"Snap Back to Reality" - Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and Harryette Mullen's Negotiations

Reading Gertrude Sten’s Tender Buttons is like listening to a chatty two-year sincerely explain her feelings. The child is talking and taking and talking and nothing is making sense. But you smile, nod, and keep listening. As I nodded my way through Tender Buttons, I felt severely disconnected from the text. With “Patriarchal Poetry” I felt overwhelmed, frustrated, and even lost within the words. Yet, Stein almost leaves me with nothing in Tender Buttons.

To be fair, Stein’s writing made me chuckle as I envisioned bizarre foods such as: “light curls verse light curls have no more curliness than soup” (25). Yet I mostly struggled with conjuring images from her words.

Apparently “Chicken” deserves four entries in a row. Sometimes “Chicken” connects to my understanding of what chicken is, and then the next entry disrupts that reality with what seems like random words such as: “Alas a dirty word, alas a dirty third alas a dirty third, alas a dirty bird” (35). I struggled so much with this because sometimes I’m familiar with what Stein is writing about, and then she totally looses me in her repetition. I can’t disconnect my perceptions of reality from what Stein is writing.

I think Stein’s writing is trying to make me see chicken in another way, but I can’t un-see chicken as a feathered animal.

If anything, Tender Buttons pushes back at me as reader. I’m fairly certain the purpose of the poems involves making me as a reader feel uncomfortable and disconnected. But I’m not sure if there are moments of connection that I’m entirely missing. Cleary Stein’s writing insists on being re-read and re-re-read.

While not as difficult as Tender Buttons, Rae Armantrout’s poem “Negotiations” portrays life experiences as fluid and temporal. In the second section, the speaker recaps the transformation of The Little Mermaid, concluding “This meant that/everything’s negotiable/ and that everything is played out/ in advance/ in secret.” Armantrout’s poem shows how the impossible becomes the possible. Both Stein and Armantrout’s writing leave me with several questions: Does reality construct language? Or does language shape our perceptions and experiences with other objects? Can we rely on language to communicate individual perceptions to others?

“Negotiations”

Rae Armantrout

    1

The best part
is when we’re tired
of it all
in the same degree,

a fatigue we imagine
to be temporary,
and we lie near each other,
toes touching.

What’s done is done,
we don’t say,
to begin our transaction,

each letting go of something
without really
bringing it to mind

until we’re lighter,
sicker,
older

and a current
runs between us
where our toes touch.

It feels unconditional.

    2

Remember this, we don’t say:

The Little Mermaid
was able to absorb
her tail,

refashion it
to form legs.

This meant that
everything’s negotiable

and that everything is played out
in advance

in secret

Chaosss: Gertrude Stein and Lyn Hejinian

Gertuide Stein is most striking through her repetition. By simply glancing at a page “Patriarchal Poetry,” the repetition is highly visible. Her prominent feature almost numbs the mind when reading. I wanted to skim over the wall of “As to and to not to as to and such a pretty bird and to as such a pretty bird and…” (58). I expect these moments to be reliable in their repetition, as if a contemporary Stein would employ copy and paste. Yet, she disrupts the rhythm of repetition with extra small words. At the end of the paragraph the words alter to: “as to and to and such a pretty bird and to as to as such a pretty bird…” (58).  The same words are used, but the pattern slightly changes and disrupts my expectation as a reader.

While the poetry displays her craft, a feeling of chaos overwhelms me. Why dedicate so much physical space to this repetition and disorder?  I think its safe to say Stein argues for a particular perspective on patriarchal poetry. Toward the end of her prose poem, the words “Patriarchal Poetry” are repeated. Most often both words are capitalized, it varies: “Patriarchal Poetry means in turn for that./ Patriarchal poetry means in return” (76). Stein is playing with meaning, expectations, and even presentation and genre. She demonstrates the slippery and unpredictable nature of language by disrupting the reliability of repetition. These formal elements contribute to her perspective on Patriarchal poetry perhaps more so than at the content. (However, I still don’t know what she’s on about.)

Contemporary poet Lyn Hejinian also uses prose poetry and some repetition in her publication My Life. In the opening lines “Reason looks for two, then arranges it from there,” the speaker says, “Where I woke and was awake, in the/ room fitting the wall, withdrawn, I/ had my desk and thus my corner.” Though not as aggressive as Stein’s poetry, Hejinian uses light repetition (“woke” and “awake”) and creates a fluid sound with the alliteration of the “w” and “wh” sounds. The speaker provides a self-narrative lacking in Stein’s poem. However, the narrative reads like stream-of-conscious writing that creates the same feeling of chaos of Stein’s poetry. Both these poems raise questions of how different techniques and genres create similar experiences. 

