Overanalyzing cummings

I’m not sure I will ever be able to adequately express my love for the poetry of e.e. cummings. The poet, himself, definitely has his personal flaws, but 99% of his work is incredible. Probably one of his most famous poems, “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in,” is, in my humble opinion, what love is. There is no further explanation necessary. He should have submitted it to Webster’s.

On the other hand, I do understand why someone would get frustrated with him, because I’ve been this person too. A little bit about myself: I thrive on structure, on organization, and all things linear. I appreciate logic and try find an explanation for everything. So, understandably, when I read my first cummings poem, I wanted to throw it out the window. To be honest, I felt a little deceived, like his signature insertion-of-parenthetical-statements/go-to-hell-punctuation style was a lot like subliminal messaging. I remember thinking: What does any of this mean? Through the years, though, I’ve come to understand that all poetry isn’t something to be read quickly or easily. Cummings forces you to slow down and pay attention to each word that he has taken the time to arrange. He makes you figure it out and that’s why I started enjoying his work. It was challenging art — like a puzzle or a mystery and I was Nancy Drew.

However, I would soon discover that there was danger in thinking that poetry was just waiting around — static, dormant, and ultimately, nonexistent — for me to decipher it . . .

At around this time last year, I was assigned to complete a poetry explication. Previously, I had heard that cummings had written a sonnet about legendary New York bohemian, Joe Gould, entitled, “little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn’t know where,” and I decided that I absolutely had to use it as the subject of my paper. I had read Joe Gould’s Secret by Joseph Mitchell and loved it. So, I saw this as an opportunity to write about two of my favorite dead men together in a paper. What could go wrong?

A lot.

A lot went wrong when I came to the parenthetical statement, “(nude eel).”

I stopped. And read it about fifty more times, continuing to go no further.

“(nude eel)”

What the hell?

As an English major, I had been trained to look for phallic symbols in everything. So, that had to be it, right? Eels burrow into ocean floors, hiding themselves away, so this had to represent the emasculation of Gould as a starving, homeless man . . . without many clothes?

But it still didn’t make sense to me. Or feel right. Since when did eels wear clothes to begin with? Wouldn’t all of them be nude? And Joe Gould didn’t hide himself away. He was a personality.

So, I kept reading it. And I wrote my introduction and explicated the first three lines to death. After some procrastination, though, I realized I needed to comprehend those two words.

When I reached the point where I was totally out of ideas, I started saying the words out loud. “Nude eel, nuuudeel, nuuu deeeel.” Then, finally: “Oh my God . . . New Deal.” And I simultaneously felt elated and idiotic. How could I have possibly missed that? Or, at least, why did it take me so long?

The answers: Because I was trapped in my head. Because art is something that should be interpreted, but not overly so. It can be natural, even if in disguise. It can make sense.

So often in my undergraduate career here, I have heard English students (including myself) rely on the notion that every little thing in a book or poem must have an underlying meaning in spoken phrases like:

“Clearly the blue curtains are a symbol for the inner turmoil this character feels.”

“Obviously that broken clock in the attic is a metaphor for time coming to a screeching halt in her environment.”

“Evidently, the lines in her face indicate that she feels burdened by the pain of her world.”

When really, sometimes the curtains are just blue. Sometimes there is just a broken clock in the attic and time continues to pass, because, you know, physics. And sometimes, if they’re lucky, people get old.

There can be simplicity in everything that at first seems complex.

Image source: http://www.clivejames.com/pieces/metropolitan/cummings