Buffalo Bill's Defunct
ee cummings

Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

1923

And you thought I was going to Beach Boy you endlessly (well, I am, here's another pic):

But it's fascinating people I'm fascinated with this week (Brian Wilson among them). Buffalo Bill? Sure. And how 'bout that e.e. cummings? What could be more fascinating than a man who legally changed his name to lower case letters? cummings is someone that we will look into in detail toward the end of the semester, but as a precursor, I thought you may want to see just what can be gleaned from a poem, just what type of analyses, if one were to really look into the minutiae of what amounts to a few words from the dictionary all out of order (see Duchamp quote below).

In "Buffalo Bill's Defunct," the poet admires Bill's skill with a rifle, as a showman, makes a point of his good looks, and yet his admiration is peppered with cynicism. The word "defunct" instead of "dead" is offered in a nanny-nanny kind of way, and the question "how do you like your blueeyed boy" posed to Mr. Death sarcastically belittles Buffalo Bill and conveys the poet’s superiority over him. BB was the most famous man in the world, but now, as the speaker is so glad to decry, he is dead and, isn’t it just so much better to be alive than defunct?

So death, which cancelled Buffalo Bill's skill and erased his good looks, gives the speaker an advantage over him. Silly. The poet fails, of course, to take into account his own pending doom, his mortality.

But keep in mind that this poem is probably not the least bit about Buffalo Bill, and although I keep referring to the speaker as “the poet,” I’m sure that cummings is simply not this naïve "littleman." Maybe this poem is instead about all of us and our desire to be alive and no one and not dead and someone. Did you notice, by the way, that Jesus is given a line to Himself (there’s that capital H)? How ‘bout that? Jesus never worried about life rather than death.

Or did he? Didn’t the man in him question: “Father, why have you forgotten me?”

Interesting how a poem of nothing really, a theatrical whim of cummings, can allow me and the world (or is it “the world and I”?) to ramble endlessly about a poem written in 1923. And so, this is my simple analysis, pondering on it, reading about it, incorporating what others think or believe. And toward semester's end, this will be you too: thinking, delineating, reading between the lines, making stuff up, seeing things that aren't there; yes that is indeed what poetry is all about. I leave you with a quote from cummings, from a poem we will do later in the year. Ponder it, roll it around on your tongue. Make what you will of it. It's beautiful. It's about love:

No one, not even the rain, has such small hands.

Oh, and that quote from Marcel Duchamp: "The greatest book ever written is merely the dictionary out of order."