It started out innocently enough.

I think it was in a high school English class that I first made Mr. Cummings' acquaintance. They had us read anyone lived in a pretty how town and maggie and milly and molly and may, and I thought he was a pretty nifty guy.

Then came the BBS world, and my aspiring poet friends dutifully copied certain works into text files to share with us, the neophytes. silently if,out of not knowable, since feeling is first, yonder deadfromtheneckup graduate of a... I began to suspect that there was more to this Cummings fellow than I had thought.

It was also Cummings who awakened me to the fact that college was very different from high school, by the virtue of having she being Brand published in my English literature text. Any institution that not only permitted but actually required us to read thinly veiled innuendoes was pretty cool in my book.

I think, though, it was when I found myself copying i am a beggar always into my diary and posting let it go--the on my homepage that I realized that Cummings had silently entered my personal pantheon, and somehow that didn't seem a bad thing at all.