ABSTRACT
This chapter explores several insights regarding one of EEC’s moon poems. In one poem, EEC sees the “pieces” of a shattered “mirror” on the “street” to be a good thing: each fragment is “whole with sky”—that is, each fragment becomes its own infinite vastness. One sheet from the archives at the Houghton library may contain several typed and handwritten stages of the poem’s becoming—as well as doodles, sketches, and syllable counting—all of which became the marks of an imagination in the midst of creative breakthrough. EEC’s drafts not only provide a tremendous weight of evidence as to the sheer attentiveness EEC gave every fragment and punctuation mark, but they also give scholars insight as to his overall creative process. EEC wrote seven of the drafts in pencil, and they are interspersed throughout the typed drafts. Readers of EEC soon realize how patterns of number create deep structures in EEC’s seemingly random makings.
