As a poet, Cummings was a pioneer not only in linguistic and typographic inventions, but also in sound and concrete poetry. But his prose is no less experimental; he wrote memoirs, essays, and fiction that are constantly provocative and often radically experimental. To read the avant-garde Cummings is to read a writer who consistently broke with established norms, "never to rest and never to have: only to grow." To not read the avant-garde Cummings is to not read Cummings.