Figuring the Form: "l(a" by E.E. Cummings

I am not bold enough or clever enough yet to play this much with form, but I have learned a lot from sharing this poem this month, and it still has more to teach me.

l(a

le
af
fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness

Have you given up yet?

I continue to comb my mind for poems whose forms play with space in ways that tickle my fancy, capture my imagination, and dare me to reckon with other ways words can be arranged on the page¹ and in the mind. “l(a” took a while to arrive, and I can’t say that it came to me easily. But it has returned to me this month in two unexpected instances where I found myself (briefly) back in the classroom, needing to find a quick way to explain why the structure of language matters centrally in what and how we communicate with each other. Perhaps an extreme instance of language and form dancing, but it worked.