“Ladies and Gentleman: the story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.”

—The opening narration from Dragnet.

E. E. Cummings—born 1894, died 1962—was an American poet whose unorthodox play with words, font, grammar and the display of text made him both ground-breaking and (occasionally) impossible to read.

When I was thirteen years old, I saw Hannah and her Sisters (directed by Woody Allen) for the first time. I love Woody Allen movies and often found them to be great jumping-off points into the ocean of books, films, music and pop-culture that surrounds the individual. And so, when Michael Caine bought Barbara Hershey a book of poems by E. E. Cummings and told her to read the poem on page 112, I went in search of the book, and the poem. I found Cumming’s Selected Poems at a bargain bookstore and began searching for the poem. I didn’t realize at the time that only the second and fifth stanzas of the poem were quoted in the film. After reading about half of the book—which I had since grown to love—I finally found it in section five, page 65:

“somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skillfully, mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and

my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility:whose texture

compels me with the colour of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens;only something in me understands

and the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands”

In my opinion, it just doesn’t get any better than that. The poem is romantic, but not too dewy and sentimental (both of which are occasionally okay, but if they aren’t going to be reigned in, then it just makes for bad poems and embarrassing reading—thus the reason I stopped writing poetry).

But before I stopped writing poetry, I had a crush on a girl—I think I’ll call her Marion, after E. E. Cummings’ third wife, rather than embarrass the both of us. I met her at a church Youth Group party. She was a rarity. Very beautiful, though she didn’t think so, and very smart. We were both writers. We talked about writing and movies and books that evening, staying in our own little corner rather than joining in with the rest of the group. I didn’t know that many people in the group, having recently moved to town.

Time passed; Marion and I grew closer. We didn’t “date” date, as my cousin would say, but if we ran into each other at the mall or at church, we’d walk and talk together until one of us had to leave; we’d sit together in Sunday school and at Youth Group events.

We both wanted to be poets, or rather we both wanted to write poetry. We never exchanged poems or showed each other our work, but we would catch each other scribbling down lines in notebooks or on scrap paper.

One day, we were at some church event and I was motivated to write down the last four lines of the E. E. Cummings poem, the only part of it which I had memorized—I don’t know why. I grabbed a sign-up sheet from a nearby table and scribbled in my somewhat legible hand,

“(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens;only something in me understands

and the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands”

adding, almost as an afterthought:

“With Love, James”

I gave it to a friend that I trusted to pass over to her. She took it from him and read it. She found me across the room and we talked again, being careful not to seem too friendly (for some reason—I don’t remember why—relationships between members of the group weren’t encouraged), but failing. We looked like a couple.

She said, “It’s beautiful. You’ve never let me see anything you’ve written before.”

At that moment, I didn’t know what to say. On the one hand, I was flattered that she thought I could have written something on a par with E. E. Cummings. On the other hand, it was actually written by E. E. Cummings. In a moment of stupidity, I didn’t answer right away, “No, that’s a poem by the guy I was talking about yesterday.” Rather, I just sat there with a stupid grin on my face while she sang the poem’s praises.

“It’s wonderful,” she said.

I realized I would have to tell her sooner or later that I did not write the poem. And the longer I waited, the worse it would be when I finally told her. Romantic plagiarism never won the fair maiden’s heart—as far as I know.

The whole thing reminds me of a line from Crimes and Misdemeanors, yet another Woody Allen movie. In it, there’s a scene where Mia Farrow gives Woody Allen back a letter he wrote to her, in which he professed his love. He responds, “It’s probably just as well. I plagiarized most of it from James Joyce. You probably wondered why all the references to Dublin.”

It was the night that I had worked up my courage and was going to tell Marion that I had “borrowed” the lines from Cummings when I found out, through a girlfriend of hers, that she already knew. She’d found out earlier that week in her AP English Class. They were studying 20^th Century poetry and, out of the nearly 3,000 poems E. E. Cummings wrote, “somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond” was the first poem they talked about on Monday. She had actually walked out of the class, she was so mad. She never wanted to talk to me again, the girlfriend told me, adding, “I wouldn’t want to hang around with a thief either.”

 

* * *

Okay.

So what did I learn?

1. If you send your girlfriend (or boyfriend) a poem written by someone else, state it by putting the author’s name in the note or the letter or the email, etc.

2. Always use quotation marks around what you’re quoting, even if you think the other person will know.

3. Make sure they know it was written by someone else.

4. If they still think you wrote it, Say something, idiot!

I can only hope that there will be some who will benefit from my loss of a relationship and that they may learn from my mistakes. After all, that’s the closest thing to a guide to love—other people’s mistakes.

 

* * *

Wrapping up:

I’ve moved on since then, hopefully wiser for the experience. Marion and I still haven’t talked since then and as far as I know she’s quite happy with her current boyfriend. The girlfriend who told me the news has never spoken to me again either, though I don’t consider it a great loss. The AP English teacher never knew why Marion left in the middle of class, and I would like to apologize to the estate of E. E. Cummings for “borrowing” his lines.