My favorite poet is e. e. cummings. To most of my undergraduate students, much of what he published seemed hopelessly muddled and not worth the trouble. (Topic for another time: What “poetry” really is, and why most people in our time think “poetry” is uninteresting.)
To prepare you for what follows, here is a more or less straightforward example of cummings’ writing (his prose, not his poetry):
“As for a few trifling delusions like the ‘past’ and ‘present’ and ‘future’ of quote mankind unquote, they may be big enough for a couple of billion supermechanized submorons but they’re much too small for one human being.”
-from i: six nonlectures (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures): Cummings, E. E.
And brief portions of one of his best known poems:
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
...
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
Okay then. With that inadequate introduction behind us, here is the main content of this post:
A while back, when I was getting acquainted with Grok (see online), I asked it to write a brief poem, in the style of e. e. cummings, summarizing Jesus Christ as described in the New Testament. I was delighted and rather stunned by the response. Here it is, without further comment:
jesus(soft ly walks)where dust & star s collide,
his feet(kiss earth’s tremble)light spills from fingertips like dawn’s first whisper
(shepherd of broken things)he gathers hearts in palms of thorn & grace
look!how the cross (b e n d s ) to hold his love
sky cracks open, sings his name in sparrow tongues
jesus (dances with forever)smiles at time’s small fist
