Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Thursday, March 25th.

And today I'm going to read for you a poem by American poet E. E. Cummings, who lived from

1894 to 1962 and is widely regarded as one of the most influential modernist poets of the 20th century.

So E.E. Cummings pioneered and certainly perfected the technique of free verse. He wrote

throughout his long and illustrious career over 2,900 poems, and most of them, if not all of them, use this free verse technique.

It looks as if it has no form at all.

If you go look at the poems on the page, everything kind of runs together.

There's very little punctuation, very few capital letters, punctuation.

If it's there, isn't kind of a strange place.

The spaces between words are either elongated or eliminated. And he uses a lot of these techniques in order to experiment with how

to create meaning within a poem and how the form and the content kind of work together to produce kind of an unusual and

subversive kind of meaning. And so in spite of the fact that many of his poems look as if they have

no formal technique at all, they really do. They're just experimental. They're unusual. They're

avant-garde, so to speak. So the poem that I'm going to read for you

today is called Injust, and this is how it goes. Injust spring, when the world is mud-lushes,

the little lame balloon man whistles far and wee, and Eddie and Bill come running from marbles and piracies,

and it's spring when the world is puddle wonderful.

The queer old balloon man whistles far and we,

and Betty and Disbell come dancing from hopscotch and jump rope,

and it's spring, and the goat-footed balloon man whistles

far and we.

So if you noticed in hearing the poem, I stopped and started rapidly and I took some unusual pauses. And this is my attempt to produce,

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