Spring Thing

The poetical season beckons

Poet Edward Estlin Cummings, perhaps better known as  e.e. cummings, loved spring nearly as much as he despised using his typewriter’s shift key. 

The man was notorious for pioneering new frontiers for lowercase letters—he rarely used capital letters, enough that academics covered for him by framing his aversion as a “radical experimentation with form.” Of the demonstrably few times the man used capital letters, one time, tellingly, was to spell “Spring” in his poem “Spring is like a perhaps hand.” It should be noted that the Associated Press Stylebook does not capitalize the season, ditto Vanity Fair, which follows AP guidelines and where Cummings did a stint a century ago. Which is to say he should know better, so we must assume Spring’s capital “S” was a deliberate, artistic choice. And in this rare instance, I support it because Spring, especially in the North Bay, is a proper noun in my book. 

Here, Spring is a living, breathing being, brimming with life,…