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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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07039_Field_TCUM T604.txt
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1996-04-10
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separated from the print form by various technical stages,
could enjoy none of the freedom of oral stress provided by the
typewriter. The poet at the typewriter can do Nijinsky leaps or
Chaplinlike shuffles and wiggles. Because he is an audience for
his own mechanical audacities, he never ceases to react to his
own performance. Composing on the typewriter is like flying a
kite.
The e. e. cummings poem, when read aloud with widely
varying stresses and paces, will duplicate the perceptual
process of its typewriting creator. How Gerard Manley Hopkins
would have loved to have had a typewriter to compose on!
People who feel that poetry is for the eye and is to be read
silently can scarcely get anywhere with Hopkins or cummings.
Read aloud, such poetry becomes quite natural. Putting first
names in lower case, as “eddie and bill,” bothered the literate