Open “The Sweet Old Etcetera” by Allison Clifford
Clifford’s lovingly produced Flash versions of E. E. Cummings’ poetry are a tribute to the poet’s playfulness and experimentation with language. In each piece, she has sought to highlight a feature of Cummings’ poetry: his idiosyncratic use of parentheses, capitalization, and spacing on the page, his way of directing the reader’s gaze to mimic the drift of a leaf to the ground, or the saccadic eye movements hopping from letter to letter trying to assemble them into something that makes sense, and more. For Cummings, the typewriter was his toy of choice to shape language. Clifford’s homage allows us to imagine E. E. Cummings creating poetry in the digital age, but it shines best in those graceful touches that are all her own.
Featured in Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.