Garden of Self: H.D. and Jamaal May

I love when I instantly resonate with a song and I can (and will) listen to it on repeat for hours. H.D.’s poetry brings that same joy as each poem speaks with clear emotion. When reading “Oread” I feel desire and even desperation as the speaker asks for what seems impossible. I spent most of my time reading and rereading the retold narrative “Eurydice,” reliving the speaker's growth from bitterness to defiance. The first and second sections are filled with angry question about the desperate situation of being left in hades:

why did you turn?

why did you glance back?

why did you bend your face

caught with the flame of the upper earth,

above my face?

(I)

The speaker comes to embrace her fate not with anger or peace, but with strength:

At least I have the flowers of myself,

and my thoughts, no god

can take that;

I have the fervour of myself for a presence

and my own spirit of light;

(VII)

In addition to Greek mythology, H.D. uses a lot of nature imagery—specifically garden and botanical elements. She sometimes writes just simply about “flowers,” but also often uses specific images of “blue crocuses” and “the very golden hears of the first saffron” As to what these images are doing I cannot say. In the poem, there seems two realms of nature—hades and upper earth—and then the speaker’s own nature making a display towards the end of the poem.  The speaker’s flowers seem a foundation, an place of assurance and self-dependence.

Jamaal May also explores themes of growth through botanical imagery. The speaker in “I Have This Way of Being” is less of a dialogue than H.D.’s poem. In contrast to the strong self seen in “Eurydice,” the speaker in May’s poem uses the garden as a metaphor for discovery and evolution of the self. May's poem also seems syntactically relate to the imagiste form. I wonder what emotions would develop if May had chosen to make the poem longer. Would a long poem reveal a change in the speaker's feeling about his or her identity? Or would it be an elongated discourse of the same emotion? I enjoy poetry that deals intensely with on emotion. However, as I spend more time with modern poetry, I find myself developing a taste for the long poem and what it can do. 

I Have This Way of Being

Jamaal May

I have this, and this isn’t a mouth
           full of the names of odd flowers

I’ve grown in secret.
           I know none of these by name

but have this garden now,
           and pastel somethings bloom

near the others and others.
           I have this trowel, these overalls,

this ridiculous hat now.
           This isn’t a lung full of air.

Not a fist full of weeds that rise
           yellow then white then windswept.

This is little more than a way
           to kneel and fill gloves with sweat,

so that the trowel in my hand
           will have something to push against,

rather, something to push
           against that it knows will bend

and give and return as sprout
           and petal and sepal and bloom.

The Labor of Poetry: Reading Ezra Pound and W.S. Merwin

I tend to read poetry way too quickly. So, this week I read aloud to slow down my reading pace. This method also proved valuable for appreciating the rhythm and the sounds of Ezra Pound’s poetry. However, reading became difficult as I stumbled over “Swartest night stretch over wretched men there” (Canto I).  Perhaps it was my embarrassing version of “grnnh! Rnnh, pthg” or the superscript lettering that made me give up (Canto IX).

Despite the struggles, I experienced the historical and biographical elements in a way skimming wouldn’t allow. I know only a (very) few references, but I felt intrigued by conflict, story, and characters. There is no particular emotion or sympathy involved; I only felt that the story is supposed to be exciting. I have no idea what is happening, yet Pound carries action into each line and stanza that kept me reading. It feels like reading Herodotus—laborious, yet filled with intriguing narrative.

The taxing length and breadth of The Cantos indicate Pound’s obsession with history and story. Truthfully, I am surprised that these poems are so long. It seems a poet who is obsessed with the “direct treatment of the thing” and concrete language should also favor shorter poems. He does follows his own advice by letting the lines of poetry flow and carry on to the next without the interruption of punctuation, but The Cantos seems a collision of concision (short lines) and breadth (historical events and use of several languages). Poems like “A Pact” tells me Pound relies on Whitman’s poetry; poems from The Cantos show me that Pound struggles to shed the tradition he depends on.

W.S. Merwin’s poem “Remembering” utilizes Pound’s rule of letting the lines in poems flow into the next without abrupt stops. This style appears in much of Merwin’s poetry, yet this particular instance evokes the continuous act of remembering. The poem ends with no punctuation, evoking a sense there is always something to remember. However, “Remembering” does not evoke the same anxiety and intensity felt in Pound’s Cantos. The speaker uses soft w and round a sounds such as “wands of auroras.”  Remembering history and historical figures is peaceful, emotive, and experiential for the speaker of this poem. 

The powerful emotive traits of Merwin’s poem compares more closely “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.” There is still story as the speaker experiences changes childhood into adulthood. The speaker says: “At fifteen I stopped schooling,/ I desired my dust to mingle with yours/ Forever and forever and forever. / Why should I climb the look out?” The speaker experiences desire and sorrow through the changes. The story and emotions come together through the vulnerability of the speaker. The images are familiar and have the potential to connect with readers, rather than losing them in a maze of historical references.

Remembering (1997) by W.S. Merwin

There are threads of old sound heard over and over

phrases of Shakespeare or Mozart the slender

wands of the auroras playing out from them

into dark time the passing of a few

migrants high in the night far from the ancient flocks
far from the rest of the words far from the instruments