A UNIVERSE IN THE BUTTONS
BOX
THE BOOK
..........................-
TENDER
BUTTONS
THE SUBBOOK
...................-
OBJECTS
THE SUBPOEM
...................-
A NEW CUP AND SAUCER: NUMBER 24
STANZAS..............................-
1
WORD
COUNT......................- 16
THE SUBPOEM ...................-
OBJECTS: NUMBER 25
STANZAS..............................- 3
WORD
COUNT......................-
49
THE
LEADER........................-
THE STEINY ROAD POET
CO-LLABORATORS..............- MODPO STUDENTS/THE BUTTONS
GENRE..................................- VIRTUAL OPERA
LOCATION............................- USA,
UK, Australia, Philippines, S. Africa, Canada.
TIME......................................- ALL HOURS OF EARTH’S CLOCK
TONE.....................................- AWED
“This thread has:
butterflies, flowers, plant grafting and horticulture, Ariadne's thread,
typewriters, pens, programming logic, letter analysis and symbolism, baseball,
accordions, Torah and Kabbalah and Gematriah, Chaim Potok, the Milky Way
galaxy, anatomy lessons, food preparation, dumplings, wood carving, an artist
named Nehemiah, Schumann gloves, lesbian sex, B language, dancing, and
treadmill notes. And I'm sure I've missed something. Give the Buttons a little
poem or two and they'll roam far and wide.” Dave Green
A NEW CUP AND SAUCER.
Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow bud and
saucer, enthusiastically so is the bite in the ribbon.
OBJECTS.
Within, within the cut and slender joint alone, with
sudden equals and no more than three, two in the centre make two one side.
If the elbow is long and it is filled so then the
best example is all together.
The kind of show is made by squeezing.
The Steiny Road Poet notes
that this discussion (all Tender Buttons
discussions happen inside the Coursera
Modern Poetry MOOC) of “A New Cup and Saucer.” and “Objects.” by the
Buttons Collective accrued 297 posts. While not all posts are comments that
extend the appreciation of the subpoems under discussion, this count exceeds
the posts on “A
Chair.”, which weighed in at 239 and caused Steiny to break up the
discussion into six separate blogposts here. However, CHAIR is a nine-stanza
poem with a 256 word count while CUP-SAUCER and OBJECTS together comprise four
stanzas and 41 words. So this time, Steiny is breaking the discussion into three
parts. Part 1 looks at “A New Cup and Saucer.”. Part 2 looks at “Objects.” and
the tremendous effort by the Buttons Collective to discover, given it carries
the same name as Section 1 of Tender
Buttons, what sets this subpoem apart from the others in the first section
of Stein’s long poem. Part 3 continues the discussion of “Objects.” but with
associations to Jewish sacred teachings and Kabbalah with a reflection on why
study “Objects.” and “A New Cup and Saucer.” together.
FIRST, THE GARDEN
Mark Snyder kicked off the
discussion by seeing a Clouded
Yellow butterfly feeding on flower nectar in the line Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow
bud and saucer. The flower is a just opening bud that he saw as the bud and
saucer.
Steiny affirmed Mark’s
vision by recounting Gertrude Stein’s anecdote in The
Making of Americans where she writes about a boy (her nephew Allan) who
is collecting butterflies. Then his father (Gertrude's brother Michael) says to
the boy that he is hurting (no, killing) something lovely. So the boy says he
won't ever do it again and goes to bed. Then his father sees an incredible moth
and catches it for the boy's collection and gives it to him in the morning.
It’s as if the excited father in his reversal gives the boy a blue ribbon with
a bite taken out of it—enthusiastically so is the bite in the ribbon.
