Stepping on Tender Buttons: “Water Raining.” & “Cold Climate.”

SEEDING THE BUTTONS BOX

THE BOOK ..........................-           TENDER BUTTONS

THE SUBBOOK ...................-           OBJECTS

THE SUBPOEM ...................-           WATER RAINING: NUMBER 31

WORD COUNT......................-           11

THE SUBPOEM ...................-           COLD CLIMATE: NUMBER 32

WORD COUNT......................-           10

STANZAS..............................-           1 each

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.....................................-           EFFUSIVE

“Rain can make a meadow or it can make a flood. The meadow is passive. The stroke is violent.” Randy Parker

WATER RAINING.

Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke.

COLD CLIMATE.

A season in yellow sold extra strings makes lying places.

The Steiny Road Poet saw the key words for this study session as water, raining, meadow, stroke, yellow, strings, lying. A great deal of the comments focused on objects in the natural world but veered languorously into painting, writing, the Stein love relationships, saffron, the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, string theory, and kabbalah.

WADING IN

Here are some samples:

From Randy Parker:

“Making a meadow is life-giving.

“Making a stroke--well that could be the painting reference that we talked about in ModPo—standing water in the meadow like a stroke of white or grey paint. But a stroke is a kind of statement. A striking, perhaps. Like lightning.  A stroke of genius. A stroke of bad luck. A debilitating physical stroke. Stroke can also refer to swimming.”

THE FLUIDITY OF LOVE

From Peter Treanor:

 “I wonder if water raining could be tears, is she or Alice crying? Raining seems like a very active description of what is happening to the water.  Its astonishing and difficult, maybe they have argued. And the flow of tears makes you wipe/stoke them away.

“And stretching it too far probably, could meadow be "me adieu", me ( GS) saying goodbye. Maybe that’s why there are tears, one of them is leaving?
 I like Randy's reading of this too and like the idea of the meadow as a meadow, and a meadow is such a good place to make hay..
 And "altogether" seems so "all to get her" every time I see it now that I wonder if the meadow is Alice and the stroke is GS stroking her, her meadow, and if the water is GS raining/ reigning down her love and (wet) passion, making hay and making the meadow's wild flowers grow.


“I was [also] thinking of the ways that water is seemingly like love. How it flows, how we get swept away in it, flooded  by it, lost in a sea of it, have oceans of it, float in it, swim in it, drown in it, set  sail away on an ocean of it. Are buoyed up by it. Love and water go together like a cup and saucer.

from Claudia Schumann:

“Water raining is like water passing by (or may mean people passing by). Maybe GS is thinking of May Bookstaver [Stein’s college lover] and trying to forget.”

BRUSH STROKES

From Allan Keeton:

“This makes me think of the strokes of paint in daoist watercolor paintings.

“I am struck by the graceful (astonishing & difficult to achieve)

harmony between humans & nature.”

STRING & PARTICLE THEORY

from Mary Armour:

“This [“Water Raining.”] brought back a memory of walking in a wet spring through water meadows near Richmond, London, grasses undulating and surfing my calves, and later watching some androgynous swimmer doing breast stroke in an Olympic-sized pool, the swift parting of waters and  cleaving, not as dramatic as  swimming the butterfly stroke and heaving up shoulders but scooping water horizontally, parting of ways like the Red Sea, like  tall grasses in Africa.

“The crawl stroke was what we were taught at school, the swift clean slicing forward motion taught after we graduated from doggy paddle. We had to practise it at the side of the pool before we got into the water, moving our arms through the air as if air was lighter helium-filled water.

Finding Feminist in Upcoming Split This Rock Poetry Festival

-->

In the pre-frenzy of getting ready for the Associated Writing Program Convention and Book Fair that the Steiny Road Poet is attending within days of this post, she wants to alert those reading her Tender Buttons posts of an upcoming event next month.

Split This Rock Poetry Festival

March 27-30, 2014 in Washington DC

Here are some highlights that might appeal to experimental poetry enthusiasts who are also invested in feminist ideas:

-->

Thursday March 27

11:30am – 1pm

Citizen Poet Queer: Building a Blueprint for LGBTQ Cultural Activism

Julie Enszer, David Groff, Charles Flowers, Donika Ross
Human Rights Campaign, Room 1

Storytelling and personal witness in poetry—as well as personal essays, op-eds, articles, blogs and advocacy journalism—are potent tools for cultural transformation. How can you find your voice and then raise it in the movement for social justice? This panel explores how the power of your poetry—and the informed passion of your prose—can challenge the norms of the LGBTQ community and the larger culture and help engender a more honest and authentic society. Offering specific strategies, guidelines, and venues for reaching readers both queer and straight, this panel will give poets the adaptable blueprint we need to engage in activist cultural citizenship through our poems—both performed and on the page—our poetry activism, and our literary, social, narrative, and political writing, as we seek to make art that opens hearts and changes lives.

