Cummings’s poem would look like this if given conventional punctuation and set in a solid block like prose:
Buffalo Bill’s defunct, who used to ride a water-smooth silver stallion and break one, two, three, four, five pigeons just like that. Jesus, he was a handsome man. And what I want to know is: “How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mister Death?”
If this were done, by what characteristics would it still be recognizable as poetry? But what would be lost?
What will be an ideal response?
By its compression, indirection, and bits of lyricism (“a water-smooth silver stallion”) this passage might still be classifiable as poetic. But all sorts of things would be lost—the jerky rhythms created by the line breaks, which function as tonal notations; the emphasis placed on certain terms by isolating them as separate lines; the running together into one word of the description of Cody’s shooting of clay pigeons, mimicking the rapidity of his sharpshooting; and even the way the layout forces the eye to track back and forth across the page in a kind of echo of Cody’s aiming his rifle at those moving targets.
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