FROM GARDEN TO WRITING THE
BODY
Mary Armour noted that from
the garden imagery emerges Stein “writing the body anew (clitoral imagery
everywhere); with interior spaces and 'seeing' table settings,
chairs, plates, cups, saucers; with the garden as a domestic and loving space
that is also a room.” These thoughts came to her as she thought about “the
swelling bud, the butterfly alighting on the rim of the cup, the saucer
and indentation, the grafting into hybridity [see Stepping on Tender Buttons: “A New Cup and Saucer.”,“Objects.” Part 2 of 3].” For Mary, this was again, “Stein's
radicalization of domestic spaces.”
ARIADNE’S THREAD’S TO ADAM’S
RIB
Then Mary extrapolated to a
domestic moment between Gertrude and her partner Alice that led immediately to
the mythic story of Ariadne’s thread:
“Alice is seated across from
GS, on the other side of the tea cups and saucers and she is doing
embroidery, she is sewing, she is mending. She bites the thread with her sharp
white teeth so as to make an ending. The thread may be a red thread like
Ariadne's ribbon of thread given to Theseus as he enters the labyrinth of
the Minotaur.”
Steiny pauses here to bring attention
to what Ariadne’s thread means to what Gertrude Stein is trying to achieve in Tender Buttons. Ariadne’s thread is
about solving a problem on various planes the physical (how to work your way
through the maze of the Minotaur), the mental (the method for problem solving),
and the ethical (the rules one follows to achieve success). Stein’s dilemma is
her love for her same sex partner that breaks societal rules of the day.
Together Stein and Toklas are locked into their maze of love, looking for an acceptable
way to celebrate their union that they still know is good despite what the
outside world says.
Now back to Eleanor
Smagarinsky who joined the conversation to link Ariadne’s thread to prior
Buttons discussions about ribbon, rib, Adam-Eve: “The male/female relationship
might also point to Adam & Eve, which I think reflects/adds to your
Ariadne/Theseus take.”
Steiny helped Eleanor
pinpoint a comment she made about ribbon in “Mildred’s
Umbrella.”: Eleanor meditated on the word RIBBON until it levitated and
became RIB ON. She then conjured up the Garden of Eden, a woman made from a
man’s rib, the cunning of a serpent and an expulsion – a loss a great loss a restitution.
Then Eleanor continued:
“…that's where we played a
bit with the idea of ‘rib on’ referring to the Genesis story of Adam's rib. This would then make ‘the bite’ into
Eve's biting of the forbidden apple, I suppose.
“The cup and saucer—they are
different, but still a couple. They go together. But they are NEW. Mary—your
image of GS and A sitting across from each other really opens up the poem!
Suddenly I see relationships everywhere!!”
THE VORACIOUS TYPEWRITER
For Allan Keeton, the bite
in the ribbon came from:
“Those typewriter typefaces
with their letter-shaped jaws
dripping black ink-blood
look hungry for the page.”
In further explanation,
Allan linked the process of typing to the way Stein was writing:
“The typebars have long
elbows & slender joints.
It will jam if there are two
in the center.
“If the elbow is long &
the ribbon filled with ink, then that kind of show,
the showing of letters to
make words,
is made by squeezing the
keys.
“Is she saying, that in her
poetry, the bite is in the placement of words,
in how & where the type
bites the page?”
Allan and Steiny put their
heads together to recover what had been noted in “A Piece of Coffee.” about
typewriter ribbons and the mechanics of writing. First here is the last stanza
of “A
Piece of Coffee.”:
The settling of stationing
cleaning is one way not to shatter scatter and scattering. The one way to use
custom is to use soap and silk for cleaning. The one way to see cotton is to
have a design concentrating the illusion and the illustration. The perfect way
is to accustom the thing to have a lining and the shape of a ribbon and to be
solid, quite solid in standing and to use heaviness in morning. It is light
enough in that. It has that shape nicely. Very nicely may not be exaggerating.
Very strongly may be sincerely fainting. May be strangely flattering. May not
be strange in everything. May not be strange to.
