she being Brand  e.e.cummings

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

she being Brand

-new;and you

know consequently a

little stiff i was

careful of her and(having

thoroughly oiled the universal

joint tested my gas felt of

her radiator made sure her springs were

O.

K.)i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her

up,slipped the

clutch(and then somehow got into reverse she

kicked what

the hell)next

minute i was back in neutral tried and

again slo-wly;bare,ly nudg.  ing(my

lev-er Right-

oh and her gears being in

A 1 shape passed

from low through

second-in-to-high like

greasedlightning)just as we turned the corner of Divinity

avenue i touched the accelerator and give

her the juice,good

       (it

was the first ride and believe i we was

happy to see how nice she acted right up to

the last minute coming back down by the Public

Gardens i slammed on

the

internalexpanding

&

externalcontracting

brakes Bothatonce and

brought allofher tremB

-ling

to a:dead.

stand-

;Still)

    I’’ve got a picture of a Hudson  Terraplane over on the left because it’s the subject of Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues” in which he compares his girl to a car. He complains that when he comes back home, he senses that somebody has been “...driving my Terraplane since I been gone.”   He then proceeds to tell his girl he’s gonna heist her hood, check her oil, flash her headlights and check her connection down below to see if it’s still getting spark.  If you don’t get that those are all sexual innuendos, well, you’re pretty nice and you haven’t hung around garages very much.


    In this poem, cummings mocks this kind of objectification of the female. How do I know he’s mocking? I’ve read all of his stuff.  He’s usually a big romantic teddy bear when it comes to women.  See my page on “since feeling is first” as proof.


    A classic way to mock someone is to pretend you’re him and make a dang fool of yourself.  In poetry, pretending you’re someone else is called  adopting a persona. So, cummings pretends he’s a gearhead. 

Cummings is famous for his quirky capitalization, punctuation, spacing and spelling.  What he’s doing is telling us how the poem should sound, and indicating what’s important, what should be thought of as a whole, and when to stop and think.

If you get that this is a guy describing the deflowering of a virgin, all of a sudden there are plenty of dirt jokes in here.  I don’t want to explain them, but I’ll mention them and let you figure it out.

Stiff?

Universal Joint?

Flooded?

Cranked her?

Slipped the clutch?

Reverse?

Nudging?

Lever?

Give her the juice?

First ride?

Public Gardens? (remove one letter!)

internalexpanding and externalcontracting?

Bothatonce?

TremBling?

    Women, are you disgusted? Well, be disgusted at the speaker of the poem, but not at cummings. So many of his love poems are tender and humble.

    We men, however, recognize this kind of guy, who wants to reduce women to objects really because he can’t deal with real personalities. (See the Monty Python’s  “Nudge, nudge...Wink, wink” sketch.)  Another thing we know...the squeaky wheel is the one that hasn’t been greased.  So, the persona cummings has adopted here is really a pretty pathetic figure.

    Now I’ll go revisit “since feeling is first” to get back to being the hopeless romantic I too often am.