 

4:00 – 5:30pm

Claiming History: Writing Cliophrastic Poems

Marilyn Nelson, Kim Roberts, Dan Vera
Human Rights Campaign, Room 3

Clio, the Muse of History, inspires us to revisit, reinterpret, and reclaim. This work is particularly important for people who have been historically oppressed or underrepresented in cultural narratives: women, GLBTQ people, people of color, and those who come from ethnic or religious minority groups. In this roundtable, three writers who have specialized in historical poems as a means to uncover and reclaim will read examples of their work, and discuss the pleasures and pitfalls of writing about American history. We will explore the sometimes conflicting needs of art and fact, and distribute a “recommended reading” list.

Friday, March 28

2 – 3:30pm

 Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence

Laura Madeline Wiseman, Khadijah Queen, Jennifer Perrine, Kimberly L. Becker, Sarah A. Chavez, María Luisa Arroyo, Ann Bracken, Elliott batTzedek, Carol Quinn, Tyler Mills, Angele Ellis, Rosemary Winslow, Margo Taft Stever, Jane Satterfield, Monica Wendel, Carly Sachs

Charles Sumner School, Room 102

Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013), edited by Laura Madeline Wiseman, views poetry as a transformative art. By deploying techniques to challenge narratives about violence against women and making alternatives to that violence visible, the over one hundred American poets in Women Write Resistance intervene in the ways gender violence is perceived in American culture. Poets of resistance claim the power to name and talk about gender violence in and on their own terms. Indeed, these poets resist for change by revising justice and framing poetry as action. This reading will include a brief introduction by the editor and feature poets reading their poems and others from Women Write Resistance.

Saturday March 29

11:30am – 1pm

From Transgressive to Divine Feminine: Female Poets as Rebels and Miscreants

Wendy Babiak, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Hila Ratzabi, Seema Reza, Metta Sáma, Arisa White

Human Rights Campaign, Room 1

Six female poets explore the interrelated problems faced by humankind: climate change, xenophobia, misogyny, and war. From Islamophobia to the trafficking of women in Mexican border towns, we explore what it means to write as women caught between a “divine feminine”—whether lyrical or sacred—and a harsh reality in which she is outsider, rebel, miscreant. A Q&A session will follow, engaging the audience with their own experiences and definitions of what it means to be a woman poet in the 21st century, and which issues they believe most critical in confronting their own work.

4:30 – 6:00pm

 FEATURED READING – National Geographic Auditorium

DC Youth Slam Team Member Lauren May

Claudia Rankine, Eduardo C. Corral, Myra Sklarew, Gayle Danley

The Steiny Road Poet will be blogging Split This Rock Poetry Festival so meet her there.

Stepping on Tender Buttons: “A Drawing.” Part 2 of 2

BLUESKYING THE BUTTONS BOX

THE BOOK ..........................-           TENDER BUTTONS

THE SUBBOOK ...................-           OBJECTS

THE SUBPOEM ...................-           A DRAWING: NUMBER 30

STANZAS..............................-           1

WORD COUNT......................-          38

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.....................................-           EXPANSIVE

“Maybe it's just what comes up in our minds is just part of the overall way things work in the universe—The Theory of Everything.” Karren Alenier

A DRAWING.

The meaning of this is entirely and best to say the mark, best to say it best to show sudden places, best to make bitter, best to make the length tall and nothing broader, anything between the half.

To review, Peter Treanor set out the following comment like a plate of milk for a finicky cat and then we Buttons all moved on to other topics as noted in Stepping on Tender Buttons: “A Drawing.” Part 1 of 2:

The meaning of this is

And there is the goddess Isis

NOT TO MISS MYTH

Fifteen days later the Steiny Road Poet mining the artifacts of the study session on “A Drawing.” challenged Peter to revisit the possible connection the myth of Isis might have on Tender Buttons and this particular subpoem.

Peter who sees anagrammatically, reconfigured this is as th Isis. For the moment, Dear Reader, we will ignore the disembodied th.

