THE SUBBOOK
...................-
FOOD
THE SUBPOEM
...................-
Milk
WORD COUNT
(Total)……...- 111
STANZA(S)............................-
7
THE LEADER........................-
THE STEINY ROAD POET
“Milk.” is the sixth
subpoem of Tender Buttons section 2
Food. There are two Milk subpoems and this is the first.
Among the topics
discussed for this subpoem were: what happened at the first Thanksgiving
celebration; hardship, afflictions/ illness; pregnancy & birth; games—golf
& guessing; measurement; food & wordplay; history of golf, and the
settlement movement.
MILK.
A white egg and a colored pan and a cabbage showing settlement,
a constant increase.
A cold in a nose, a single cold nose makes an excuse. Two are
more necessary.
All the goods are stolen, all the blisters are in the cup.
Cooking, cooking is the recognition between sudden and nearly
sudden very little and all large holes.
A real pint, one that is open and closed and in the middle is so
bad.
Tender colds, seen eye holders, all work, the best of change,
the meaning, the dark red, all this and bitten, really bitten.
Guessing again and golfing again and the best men, the very best
men.
“Did you notice all
the words with the letter o? …It's a kind of beholding, a seeing with awe, no?”
Karren Alenier
FROM
SETTLEMENT—HARDSHIP & ILLNESS
Subpoem
6 “Milk” elicited lots of different thoughts on what it was about. Karren Alenier began the conversation
by saying that “Stein connects ‘Milk.’ to ‘Cranberries.’ with the word settlement”
and continued:
“Hardship seems to
be a big theme in this subpoem. Being sick with a cold makes me think of that
early Thanksgiving where the settlers were suffering from starvation until they
got some help from the native Americans and then things changed.”
The implication is that hardship points to the first Thanksgiving
celebration.
Teri Rife further explored
the issue of illness:
“As to the colds. From "Sugar:"
The line which sets sprinkling to be a remedy is beside the best
cold. [stanza 8 of subpoem 6 “Sugar.”]
“And in this subpoem we have:”
A cold in a nose, a single cold nose makes an excuse. Two are
more necessary. [stanza 2 of subpoem 6 “Milk.”]
Tender colds, seen eye holders, all work, the best of change,
the meaning, the dark red, all this and bitten, really bitten. [stanza 6 of subpoem 6 “Milk.”]
“So, it seems that perhaps a bug has gotten into the system (‘bitten,
really bitten’) and the result is a cold: a cold IN a nose and a cold
nose, both (two are more necessary.) I love the fact that makes
an excuse sounds so much like ‘makes an achoo!’ And the word necessary
sounds rather sneezy, too.
“This bite, making the skin dark red, may be from a flu bug, or
a love bug, or a writing bug (akin to a ‘travel bug’—something which cannot be
ignored. If the love bug which has bitten Stein has given her tender
colds (the kind which induce her to write TB), then I can see the meaning of all this: the
best of change, all work, maybe even seen eye holders (spectacles?).
Also, Alice would Tend-her colds, would she not?”
Mary Armour added:
... all the blisters are in the cup
“And I find myself with slight repugnance thinking of the old
medical tradition, found in the Victorian medical practice Stein would have
known, of cupping boils or blisters. Cupping and
blistering were ways of excising infection, cupping worked by creating a
suction on the skin. Pus coming out as a milky fluid? And the blisters
in the cup, the skin blistering from application of the heated cup.”
STEIN’S MEASUREMENTS
Talking about cups brings up measurements—Stein always the scientist
is never far from measuring things. Here’s Alenier
on this subject:
“Measurement comes into play in this subpoem with these words:
increase and change
cup and pint
very little and all large
“There are also contrasts:
sudden and nearly sudden
open and closed”
MAKING BABIES & OTHER GAMES
Changing directions Alenier
also commented about a pregnancy and birth theme:
“These words and phrases make me think of pregnancy and birth of
a baby:
milk
egg
constant increase
Two are more necessary
nearly sudden very little and all large holes
a real pint
the dark red (maybe bloody show?)”
Seeing connections between “Sugar.”, “Cranberries.”, and
“Milk.”, Rife noticed that “the blisters,
sudden, red and bitten (teeth & dog—the monster's back).
And guessing is a game, just as golf is.
While Alenier saw the
return of the monster, she said this:
“Babies can be little monsters especially as they start to get
teeth and don't know the power of teeth.
“If you look at Stanza 6, it begins with the word tender:”
Tender colds, seen eye holders, all work, the best of change,
the meaning, the dark red, all this and bitten, really bitten.
“As we have previously discussed, the book title Tender
Buttons could be referring to belly buttons and because this long poem is
about the marriage troth between Gertrude and Alice that includes having
babies—these babies are Stein's books, I think ‘Milk.’ is particularly about
babies.”
BLISTER AS BALLOON OR PREGNANCY BUMP
Catching up on Mary Armour’s comment about blisters, Alenier countered:
“Blister as bubble, as
in balloon where that leads to ideas floating out of the cup of Stein's head!
“Also blister as the
pregnant bump and this goes with the bubble-balloon of creation-imagination.”
COOKING FOOD/WORD PLAY
These comments led to Rife
moving from blisters to cooking:
“The bump—both baby and writer's!
“Been thinking about blisters and cooking (burns)
and blisters and working (rubbing). Pressing too hard on
your writing instrument results in a dark red blister/bump. (I
speak from personal experience.) All work and no play makes Jack a
dull boy.
