Vox Populi
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Gertrude Stein: Two Poems
A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.
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GLAZED GLITTER.
Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover. The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing. There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.
Public Domain. From Tender Buttons (1914).
Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse, would meet. In 1933, Stein published a quasi-memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of Alice B. Toklas, her life partner. The book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of the cult-literature scene into the limelight of mainstream attention.
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Somewhere I have pages of my attempts to write like Stein. The first time I read her poetry, I felt a delightful high, a letting go, a teeter totter of this is silly/this is profound. Today when I read this, I felt nostalgia for important late night teenage silliness.
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When I was a baby poet, I tried to write like her, but I’m afraid my poems just sounded like nonsense. The way she pulls it off, I think, is by using her impeccable ear for the rhythms of language.
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This is the kind of art that for me — I’m not generalizing — invites erasure. I’m certain that Gertrude Stein would have absolutely loved erasure, don’t you think?
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I’m sure she would have!
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When I picture Stein’s process, I have often wondered if she herself used a type of erasure. Sometimes it is as if she writes a thought and then skips ahead 20 or 30 more thoughts before she writes another…. She probably did not do that on paper, but all in her head…yet I can picture these poems as pages and pages of descriptive writing all crossed out and whittled down to their final drafts.
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How interesting. Thank you. You’ve given me something to think about when I go back to Tender Buttons.
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Oh, I so love trying to follow her logic and her process. Sometimes, when I think I have come to an understanding of a line (or a whole poem), it’s like that wonderful surprise I feel at the end of a Haiku! Truely a new way to see something. Someday I would like to see her drafts and get a peek into her process…
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Yes, Stein was one of the first modern poets I read as a teenager. She opened new worlds for me.
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Gertrude Stein has always fascinated me and I admire her conviction and courage. She has never moved me.
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She’s not a romantic, but rather a precursor to the language poets.
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Yes, I know. And, even though the work of the language poets is interesting and often admirable, it never moves me to more than admiration of their language skill.
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Marvelous. Thank you.
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