While Steiny is fully aware that Stein scholars say that Gertrude Stein’s writing contains no allusions, Tender Buttons is not like any other work Stein wrote. Against all counsel, Steiny and her band of merry Buttons have been enjoying the rich associations that the letters, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, titles have been eliciting. Indeed many of the associations look mightily like allusions—passing references made obliquely to obscure things or ideas.  What made Steiny interested particularly in pursuing the Isis association—as big a reach as this is (oops, can’t avoid the IS-IS-ness), was research she was doing on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire where one scholar talked about how Apollinaire reconfigured old myths regularly in his poetry. Because Stein considered him a brilliant mind and said so in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Steiny thought it might be worth going out on a limb to look at Isis.


SISTER-BROTHER PAIRS

So Peter dug in saying, “I think she [Stein] would be drawn to the strong female goddess imagery, and the relationship with her brother especially. Even if their relationship wasn’t sexual ( GS and Leo), it was intense and productive. And was so completely ripped apart when Alice came along as lover, it seems like there were intense feelings and tensions between brother and sister that may or may not have been overt and/or realised. Isis and Osiris produced Horus (god of cultivation, farming). GS and Leo gave birth to the infants of Modernism.”

She [Isis] was the friend of slaves, sinners, artisans and the downtrodden, but she also listened to the prayers of the wealthy, maidens, aristocrats and rulers.

“Seems to be a great description of GS's role in the salons of Paris,” Peter glossed.

She married her brother, Osiris, and she conceived Horus with him [after Osiris was dead and resurrected]. Isis was instrumental in the resurrection of Osiris. It was believed that the Nile River flooded every year because of the tears of sorrow that Isis wept for Osiris.

“Well,” Peter wondered. “She and Leo were certainly very close, a marriage of minds, if nothing else. And obviously linked together with a passion, the nature of their complete and catastrophic split points to a great intensity.”

After she assimilated many of the roles of Hathor, Isis's headdress is replaced with that of Hathor’s—the horns of a cow on her head, with the solar disk between them, and often with her original throne symbol atop the solar disk. Sometimes she also is represented as a cow, or with a cow's head. 

Peter said, “Associations with the cow and GS does describe her [Gertrude] and Alice as cows and having a cow, as having an orgasm.”

Stepping on Tender Buttons: “A Drawing.” Part 1 of 2

BLUESKYING THE BUTTONS BOX

THE BOOK ..........................-           TENDER BUTTONS

THE SUBBOOK ...................-           OBJECTS

THE SUBPOEM ...................-           A DRAWING: NUMBER 30

STANZAS..............................-           1

WORD COUNT......................-          38

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.....................................-           EXPANSIVE

“How wonderful that GS should come straight back at us with such a  statement about meaning after all our talk and musings in the last thread about in what way(s), how, or if, she [Stein] conveyed meaning.” Peter Treanor

A DRAWING.

The meaning of this is entirely and best to say the mark, best to say it best to show sudden places, best to make bitter, best to make the length tall and nothing broader, anything between the half.

That the Steiny Road Poet is still able to pull on her boots and move forward after processing long discussions like “Careless Water.” is only made more remarkable by the magnitude of big themes discussed in conjunction with “A Drawing.”.

Inside the ModPo Discussion Forum where all this Tender Buttons study is taking place, Steiny exclaimed, “I love how we mark through endless lists of possibility--river measurement, Hobbit bloodletting, midpoint (wisdom) of Sefirot, Super Bowl drawing, pen & ink drawing, a portrait of Moses’ Sister Miriam, until we get full and Dave [Green] quotes Rabbi Tarfon: ‘It is not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but you are not free to desist from it either.’”

And should Steiny say that the Buttons never seemed to be sated on this discussion and kept coming back with more thoughts. So added to this list were associations with erections, comparative symbology (vinculum and solidus), lesbian lovemaking, contemporary French philosophy (including Écriture Feminine of Luce Irigaray), Egyptian myth of Isis, ordinal numbers, String Theory, the element Thorium, and who knows what was overlooked in this stream of ideas.

Here in part 1 of "A Drawing.", Steiny ipauses for those skeptical about the scope of this discussion. Steiny raised the question during this study session how deeply can we associate? Peter Treanor responded, “I think as deeply as we like or are able to. But I  think we can only say I think rather than I know with our associations. Best not to become association fundamentalists.” So, Dear Reader, be warned, that here there exists no gospel—no absolute truth—but plenty of Steinian circularity. Put on your boots, we are wading in.

