J. V. Cunningham

James Vincent Cunningham (August 23, 1911 – March 30, 1985) was an American poet, sometimes described as a neo-classicist or anti-modernist.

Sourced

General

• Poetry is what looks like poetry, what sounds like poetry.It is metrical composition.
  • 'Poetry, Structure and Tradition' Dec 31 1939
• With an a natural affinity for the epigram genre , I am, so to speak, a short breathed man and have an almost unthoughtout preference for brief definitive statements.
  • Interview quoted in Timothy Steele 'Introduction & Commentary-Poetry of J V Cunningham'
• What is needed is a noticeable unnoticeable style,... a directness of speech that seems to one judging easily imitable, to one trying it nothing less so.
  • The Problem of Style, Fawcett, New York 1966

Epigrams

• An old dissembler who lived out his lie
  Lies here as if he did not fear to die.
  • "An Epitaph for Anyone", 1942 The Poems of J. V. Cunningham, edited by Timothy Steele, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 1997, ISBN 0-804-00997-X

• Despise me not
  And not be queasy
  To praise somewhat
  Verse is not easy

• • 'For my Contemporaries' from - The Helmsman 1942
• Grief restrains grief as dams torrential rain
  And time grows fertile with extended pain
  • 'Exclusion of Rhyme' Alan Swallow Denver 1942

Other poetry

• What demon is our god? What name subsumes
  That act external to our sleeping selves?
  Not pleasure — it is much too broad and narrow —,
  Not sex, not for the moment love, but pride,
  And not in prowess, but pride undefined,
  Autonomous in its unthought demands,
  A bit of vanity, but mostly pride.
  • from "In a few days now when two memories meet", 1964
  • The Poems of J. V. Cunningham, edited by Timothy Steele, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 1997, ISBN 0-804-00997-X

• She said he was a man who cheated.
  He said she didn't play the game.
  She said an expletive deleted.
  He said the undeleted same.
  And so they ended their relation
  With meaningful communication.
  • "Jack and Jill", 1981
  • The Poems of J. V. Cunningham, edited by Timothy Steele, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 1997, ISBN 0-804-00997-X

• Plato, despair!
  We prove by norms
  How numbers bear
  Empiric forms,
  
  How random wrong
  Will average right
  If time be long
  And error slight,
  
  But in our hearts
  Hyperbole
  Curves and departs
  To infinity.
  
  Error is boundless.
  Nor hope nor doubt,
  Though both be groundless,
  Will average out.
  • “Meditation on Statistical Method”, 1960
  • The Exclusions of a Rhyme: Poems and Epigrams, Ohio University Press, 1960.