“As to various food items and cooking, I've been looking at white
egg (egg white), cabbage, goods, and stolen (stollen?) and
lots of words associated with the cooking process implements & the
measurements Karren mentioned above (pan, cup, pint, (pot)holders),
and chemistry (settlement, constant increase, blisters, sudden
and nearly sudden, very little and all large holes, the best of change.)
“It seems there might be another instance here of the word play
with double o's in words (cooking, cooking) coupled with a phrase
like "seen eye holders." Are the double ee's in seen
the representatives of the two eyes in the holders? Fun.
“There are pairs of words in the "Cooking" sentence.
1) Cooking, sudden, very little (holes) and 2) Cooking, nearly
sudden, all large holes. Does this refer to rising time prior to
baking the stollen resulting in a more or less airy bread structure? The
ingredients of stollen include milk, eggs, honey (sugar), yeast, all sorts of
dried or candied fruits—all the goods? And is there more word play with all
the goods and so bad? You don't want to put the milk from the
pint that has been opened and closed so much that it has gone bad.
“But where does the cabbage fit it? Eggs and
cabbage cooked together do make a good dish, and there is such a thing as a
cabbage soufflé. There are some physical features of the cabbage plant that
relate to language in this subpoem: parts that are ovate and cup-shaped
leaves. This seems rather flimsy, though.
“Who are the best men? Are they the men Gertrude
admires—men she would have stand-up for her at her wedding to Alice?”
To this, Alenier
asked,
“Did you notice all the words with the letter o?
colored, constant, cold, nose, two, more, goods, stolen,
cooking, holes, one, open, closed, so, holders, work, golfing
“It's a kind of beholding, a seeing with awe, no?”
Rife
crooned:
“OOO, the o's.
Especially the holes, since o's literally look like holes, don't
they? And "hol(e)-ders"--beholders, as you say.”
Alenier
pushed back:
“I'm thinking about
those holes and what goes in them.
“At the end we have golfing and men. white golf ball in the cup.
Men with their pen is applied to the pap-[h]er! Hehe!”
Rife mused:
“Ah, yes. I should have gotten the white ball in the cup. That's
what the golfers say they're doing. The genius is re-thinking (cooking is
the re-cognition between: 1) sudden and nearly sudden, 2) very
little and all large holes) language and the very best men are on
the golf course, occupied with chasing around the little white ball!”
Alenier rejoined:
“Nice, Teri, that connection about the cooking-re-cognition to
these balls.
“Now that makes me think that Stein is making fun of men who are
chasing their balls! Hehe! Also men protect their anatomical balls with a
cup, no?”
In a more serious mood, Alenier said,
“Something that occurred to me is that ‘Milk.’ is one of two and
the first category in the FOOD
table of contents.
“I think this makes the tie to conception—baby, mother's milk,
Stein's book babies—all that much stronger.”
Steiny thinks given all the o’s and the holes, maybe we should
be asking how much can the reader swallow?
Steiny will end by adding notes (collected from Wikipedia) on
golf and the Settlement Movement.
GOLF
1900—Golf is played at the Paris Olympic Games. Twenty-two
participants took part (12 men and 10 women) from four countries who competed
in 36-hole individual stroke play events for men and women. The women’s Olympic
champion was Margaret Abbot (USA) and Charles Sands (USA) was the men’s
champion.1901 The rubber cored Haskell ball is introduced. It changed the way
the game was played. The Haskell ball travelled farther than the old
gutta-percha ball and cost considerably less because it could be mass produced.
The game’s popularity surged in response.
1904—Golf
is played for the second time in the Olympic Games in St Louis. Only men’s
competitions were staged. (A team event of 36 holes stroke play won by the
United States of America’s team and an individual event was won by George Lyon
from Canada).
THE SETTLEMENT MOVEMENT
The
settlement
movement was a reformist social
movement,
beginning in the 1880s and peaking around the 1920s in England and the US, with
a goal of getting the rich and poor in society to live more closely together in
an interdependent community. Its main object was the establishment of
"settlement houses" in poor urban areas, in which volunteer
middle-class "settlement workers" would live, hoping to share
knowledge and culture with, and alleviate the poverty of, their low-income
neighbors. The "settlement houses" provided services such as daycare,
education, and healthcare to improve the lives of the poor in these area
The
most famous settlement house in the United States is Chicago's Hull House, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates
Starr in
1889 after Addams visited Toynbee Hall within the previous two years. Hull
House, though, was not a religious based organization. It focused on providing
education and recreational facilities for European immigrant women and
children.[2] Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, founded in 1894,
Friendly Inn Settlement House, founded in 1874, Henry Street Settlement, founded in 1893, Hiram House, founded in 1896, and University Settlement House, founded in 1886 and the
oldest in the United States, were, like Hull House, important sites for social
reform. United Neighborhood Houses of New York is the federation of 38
settlement houses in New York City.[5] These and other settlement houses inspired the
establishment of settlement
schools
to serve isolated rural communities in Appalachia.[c By 1913, there were 413 settlements in 32 states.[6]
In
1910, Louise Marshall founded The Cabbage Patch Settlement House with the help
of her community, church, and family. Named for the Louisville neighborhood
where it was originally established, The Cabbage Patch was formed in the spirit
of Christian love as a safe haven for children in the neighborhood to play,
grow, and learn. The Cabbage Patch quickly grew, gaining continued support from
the Louisville community.
The
Buttons Collective discussed Hull House in “It
Was Black, Black Took.”
Participants:
Karren Alenier, Mary Armour, Teri Rife
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