MARKING TWAIN

best to say the mark… best to make the length tall and nothing broader, anything between the half.

Pictorially, Allan Keeton responded:

                                     mark

                                                                between the half

                                      Mark                  Twain

make the length tall and nothing broader

                          Tall tales

                                           &    b  r  o  a  d  

                                                                          humor

This caused Judy Meibach to scratch her head and so Steiny jumped in with a definition of mark that included:

6. Nautical

a.    A knot or piece of material placed at various measured lengths on a sounding line to indicate the depth of the water.

Allan also glossed his picture with:

Judy,

between the half 

is the place between something that was whole,

but has now been cut (there's that cutting again) in twain.

Since mark shows up earlier,

I heard 

                 Mark Twain

being drawn forth from “A Drawing.”

Thus we see Stein taking a measurement, like a Mississippi boat captain tossing down a knotted line to see how deep and can he navigate through this part of the river.

DRAWING BLOOD WITH TOLKIEN

As if this were a card game on one of those Mississippi riverboats, Mary Armour said,

“Like your Mark Twain, Allan, and raise you with JR Tolkien:

I will draw you, Saruman, as poison is drawn from a wound. - Gandalf.

Hmm, Steiny joins Judy in puzzlement. Is this the groom Gertrude on her wedding night with bride Alice piercing the hymen?

Stepping on Tender Buttons: “A Paper.”

CONFETTI IN THE BUTTONS BOX

THE BOOK ..........................-           TENDER BUTTONS

THE SUBBOOK ...................-           OBJECTS

THE SUBPOEM ...................-           A PAPER: NUMBER 29

STANZAS..............................-           1

WORD COUNT......................-          21

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.....................................-           GIDDY

“The fall of Man, oh what an occasion that was!” Peter Treanor

“Meaning like time is relative. However we map our associations to Tender Buttons and whatever we call this work we do, we are finding knowledge.” Karren L. Alenier

A PAPER.

A courteous occasion makes a paper show no such occasion and this makes readiness and eyesight and likeness and a stool.

According to the Buttons Collective, the critical words for “A Paper.” are paper—especially a paper show, occasion, and stool.

AN INTRODUCTION: TIMID & NOT SO

By way of introducing this subpoem, Dave Green said, “If you're meeting with someone and you want to be courteous, you shouldn't be looking down at a piece of paper, you should be looking at the person with a sense of readiness to hear what they have to say. This will bring out what's in common (likeness) between you, and you will both want to pull up a stool and sit a while.” The Steiny Road Poet can then picture a nervous first-time visitor to Gertrude Stein. He is holding onto a paper he is using as a prompt against tongue-tied fear.

Eleanor Smagarinsky going word by word offered this:

“COURTEOUS --- Courting

“SHOW --- A show of love

“READINESS --- An ability to read each other, intimacy, ready to publicise feelings.

“EYESIGHT --- Direct eye contact --- I-Sight ---Knowledge of oneself, necessary to have so as to be able to love another.

“OCCASION --- A remarkable moment, true... But also occ is the beginning of occular, again connected to sight.

“LIKENESS --- Liking each other ---being like each other --- loving?

“A PAPER SHOW --- Paper is translucent. But why "no"? Perhaps because a lesbian couple cannot show their love in public, like other couples? No transparency....

“THE STOOL..... No idea........ Dammit......  Maybe a stool pigeon....like a decoy??

“I have moons on my mind, so I Googled paper moon and read on Wikipedia ‘may refer to a spherical paper lantern’ and so, naturally, I remember my favourite scene in the film Tangled...if you see it in 3-D it's particularly breathtaking. Years after seeing that movie, a friend of mine moved to Thailand and sent me photos of the real thing, amazing!”

WHAT FALLS OUT OF THE OCCASION

Digging in deep, Allan Keeton set out all the definitional permutations of the word occasion. After all, the word is used twice in this subpoem with a single stanza containing 21 words. What is most Xciting is that the root of occasion originates from falling:

Middle English, from Anglo-French or Latin; Anglo-French, from Latin occasion-, occasio, from occidere to fall, fall down, from ob- toward + cadere to fall — more at ob-,chance

Looking at the full definition of occasion as a noun, one sees a relationship to time, situation,  and event:

1

:  a favorable opportunity or circumstance occasion

 to talk with them>

2

a :  a state of affairs that provides a ground or reason 

b :  an occurrence or condition that brings something about; especially :  inciting

 circumstance as distinguished from the fundamental cause occasion of a bitter quarrel>

3

a :  happening, incident

b :  a time at which something happens :  instance

4

a :  a need arising from a particular circumstance

b archaic :  a personal want or need —usually used in plural

5

plural :  affairs, business

6

:  a special event or ceremony :  celebration

Maybe, Steiny, thinks to herself about the root of occasion pointing to falling, an occasion can be the result of situational fallout. Certainly it could be like Dave’s shy visitor hanging onto his cheat sheet in the presence of the awesome Gertrude Stein.

