ADDENDUM: Anthony Hopkins' reads Dylan Thomas

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)

Emerson, Transcendentalism, and the American (Counter?) Culture.

     Now to start, ever enthusiastically, on the topic of transcendentalism in poetry, and how it caused stuff....or whatever.  Transcendentalism is all about the protest...man.  S'all about the struggle against these Harvard FATCATS and their blatant thought based fat-cattery that had been pervasive in intellectual and spiritual thought in the American North East up until that point (1830s through to the 50s and into the big war).  Namely that we weren't being simple enough, or maybe we were too simple, and you needed to free your mind....man.

Here is a requisite cat.  It is big boned.  It has a glandular problem.  He may also be a hedonist.

(What's that?  Need a more comprehensive background?  You are the problem.)

       The father of American Transcendentalism is Ralph Waldo Emerson, that's no secret.  He composed several works of literature, such as the famed Nature, in which he espouses an abandon from established values in resorting to a non-traditional approach to appreciating nature.  He, in fact, asserts that each person comes to an understanding of nature by various degrees, and that, by doing so, we return to a true understanding of reason and faith.  There was a lot of Unitarianism going on in the north, a lot of very charismatic Protestantism going on in the south, and the dang ol' papists were hanging around there in pockets as well. (it's okay, I was "raised" Catholic)  Anyway nobody liked it, and they all wanted people to get their ideas about faith, and reason, and religion, and intelligence right from the font of their willingly profuse mouths.  Harvard wasn't a big fan of it, until after the fact when they were.  It began as a reformation within the Unitarian Church, however it would not be contained within those bounds for very long.  In high school, the teachers spoke to me of Emerson like he was the fourth horseman, come to whip the small babe Jesus with a hickory switch.  This peaked my interest.  The plot thickened.

     Here is one of my favorite poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which I think exemplifies the kind of ideas which were starting to brew...I suppose it would have to elicit some kind of reaction.  It is called Brahma, and it was published in 1857 in Atlantic Monthly.

Brahma

If the red slayer thinks he slays,

Or the slain think he is slain,

They know not well my subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;

Shadow and sunlight are the same,

The vanished gods to me appear,

and one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings;

I am the doubter and the doubt,

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,

and pine in vain the Sacred Seven;

But thou, meek lover of the good!

Find me, and turn thy back on heaven

    It is important to understand the nature of Brahma (the Hindu god of creation) in order to understand the parallels between how Emerson saw man and faith interacting, and how the Brahmin castes interacted with the essence of the universe (Brahman).  Needless to say, there were little similarities shared with the monotheism of his American contemporaries, however, during the time when he wrote it, Emerson was claimed to have been a devout and well-studied Christian.  This god is the embodiment, the incarnation, of the entire essence of Hindu creation.  Brahma is omnipresent in the vein that he is in all things and that all things are in him.  He is the embodiment of nature, and natural causation.  The "Sacred Seven" is said to refer to the "Seven Lords of Amenti, regarded as The Lords Of Life" or the seven Rishis, Sons of Brahma.  Brahma is an exhortation, or rings as one to me.

     Snap back, lets deconstruct this mother.  

     The poem is broken up into four distinct stanzas, each assuming Brahma into a different allegorical manifestation.  Each stanzas form is wrought with iambs (tada, I guess Shakespeare was on to something).  Stanza by stanza progression seems to be getting at something, perhaps that Brahma is...like...important or something.  THEN you get the punch line, you are supposed to pay attention to him because he is around you, and not worry about heaven (or whatever the Bhagavad Gita provides for).  So what is "God" in this poem?

     In the first stanza he is embodied by a moral authority, one that does not distinguish between the "slain" or the "slayers".  Indeed he provides that the slain ARE NOT slain and that the slayer DOES NOT slay.  The moral orientations and whims of those those who would portend to be the authorities...intellectuals....clergy....these guys have no clue what the hell they are even talking about, "...my subtle ways".  nothing shockingly new here though, Thomas Jefferson had expressed just these ideas about American clergy almost an entire century before.  MOVING ON.

