Carnevali on Clifford's interpretation of Cummings

       In Alison Clifford's "The Sweet Old Etcetera" we are given the ability to interact and watch some of E.E.Cummings most famous poems. While he was known for his use of "white space", he was also known for his ability to create the image of the thing itself he was trying to write about. Clifford uses five of his poems and two of those poems really show us thing Cummings was writing about. Even though he successfully showed these images without the digital world, Clifford has given life to his work and has helped to enhance the purposeful spacing and unorthodox line breaks that Cummings used so well.
        Clifford allows us to watch the poem unfold as if a leaf has literally fallen from a tree and has created the poem. We are given the opportunity to see this famous poem come to life. After we see the whole poem fall from the branch, the poem also disappears through itself and we return the beginning tree that holds the certain poems that Clifford had chosen for the piece. When one reads this poem for the first time, it seems confusing. I first ran into the poem my freshman year of college when I was still a young and was not aware of the true beauty of this poem.
        Whether you read this poem on a sheet of paper or you see the poem unfold in Clifford's complex landscape you will still see the simple beauty that it holds. A leaf falls in loneliness. That is exactly what the poem does. We can see that inside the word loneliness a leaf falls. It is brilliant and simple. And that is why it is so inspiring. You get a strange feeling inside when you read it. You question whether or not this is really poetry and that is exactly what a poet wants. Or even an artist. They want you talk about their work. They desire for their readers or viewers to react to the thing they have created and say to themselves, "hmmm is this really poetry?" or "what defines a poem?" Just as we can ask the question, "what is the point to Clifford's piece?" She is repurposing older poems that may have been forgotten. (Not that E.E.Cummings is forgettable.) She almost gives a new generation the access to these poems in a way that they will enjoy them. Most people do not read books of poetry, unless they have to for school and even then we are given online assignments. But I truly digress.
        Back to the poems involved in this digital landscape. One other poem I feel the need to mention is "Grasshopper". A poem that was written to give the reader the experience of watching a grasshopper hop into the air. Cummings tried to capture the wild nature of the grasshopper through this poem. He used a lot of white space and different line breaks to create this image for his readers.
        Just as Clifford creates the image of a leaf falling and creating the poem, she has taken the letters and had them jump around until they have formed the poem. It even helps the reader to understand what the poem actually says. My best interoperation of the poem is as follows. -Who as we look up now gathering into the leap, arriving rearrangingly to become grasshopper-. Cummings takes us through the act of the leap, and the strange image of the grasshopper flopping through the sky. He shows us how the grasshopper is wild in the air, almost coming apart and then coming back together in the end to be exactly the same as it was before it jumped.
        When it comes to the idea of taking these classic poems and turning them into something digital, I almost cringe because you  should not fuck with Cummings. But Clifford almost pays homage to the poet by creating such a beautiful landscape out of his own words. It is something I believe Cummings would enjoy, only because he tried to emulate these real pieces of nature into his poems and Clifford has created an image of nature from those poems. She honors him in her work. This is the kind of Digital Humanities that I both love and hate. I love this because like I said it really captures Cummings work and it is beautiful to watch unfold. But then I hate it because it has taken something that was meant for paper and has taken it and made it part of the digital world. Yes it appears as it does on paper, so really this is ok in my book. But I feel like I'm cheating on the hard copies of Cummings work. Still I will continue to not so secretly enjoy The Sweet Old Etcetera.