Allan also pointed out that besides time, a synonym for occasion is moment. Since Stein’s philosophy of living and writing is to achieve the present moment, to open that window called now, occasion takes on a big emphasis. Being thorough, Allan also set out the antonyms:

aftereffect, aftermath, consequence, corollary, development, effect, fate, fruit, issue, outcome,

outgrowth, product, result, resultant, sequel, sequence,

upshot

Now Steiny is thinking that the root of occasion is more like its antonyms and how much this word must have intrigued Gertrude Stein who was keen on the push pull of the universe. In other words, Stein appreciated opposing forces because it represented a fuller picture of what she was up against.

However, occasion is also a verb meaning to cause (something to happen). And oh, the synonyms:

beget, breed, bring, bring about, bring on, catalyze, cause, create, do, draw on, effectuate, engender, generate, induce, invoke, make, effect, produce, prompt,

result (in), spawn, translate (into), work, yield

Why Steiny pauses here to swoon is that the string of synonyms begins with beget and Tender Buttons is all about the begetting of an extraordinary offspring of Stein’s mind. Furthermore, Stein’s wife Alice B. Toklas, whom Tender Buttons covertly celebrates, is the midwife—Alice taking paper in hand, inserts it into the typewriter every morning to produce a likeness of what Gertrude has handwritten the night before. So there is Alice perched on a pedestal (one of the definitions of stool) not only before the typewriter but also in Stein’s mind as a driving theme of Tender Buttons. Stein held Toklas on a pedestal, this woman who cleared away the clutter of daily living and nurtured Stein the body and Stein the mind.

PUSH PULL OF THE STOOL

Before Steiny loses her nerve or sight of this armless, backless object called stool, she warns you, Dear Reader, about the next push pull of the universe. Here is a list of what stool elicited for the Buttons: the artist’s stool, especially useful when painting outdoors all day; the low mourning stool used by the Jewish orthodox when sitting shiva; the footstool to God’s throne depicted in “The Sermon on the Mount”; the hanging stool put under the feet of a person about to be hanged; the dunking stool used by the Puritans as punishment; tea ceremony stools, usually used by the customers while the geisha preparing the tea kneels on the floor; origami stool, if made from paper big and strong enough, a person can actually sit on one of these; birthing stool, probably used by Gertrude Stein when she was studying medicine at Johns Hopkins and did work in the Black community of Baltimore; the lesbian love stool (comments censored); and you know…excrement.

Steiny won’t play stool pigeon and say who came up with these associations, but she will say one can spin a read through “A Paper.” using any of them. She recommends if you do so, that you keep most of the results to yourself. For now, Steiny, satisfied with the Alice-on-a-pedestal interpretation in spite of that rather bizarre photo of Alice sitting in a chair with very short legs while Gertrude sits in in stocking feet in a normal chair, will return to her bar stool for a hardy drink.

WHAT PAPER SHOWS

Turning away from stools to paper, Steiny reports the following associations from the Buttons: newspaper, writing paper, photographic paper, fans, shadow puppets, toilet tissue, and feminine hygiene products. Yup, more push pull of the universe that points to a women centric space. Oh, and not to forget that paper is what one gives a spouse on the first anniversary of marriage.

STUMPING MIRROR SYMMETRY

And one last thing discussed was mirror symmetry. It is related by the Buttons discussion in “A Paper.” to likeness. Eleanor stumbled upon mirror symmetry, which is one aspect of string theory that relates to geometric measuring of curves. The topic is so far outside the box that Steiny shall do no more than leave it on the stump and run. Well, just these thoughts, string theory came about (late 1960s) well after Gertrude Stein was dead but it addresses connectedness and all that push-pull gravity stuff Steiny has been playing with in this discussion. It’s exceedingly complex and seems to fit the model Stein was working with in Tender Buttons. And it uses words like objects.

“Now,” Steiny says to the Buttons, “throw the confetti,” picks up her lantern, sees the path ahead, and declares she is ready to move on.