E e cummings pics of dogs
•
An Illustrated Tour of New York City from a Dog’s Point of View
“A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry.” So wrote E.B. White wrote in his timeless love letter to New York — a city that has, in fact, has inspired a great deal of poetry itself: visual poetry, like Berenice Abbott’s stunning photographs of its changing face and Julia Rothman’s illustrated tour of the five boroughs; poetic prose, like Zadie Smith’s love-hate letter to Gotham and the private writings of notable authors who lived in and visited the city; and poetry-poetry, like Frank O’Hara’s “Song (Is it dirty)” and Walt Whitman’s “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun.”
Now comes a most unusual addition to the menagerie of Gotham-lovers — a foreign cousin of Manhattan’s beloved creative canines. In Americanine: A Haute Dog in New York (public library), French illustrator Yann Kebbi takes us on an imaginative and infectiously enthusiastic tour of the city from the point of view of a dog, “a merry canine” — a creature full of goodwill and earnest wonderment at the world, wholly devoid of the petty cynicisms that blind us to the mir
•
•
E.E. Cummings’ Colorful, Imaginative Childhood Drawings
The Vault is Slate’s new history blog. Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter @slatevault, and find us on Tumblr. Find out more about what this space is all about here.
Archivists at the Massachusetts Historical Society, while cataloging the papers of the family of E.E. Cummings, recently found caches of previously unseen writing and sketches from the poet’s early years. Here are two drawings by a 6- and 7-year-old Edward Estlin Cummings.
The two sketches, made between 1900 and 1902, reflect Cummings’ immersion in the popular culture of the time: circuses, Wild West shows, and adventure fiction.
The friendship between the rhinoceros and the soldier, sketched briefly in a single drawing accompanied by creatively punctuated text, could come straight from a H. Rider Haggard novel or one of the fantastic animal tales of Ernest Thompson Seton.
In the “Wild West Show” poster, the young artist pictures himself as a mustachioed impresario in military uniform, looking much like the dashing real-life showman William “Buffalo Bill” Cody.
In later life, Cummings was to write a poem about Cody’s death—a work that reflected his onetime hero worship for the man, along with his more adult disillusionment in the “blueeyed boy