According to Judith h. Dobrzynski of the Wall Street Journal, You have to go out of your way to get to Brockport, N.Y., a pretty little Victorian village west of Rochester that had its moment in the sun before the Civil War, when the Erie Canal briefly ended there and canal boats loaded up on products like grain and cod liver oil. Yet a few enterprising Brockporters are hoping that arts-lovers will beat a path to their door this month to help them restore the works of the painter E.E. Cummings, which are torn, dusty, stained and otherwise in pitiful condition.

That's right: The very same enduringly popular, inventive bard of love, sex, rebellion and nature who ranks with the best of 20th-century poets painted with paints as well as with verbal images arranged just-so on a page.

Cummings's paintings are largely forgotten, but he considered himself just as talented a painter as a poet, and worked hard at it, especially on his early abstractions. He made thousands of works. "He painted every day, and devoted more time to it than to his poems," says Milton A. Cohen, a humanities professor at the University of Texas at Dallas and author of "Poet and the Painter: The Aesthetics of E.E. Cummings' Early Work."

How 72 of those paintings ended up in disrepair at the State University of New York at Brockport -- miles away literally and figuratively from Cummings's bohemian life in Greenwich Village, Paris and New England

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