Review Monday: e.e. Cummings' Erotic Poems

Erotic Poems
by e.e. Cummings
Pub. Date: February 2010
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Paperback: 80 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0871406590

Reviewed By Will Grofic

Simultaneous orgasms don’t happen often, or maybe not often enough, and therefore sex becomes a match of wills. There is a power to pleasuring and a relinquishing of power to being pleasured that e.e. Cummings erotic poems taps into beautifully, and this power struggle is the spine of these poems.

Of course inside this book are all the hallmarks of e.e. Cummings poems: compound nonce words, cutting and enjambing words by syllables, comedy, and repetition. But the tension in his poems comes from the realization he’s helpless or the admission that he wants to be so. One of his most famous poems “16” is a he said/she said poem about an affair. The man starts out with the power, while the woman asks “is it love said she)/ if you’re willing said he/ (but you’re killing said she.” By and by, they start with the whoopee, and the last stanza illustrates the release (and catch) of power:




(come? Said he

ummm said she)

you’re divine! said he

(you are Mine said she)


Even when Cummings incorporates awe (“the sudden flower of complete amazement”) or primal violence (“my loveFist in her knuckling/ thighs”), the lines that sparkle are those that tense up at the thought of the sex being over, the relationship finishing, and eventually life ending. In “xxx.” the speaker asks his lover to ponder the decrepit statues and aqueducts of past civilizations, and his logic is that if these things are so ephemeral “let us make haste” with “constructive/Horizontal/ business” and to “consider well this ruined aqueduct/ lady,/ which used to lead something into somewhere).” Of course countless poets have made the same claim to their lovers, but his word choice and images of aqueducts and statues are fresh and compelling.

And then you have to think to yourself, he wrote these in the 1920s? When Harry Douglas and someone named Mary Pickford were the big silent movie stars? Contemporary poets still use poetic moves that he championed like the compound nonce words and humorous use of ecstatic “O”. Although his wordplay for that day and age holds up for the most part, Cummings does sometime combine words that aren’t necessary to the image or rhythm of the poem (“greenslim” and “smelloftheworld”), making the poem all that much clunkier, but then he follows those words up with highly innovative concoctions like “mancurious” and “pseudomind” and “gropeofstrength” that all but make sense to be put in next year’s Oxford English.

Overall though, Cummings’ images seemed less modern and contemporary than the famous poems recast him. The subjects of his usual erotic images were often staid nature references, not what we remember from his great poem included in this collection about driving a car “xix.”:

the

internalexpanding

&

externalcontracting

brakes Bothatonce and



brought allofher tremB

-ling

The other outdated factor of reading Cummings today was his staggering amount of adverbs that garble and jumble without a function or reason. With that said, it’s remarkable any of these poems are fresh almost a century later.

Back in 1920, these were considered controversial poems, and today they’d fit in with other contemporary erotic poems. In one of Cummings’ weirdest metaphors, he biological inverses the sexual insertion:

there is between my big legs a crisp city…

all the house terribly tighten

upon your coming; and they are glad

as you fill the streets of my city with children.

Cummings has become the waiting taker, while the woman fills him. It’s odd and off-putting, power is reversed, and Cummings asks for her to “murder (his) breasts, still and always// I will hug you solemnly into me.” Even when Cummings wants to be the victim, his pleasure comes from a violent relinquishing of power and the peace that comes afterward.
***

Will Grofic is Managing Editor of Potomac Review and a recent graduate from the Bennington Writing Seminars where he received an MFA in Writing. His poems appear or are forthcoming in No Tell Motel, Gargoyle, The Coachella Review, and Anti-. He also teaches at Montgomery College.

Will Grofic: Why Write Poetry?

“I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.”

To refuel my creative drive, I read Donald Hall’s “Poetry and Ambition” essay. It’s basically a go for broke or go home message to poets, which I agree with in spirit. It can be hard (read: depressing) to look at every one of my poems and put it up against Ozymandias or Lycidias, but Hall does make a good point that….why not? It’s a little naïve in that, what poet is striving for mediocrity? But within the essay, Hall hits on a few points I’d like to share.

In a discussion with some of the Writer’s Center staff today, we were talking about manuscripts, and one person said some of your best poems are the one’s you would never think of, which goes along with Hall alluding to Keat’s tombstone:

“[Keats] convinced that his name was ‘writ in water.’ But he was mistaken, he was mistaken. ... If I praise the ambition that drove Keats, I do not mean to suggest that it will ever be rewarded. We never know the value of our own work, and everything reasonable leads us to doubt it: for we can be certain that few contemporaries will be read in a hundred years. To desire to write poems that endure—we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and that if we succeed we will never know it.”

Geez, a little depressing. But how to write good poems, there’s the rub.

After reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest article in New York, I think that being a good teacher can be like being a good poet. It’s about letting the ideas and words take on their own meaning, engaging with the words, not coercing them to fit your own structure. The greats of the past were iambic rhymes that had to be constrained to a certain poetic barb-wired fence, but nowdays, the best advice I receive from my professors is that of allowing the poem to become its own entity.

Hall describes this as “a stage where the poem is altered for its own sake, to make it better art, not for the sake of its maker's feelings but because decent art is the goal. Then the poem lives at some distance from its creator's little daily emotions; it can take on its own character in the mysterious place of satisfying shapes and shapely utterance. The poem freed from its precarious utility as ego's appendage may possibly fly into the sky and become a star permanent in the night air.”

Gladwell parallels this type of embracing the poem with a teacher who seamlessly interacts with students. In my metaphor, consider the teacher as the poet, the students the poem (its ideas, word choice, all of that jazz). In talking about a videotape of a great teacher, Gladwell writes:

“Pianta’s team has developed a system for evaluating various competencies relating to student-teacher interaction. Among them is “regard for student perspective”; that is, a teacher’s knack for allowing students some flexibility in how they become engaged in the classroom. Pianta stopped and rewound the tape twice, until what the teacher had managed to achieve became plain: the children were active, but somehow the class hadn’t become a free-for-all.

A perfect creation of a poem: to not let the poem become a free-for-all, but still be active and learning from it.


Donald Hall’s Essay “Poetry and Ambition”

Malcolm Gladwell’s Article on Teaching

Will Grofic is the Publications Intern for The Carousel and in the M.F.A program at Bennington.