"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