Rodney Nelson: Editorial Eye

To the Editor:

Gadfly is my favorite columnist. I’m almost a “dittohead.” And the man I knew as Mr. Raymond was my high school journalism teacher.

I learned news writing from him, and he gave me an editorial eye.

In his column for June 24, he cites a poem, “To Satch,” and attributes it to “eecummings (he hated punctuation and capitalization).”

I’ve been in the poetry business awhile and must report that E. E. Cummings never lowercased his name (the de-spacing must have been a typo). And he loved to toy around with punctuation.

Moreover, “To Satch” sounded not quite Cummings; so I asked librarian Karen Joan Kohoutek to check out the citation. Here’s what she found:
It appears that the poem is “American Gothic (To Satch)” by Paul Vesey (the pseudonym of African-American poet Samuel W. Allen). My source is “Soulscript: A Collection of Classic African American Poetry” (Harlem Moon Classics), although it appears in various other collections as well.

Mr. Raymond taught me well. The editorial eye is hard to keep closed.

-Rodney Nelson
Fargo

Editor’s note: While we are thankful for Mr. Nelson’s admiration of Gadfly, and recognize that E.E. Cummings is often capitalized, we do note that his poetry does not always follow conventional usage of caps and lowercase and that the publishing world itself has varied in its treatment of the poet’s name.  See Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, E.E. Cummings: a biography at ix (Sourcebooks, Inc. 2004) (“‘I am a small eye poet,’ Cummings wrote his mother as a way of explaining his well-known practice of not capitalizing in his poetry the first person pronoun.”); Norman Friedman, SPRING The Journal of the E.E. Cummings Society at 114 (October 1992) (discussing the disparate treatment of Cummings’ name by publishers and advocating for standard capitalization). Therefore, Gadfly’s choice to use lowercase letters seemed to us true to Cummings’ art form—or at least permissible by Cummings’ own standards. As for Mr. Nelson’s second point, our research discloses that indeed the poem quoted by Gadfly was authored by Samuel W. Allen and published in his 1957 collection Ivory Tusks and Other Poems.  We regret the error.