and how this must have haunted him the rest of his life. I wish I had never encountered the story. I can understand his impulse to write about all true sad and happy matters in his life.

END PART 1 OF 2

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