The Story: love is more thicker than forget
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The ever-lowercase e.e. cummings isn't the obvious choice for lyrical source material, even when his poems scan, as in the 4x4 series from whence this transformed verse comes. The language borders on cryptic abstraction, with voiced emotion and fragmented narrative taking the place of the more traditional verse structure which he learned from, and it tends to break funny between lines.
But Jonatha Brooke and Jennifer Kimball, in a coda from their debut duo pairing The Story, found their tendency towards playfully beautiful soaring and dischordant harmonies perfect for the piece, and for e.e. cummings' style overall, managing with just piano and two voices to create an incredibly successful environment for what is often a gorgeous yet difficult-to-fully-access poetic method. They do it so well, in fact, that as in the original poem, the pauses between lines speak as loud as the words themselves: the sparseness sings, and the self-referential imagery of love's extremity rises and fades with the cross and flow of these two voices into sky and sea and everything between.