     The second stanza is one in which I find a great deal of Emerson's essay about nature, as well as Thoreau's  little addendum in Walden.  Namely, it means to say that of the two, God is...both: both far and near are the same to me,  both shadow and sunlight are the same, both shame and fame are of equal worth to me.  Hmm...it's like there are no classes when you are all outside eating questionably toxic berries in the woods, or going to jail for not paying taxes.

     But not only is he all of these things, he is more.  He is the idea about the things as well:

...when me they fly, I am the wings;

I am the doubter and the doubt,

I am the hymn the Brahmin sings.

     God is not only natural, but intuitive, and aspirant, and one who is carried on the ideas of the thinker, not in the pulpits of the chapels, or in the halls of the yogis and mystics.   He is THE DOUBT...WHAAA!??  But not only that, he is the doubter himself.  He is the one who is affixed apart from the security of congregational acceptance, he is the thinking man aloof of the established means of thought.  Harvard Divinity School was not teaching you this kinda stuff in 1840-whatever, man...far out.  Notice how I left out the first line of that stanza.  You see what I did there?

"They reckon ill who leave me out"

     This seems like an important preface to the last three lines of the stanza.  Personally, to my taste, he could have just written this line, added a period, and moved on to the next stanza...wham, bam, thank you ma'am.  It's funny in a poignant way, because it is impossible.  He goes on to show you why...because he is in everything, because he is even in song.  Who the hell are they anyway?  He doesn't even say.  Are "they" not important enough to get a mention? (apart from them being they)  Irrelevant questions, because Brahma is living in all creation; he is the author of it, he is the inescapable element of "is".  Sounds like, therefore, maybe it would be a good idea to try and get together with those things *Ding* hey...maybe I'll go camping this weekend.  

     The last stanza is the, if unconscious (although I suspect it was not), departure from which there is no return.  These guys are trying to get after me, they are trying to emulate my nature, but they are no substitute for me.  It is only you, you are the only one, come and look for me yourself...don't subscribe to the heaven that they are offering you...don't worry about what they are going to say about you in the process of that journey.  It will only be you "...meek lover of the good"  who will find me.

Fade in.

     Have you ever felt such a strong intuition inside of you, like a coal that you are carrying unprotected in your scalded hand, only to be told by someone that it was a wrong turn?  A gravely wrong turn?  A turn from which you would suffer with severe social and perhaps...eternal implications?  Have you ever felt tears welling up in you because you could not contain the love in your heart for those outlying creatures, foreign to the fold?  Those that you pay calm cheerful grins to, only to be reigned back into a state of self doubt?  Ever listened to a story that people gave so much credence to that any deviation from it could frame you in a film, to be jeered at like an exhibition, or pitied like you are not the same sort of human as they?  Emerson and Thoreau are jiving with ya.  Emerson and Thoreau PRICKED their green thumbs on the thorns of their contemporaries' society, and they BLED OUT a new generation of American intellectuals...scholarly and religious transcendentalists.

     Close your hymnals and pass them to the middle of the aisle, this has been another edition of Poetry Snapback with Cullen Gandy.

     

           

     

       

Abraham Lincoln and Poetic Speculation...lol.

     You might ask me why I chose a non-celebrated, amateur poet as the first entry of my poetry blog.  The focus I think that I am trying to portray is that the citizen and the amateur, as poet, can write inspiring and heartfelt work (even a president).  This is primarily because poetry moves me very much, and I would like to bring it back to the people in popular culture...in a way that is "relatable" to modern life, in all of its toil and elation.


     Abraham Lincoln is probably one of the most misunderstood characters in American history.  To him such characteristics are attributed as would be attributed to a titan, for his work at the helm of a country in tribulation.  You may think all of these characteristics are true: the simple moralist, the righteous patriot, the wrestler, the self assured conqueror of the evils of America past, etc.  That is, unless you ever read any of his private correspondences, and especially his poetry.  Abraham Lincoln was an exceptionally melancholic figure, and it is well-manifested in his poetry...notwithstanding in the following work, which was attributed to him.  The poem is called "The Suicide's Soliloquy" and there is a written preface that precedes it.  The poem was published in the Sagamo Journal in 1838.

THE SUICIDE'S SOLILOQUY.

The following lines were said to have been found

near the bones of a man supposed to have committed

suicide, in a deep forest, on the Flat Branch of the

Sangamon, some time ago.

