Lessons learned from Tender Buttons So Far

2014 is the Centennial Year of the publication of Gertrude Stein’s long poem Tender Buttons. This prose poem marked a turning point in Stein’s career as a writer by establishing her as poet first and foremost though she had already published Three Lives (1909), a book of novellas, and she had written the unpublished long novel The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress (completed in 1911), not to mention the long hidden novel QED about Stein’s failed love affair with May Bookstaver. QED was completed in Baltimore in 1903.

Academics will be quick to say Stein is hard to put in one literary box. However, the Steiny Road Poet will stick by labeling this highly experimental writer as a poet because of the way Stein handled words throughout her writing.  Stein’s lecture “Poetry and Grammar” backs this up as well and presents how she transitioned from writing The Making of Americans with its emphasis on verbs and adverbs to Tender Buttons with its emphasis on nouns.

With the help of an international study group assembled inside the Coursera Modern Poetry Massive Open Online Course developed by University of Pennsylvania professor Al Filreis, Steiny has been studying Tender Buttons since mid October 2013 and presenting the results of that study in this blog. We have currently worked our way through 40 percent of “Objects,” section 1 of the three part poem. Here are some lessons learned which may help in reading Stein’s first love poem to her life long partner Alice B. Toklas.

#1

Nouns are important, especially the root meanings.

#2

Root meanings lead to new aspects of what Stein is studying.

#3

For Stein, poetry is about expressing love. Hidden in the words is her love for her partner Alice B. Toklas.

#4

Stein’s daily life, her experience of living and the world in which she lived in come into play in Tender Buttons. This includes her long relationship with Pablo Picasso, cubism and various visual artists whose work Gertrude and Leo Stein invested in. Stein's treated all aspects of her life equally in Tender Buttons and often these elements arise simultaneously showing Stein's dazzling ability of dimensionality where one word, phrase or sentence projects many associations at the same time.

#5

While Stein presents as simply as possible, often using plain monosyllabic words, she operates within a system to pointing that usually harkens back to what she learned from her Harvard professor William James. Therefore she is pragmatic. Therefore there is always some logic behind what she is offering. This could be meaning or it could be method.

#6

Key words thread through Tender Buttons. Therefore, if Stein uses a word more than once within a subpoem, that is a sign that she is up to something and the reader must dig in deeper.

#7

Mathematics and geometry play into Stein’s system of pointing. It’s part of her logic and eye on cubism. (think fractals)

#8

Humor is part of Stein’s ludic (playful) landscape. Often it manifests in odd word play.

#9

Reader participation is a requirement for reading Stein. She invites you to get out your magnifying glass, to tune up your singing voice, to play scrabble with her letters, to read what she has written through a kaleidoscope, to take out your perfume and get intoxicated.

#10

When you enter the Steinian woods, take all your family, friends, and acolytes. The more the merrier.

Dear Reader, you are invited to participate here in The Steiny Road to Operadom blog as we move slowly through the subpoems of Tender Buttons. 

2014: HAPPY NEW YEAR! Happy 100 years for Tender Buttons!

Ten BUTS Thru Ten COMMS: CLOAK & FALSE WITNESS

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In the ninth pairing of the Ten Buts thru Ten Comms Project reading “A Method of Cloak” through “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” Dave Green jumped in with steady vision, saying the title suggests, “We should cloak (clothe) ourselves with the truth. That will keep us warm and protected.”

A METHOD OF A CLOAK.

A single climb to a line, a straight exchange to a cane, a desperate adventure and courage and a clock, all this which is a system, which has feeling, which has resignation and success, all makes an attractive black silver.

DAVE'S TAKE: A DIFFICULT JOURNEY

“The poem suggests a difficult journey that takes courage to complete. This can be viewed as a metaphor for always telling the truth, i.e., not bearing false witness. How? Because it is not easy to always tell the truth; it takes a certain courage. Sometimes telling the truth makes you feel good (success) and sometimes it makes you feel bad (resignation). But adhering to this commandment is the moral equivalent of a precious metal (attractive black silver). It makes you part of a moral ‘system.’ A clock is involved because not only is it important to tell the truth, it is important to tell it in a timely manner. A single climb and a straight exchange suggest a straightforward and honest approach. We may need a metaphorical cane to support ourselves sometimes, but we should not build that cane out of falsehoods, it should be built on something stronger.”

STEINY'S GLOSS ON CANE & UMBRELLA

The Steiny Road Poet added this: “A straight exchange to a cane could be someone taking a beating for bearing false witness. Well maybe something more complicated and here's what comes to mind from the huge oeuvre of Stein

“There is a scene in The Making of Americans (in the Martha Hersland section) where a man beats a woman with an umbrella while shouting at her to leave him alone. Stein writes, "the woman had a red face partly in anger and partly in asking and the man wanted the woman to know then that he wanted her to leave him alone then in a public street where people were passing  and Martha saw this and this man was for her the ending of the living I have been describing that she had been living. She would go to college, she knew it then and understand everything and know the meaning of the living and the feeling in men and women. She would go to college and she told it then to her father and her mother and they had no objection, no one was paying very much attention and she began her preparation..."

“Without hours of rereading, I believe what happened between the man and the woman is that they had an affair either on the up and up or illicit, maybe she is pregnant with his child, whatever. She sees him in the street and says she needs something from him but she is embarrassed and when he hits her as if he is the victim saying "Leave me alone," she is now both red-faced from embarrassment but also from anger. So in this case, he is publically bearing false witness against her as if she has done injury to him.

“Now add to this, Stein, as narrator of MOA, being so psychologically marked by this scene that she goes to her parents (who have been spending a lot of time educating her and her siblings, hiring special tutors and doing all sorts of things to make her be motivated to learn) and says she is going to college.

“If I am not mistaken the umbrella scene actually happened one day when Gertrude was on her way to a singing lesson. By this time in her real life, both of her parents were dead and she had dropped out of high school. She and brother Leo made it a habit to take a wagon of books into the Oakland hills and walk around all night occasionally stopping to read.

“I think I am coming at this completely aslant but this business of bearing false witness in a very perverse and public way is something that affected her so much that she got her psychological act together and made it a point to go to college so no man could hold an umbrella over her head.”