SEX...now that I have your attention...

     this blog is about imagery and how we use it to express the simplest of things with the most ethereal of language available to us.  (manslation)  this one is about imagery, and how we use it to explain what it's like to  get freaky, but in like a really classy way so that ladies will be really cool with how sensitive you are.  right now i bet you're asking yourself (or me, but in the silence of your rooms set all glow by your computer screens)... askin', "cullen, you have forgotten about capital letters, and traditional use of punctuation."  don't you worry baby bird, i'm gonna feed you my knowledge like some grapes, and fan you, and things like that.

     edward estlin cummings is one of those off-beat poet types that crawled his way into american hearts in the early to mid 20th century.  he wrote round about 2900 poems in his lifetime, each one inundated with a unique style that ranged from easily relatable to classical sensibility, to a bouncing-off-the-asylum-wall kind of formless.  the manner in which i am writing this blog is, very often, the manner by which cummings would compose his poetry.  so what is up with this guy, what is his story, and what are his poems REALLY?

they are REALLY all about images.  like the following cat, only with words and such.

     (this was my obese calico who i named Clover.  the inspiration for naming her this came from a Seinfeld episode, in which a man wanted to write "the lover" on a license plate, but the whole thing wouldn't fit.  this cat is important because she loves you.)

     recently, i went to governor's island in new york city, where i found a small house set aside for the poetry society of new york.  it was all women that i could see, and they had a theme for their organization on this island called, "poetry brothel" in which they would take the various rooms to the house (given to them by whatever foundation) and have you pay the poets, dressed like whores, to do private poetry readings for them.  in the foyer of the house, a group was gathered, listening to the various new poets recite their works, all, i would imagine, well studied poets in their own right... all girls.  a theme of imagery immediately began to present itself from poet to poet, and some of it, very well engineered and effective imagery, but the salient thing about these poets was not where or how they used their imagery, but where and how they chose not to. more often than not, i would hear passages like this one:

     "and then we fucked in the backseat of other people's cars...." or "...he fingered me there in the hammock"

  often preceding and proceeding passages like this would be found the elaborate manifestation, or at least attempt at the elaborate manifestation, of images to describe events.  something bothered me about the affect that they may/may not have been eliciting from the bluntness of these kinds of statements (perhaps that is where the poetry lies for them).  though it was not because of the subject-matter....it bothered me just the same.  AND THEN IT HIT ME!  edward estlin cummings, like a shot of lightning down my back.  cummings understood, when he wrote, what it was about our minds and our bodies that made sex, attraction, love, contact...everything between a man in a woman...so alluring to us.  it's the insinuation, and the mystery that make it beautiful, not just the act. (y'all catch that fellas?)  in the same way that those poets used sex as a means by which to detach the reader/listener from mystery and seduction, so did cummings use its imagery to seduce and mystify in his sensual works.

     the following poem is called sometimes i am alive because with, it remains under copyright to this day:

sometimes i am alive because with
me her alert treelike body sleeps
which i will feel slowly sharpening
becoming distinct with love slowly,
who in my shoulder sinks sweetly teeth
until we shall attain the Springsmelling
intense large togethercoloured instant

the moment pleasantly frightful

when,her mouth suddenly rising,wholly
begins with mine fiercely to fool
(and from my thighs which shrug and pant
a murdering rain leapingly reaches the
upward singular deepest flower which she
carries in a gesture of her hips)

     much better.  do you see the thought that cummings has put into the words in this poem?  how many of us could have written out blunt, fleeting statements like the ones written within the poetry bordello there on governor's island?  i enjoy and celebrate cummings because i am appreciative of classical poetic heritage.  "but cullen, this is not a classical poem, cummings doesn't look like a classical poet." SHUT UP random voice of dissent, this is my blog and i am going to tell you why you are wrong.  how?  by using the critiques that cummings, himself, would often receive in his lifetime.

     louise bogan, the fourth poet laureate of the united states, once called cummings' work "irrevocably stuck in the past...".  according to the Gale Encyclopedia of Biography: Edward Estlin Cummings, he felt a struggle to create a new inventive way of conveying material without reusing the same devices that he had been using.

Cummings' other stylistic devices - the use of low dialect to create satire and the visual "shaping" of poems - often seem self-indulgent substitutes for original inspiration. 

     though cummings' methods for conveying ideas were very abstract, the ideas, themselves, were decidedly not.  as well, he was a harvard-studied man, a graduate in literature, especially with concern to the classics.  it was well documented that cummings spent a good amount of time with ancient greek and latin.  he was aware of the pathos of aristotle and of plato, and he read the poems of his contemporaries and literary ancestors alike.


snap back 


Let's break this poem all the way down.



     Cummings uses multiple devices to convey the emotion of sex in this poem.  Some of the most obvious are  some of the most signature means of expression when it comes to non-concrete poetry (that meaning, poems that aren't formed to make shapes in the placement of the words).  There is an abandoning of syntax and slurring together of phrases and words.  This style is almost an emotional stream of consciousness that is being evoked by his combination of dissipation of syntax and abandoning of punctuation.  I can imagine the narrator being asked the question "When do you feel most alive?" and having it taking him by such surprise that he just begins to extemporaneously confess it to the inquisitor...


Also, he puts words together...and not just listing them in groups, he makes one word of them.  "Springsmelling", "togethercoloured".  He makes adjectives of the gerund forms of verbs.  "leapingly"  Isn't this the most literal and beautiful rendering of what the true body of love-making is all about...two things becoming one?  Is it not an expression of things through actions, that were, beforehand, inexplicable?  This is the brilliance that I love about Cummings. 


I assert that use of typography also sets the imagery in motion. How?   Really only in one place...okay, two places if you are a freak.  The first, and most salient, is the separation of the single line of text, "the moment pleasantly frightful" to signify the moment of orgasm.  Makes sense.  The other, and possibly non existent/completely speculative example lies with the last four lines.  In these lines he seems to be reiterating what is going on with him when they are kissing, perhaps the parentheses are an aside to the reader, to let you know what is going on with their bodies.  I would like to think that the typography includes a representation of the bodies themselves.  He didn't need to write parentheses there, he had abandoned all use of punctuation for the entirety of the piece, and now all of a sudden here they are.  I think the parentheses are physical symbols for the vagina, the last word being hips, the very lowest part of the last stanza.  Food for thought I suppose, disagree with me or agree with me if you like.  Or do something...subscribe dang I'm doing this so you guys will talk about poems ha ha.


Fade in.


 perhaps there is someone that you have from whom you cannot escape


a lover who excites you and makes you do things that you may not understand or that you may not be able to express things that bear no justice contemplating after the fact 


 imagine that there is someone that you would rather be lying next to more than anything in the word and when you are (if you are so lucky) that person can make you make words where the meanings did not exist beforehand


a person that makes you confess yourself to them even though you maybe don't want to or you are too frightened or have tried to build some kind of inhibition around yourself


now imagine that you are the very closest to that person that you or any two people will ever be  you are so close that you seem to inhabit common space and lack being distinguished from one person to another


can you image it? 


cummings could.


 cummings took a portrait of an instant with his senseless words and made them vivid


he set them to life


fold the blog up and stick it underneath your mattress 


this


                      has been another  installment of 


poetrysnapback with 

 (cullen gandy)