Here, where the lonely hooting owl

     Sends forth his midnight moans,

Fierce wolves shall o'er my carcase growl,

     Or buzzards pick my bones.

No fellow-man shall learn my fate,

     Or where my ashes lie;

Unless by beasts drawn round their bait,

     Or by the ravens' cry.

Yes! I've resolved the deed to do,

     And this the place to do it:

This heart I'll rush a dagger through,

     Though I in hell should rue it!

Hell! What is hell to one like me

     Who pleasures never know;

By friends consigned to misery,

     By hope deserted too?

To ease me of this power to think,

     That through my bosom raves,

I'll headlong leap from hell's high brink,

     And wallow in its waves.

Though devils yell, and burning chains

     May waken long regret;

Their frightful screams, and piercing pains,

     Will help me to forget.

Yes! I'm prepared, through endless night,

To take that fiery berth!

Think not with tales of hell to fright

Me, who am damn'd on earth!

Sweet steel! come forth from out your sheath,

     And glist'ning, speak your powers;

Rip up the organs of my breath,

     And draw my blood in showers!

I strike! It quivers in that heart

     Which drives me to this end;

I draw and kiss the bloody dart,

     My last—my only friend!

BAM!!

  Bam cat has a point...take all that in, and then I'm gonna go ahead and snap back and reevaluate what the hell just happened here:


     Technically, the poem is stanzaic, consisting of four lines per stanza.  The metric feet per line alternate with the first and third lines of each stanza being iambic quadrameter, and the second and fourth lines being in iambic trimeter.  Each line rhyming with the corresponding alternate...yawn. whatever. not important.  This is a simple vehicle for rhymed poetry, designed to maximize on structure within a metered poem, while facilitating a flow and ease of rhyme.  So what makes this poem interesting, apart than the fact that it contains some pretty rad/uncool emo "the world hates me" affectations? 


     It is a little story isn't it, in the beginning?  The scene is laid out before you...Here where the lowly hooting owl sends forth it's midnight moans...wolves are gonna start pickin' at him, and then the imperative statements start flowing out of him like a loose fire hydrant.  Yes!  I've resolved the thing to do, and this the place to do it...already the language he is using lends itself to a man, long weary with the things that have been picking at him in his life...the "wolves" if you will.  All of this inspiration, and before the advent of the civil war. Where did this come from buddy?  Well, this isn't a history blog, but I entreat you to get behind this author and read some of his correspondences.  It is my assertion that Abe's honestly is drawn not from his altruism, but from a need to express one's self even despite caution, or how the candid situation may be publicized.  At one point he is even on record as saying, "The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity, my religion."


     This poem is interesting because there is adequate use of natural imagery to express the emotion that the poet is trying to express.  This poem is interesting because there is a clear delineation between the beginning, progression, and conclusion of the poem. 

What does that mean?

It means that the poem utilizes rhyme, not for the sake of rhyming (although, undoubtedly, Abe did associate poetic notions with rhymed and metered poems throughout his body of work) but RATHER, good ole' "honest" Abe understood that iambs have implications for motion...that iambs have parallels with emotional and anatomical physiology (the beating of a heart often being associated with iambs).

  This vehicle is well suited to drive the character, in the poem, over to the inevitable conclusion of the emotion that envelops someone when they consider suicide.  AND  it is a soliloquy.  Which means that nobody, in theory, is around when the character is saying this.  

     

     Have you ever felt so desperate about a situation that you begin to analyse and speak it aloud to yourself? Anyone failed to commit suicide, maybe you wrote a note and you spoke the words out loud to yourself as you were writing them?  What did your heart feel like when you were writing those words?  Did your hand start shaking?  Perhaps you were steady, or resigned, or trembling, or relieved?  Then you pick up the note and hold it twixt your thumb and a dagger.  Abe is jiving with ya.  Abe had 99 problems and a B!%ch WAS one (you're welcome jay-z afficionados).  

     Maybe you pick up the letter and it reads exactly like this...and you take your life.   Then someone, down by the river where all the madness took place, plucks it up from under a stone and publishes it in a newspaper.  You know ABE'S NAME WASN'T on this one.  This is where you have to be when you pick the poem up.  Pass the razorblades to your left, and welcome to the first installment of Poetry Snapback with Cullen Gandy.