Here is a paragraph from
Steiny’s blogpost on “A Piece of
Coffee.”:
“This stanza seems to
transition from furniture to writing or the mechanics of writing such as
writing done on a solid heavy typewriter, a machine with a ribbon, a machine
where the lining is pieces of paper, a machine that is used in the morning
after the night of handwriting is completed, the night where the writer writes
for herself and strangers as Stein stated in her long novel The Making of
Americans. This is the point in the poem where the piece of coffee has
disappeared and things such as the stains coffee leaves needs to be cleaned up
carefully with special implements of soap and silk. Then one can see the
illustration, the design on the paper made of cotton rag.”
This is what Steiny
classifies as bone fide review time and gives herself a little pat on the back
for insisting on the arduous exercise that resulted in the Ten Buts Thru
Ten Comms project. The ability to reach back to work already done
helps the Buttons move forward with studying Tender Buttons.
FILLING THE FOUNTAIN PEN
And one set of comments
always seems to lead to another. Eleanor followed on with: “Allan, your
typewriter connection led me to think of fountain pens—the way they look and
the way they are filled (cut & slender joint, filled, show, squeezing etc.),
and then I Googled "filling a fountain pen" and found this article
which blew my mind.
Picking up on the review
theme, Peter Treanor reflected:
“Shame we couldn’t run the
words of pen types (and all things pen) through the text of the whole work and
see which ones come up. I wonder if she is using typewriter parts as well in
the text? I get this picture of her actively trying to avoid any kind of
conventional meaning or linear flow to her writing, whist trying to pack in as
many codes and oblique. But maybe that was her multisurface /multidimensional
cubistic representational intention. Meanings on different and fractured
planes.”
A TEA MEDITATION
With some days to meditate,
Peter then saw the brewing of tea:
“Enthusiastically hurting a
clouded yellow bud. The enthusiastically seems to suggest infuse to
me—infusiastically infusing, which you do with tea. Hurting, scalding with the
boiling water perhaps. And a clouded yellow bud, could be both the buds of the
tea (which are made from the growing tips of the tea plant), or maybe
even jasmine buds
which are yellow, clouded as the cloudy colour of tea, especially if milk
or lemon is added. And the bud and saucer, well the pretty china ornate cup
is bud shaped. So she gets the bud to be at least two things at once.
All very Cube-of-sugar-ist..
“And the bite in
the ribbon, bite has so many meanings. Could the ribbon be the handle of the
teacup? (it is long and ribbony), the bite could be the chunk taken out of the
centre of the handle as if it was bitten, or it could be the purchase
that the handle gives, allowing the cup to be lifted (as to grip or take hold on
a surface is to bite too) or the pain incurred as the fingers touch the hot
cup, or the sharp tangy bite of the jasmine tea with lemon.”
Typically, Peter mines Tender Button anagrammatically and this
not only leads to cubist vision but often insights other members of the Button
Collective use to go fishing deeper into the word pool. Here, Eleanor invoked
Doris Day singing “Tea for Two”
and then progresses to:
“But in this case, it's not
‘you and me’ but ‘you and I.’ Look at how many different ways the letter ‘U’ is
used:
cUp
saUcer
enthUsiastically
hUrting
cloUded
bUd
saUcer (again)
enthUsiastically (again)
(also - "new"
sounds like you)
“And then there's the letter
‘I’:
enthusIastIcally
hurtIng
enthusIastIcally (again)
Is
bIte
In
rIbbon
“It's as if Stein is
pedantically taking each word and each object, and transforming it into a
metaphor for herself and her significant other.”
Then after an exchange with
Mark over what could hurting
mean, Eleanor steps into Peter’s shoes and transforms hurting to her thing such
that Enthusiastically hurting
becomes enthusiasm about her thing—that
bud and saucer—moving associations
into an erotic zone.
Allan asked:
“Is new cup & saucer a
new universe?
“Here is our Milky Way
galaxy looking like a cup & saucer.
It even has yellow.”
Soon, Dear Reader, you will
understand how
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