Ten BUTS Thru Ten COMMS: THE EXIT

What value was the re-playing, the re-visiting, the re-viewing of the first ten subpoems of Tender Buttons through the filter of the Ten Commandments? Could such a review as the Ten Buts thru Ten Comms Project have been done through other means? Will other reviews like this one be done in the future?

The Steiny Road Poet brings up these questions to close out the Ten-Ten project, to acknowledge various methods of close reading a difficult work like Tender Buttons, and to taut the SloPo (Slow Poetry) approach that is kin to the slow food movement.

EPHIPHANIES OF THE TEN-TEN

As Eleanor Smagarinsky pointed out the first five Ten Commandments deal with the God/(wo)man relationship and the last five with (wo)man /(wo)man relationship. Accordingly, the big discoveries of this Ten-Ten project came in the first five pairings.

In the first pairing, reading “A Carafe, That Is A Blind Glass.” through “Thou shalt have no other gods,” what jumped out for Steiny was that Tender Buttons serves as a holy text of matrimony between Gertrude and Alice. This is Gertrude declaring her troth that there will be no greater love than the one she has for Alice.

In the second pairing reading “Glazed Glitter.” through “Thou shalt have no graven images or likenesses,” the issue of not depicting, not showing, not naming G-d translates to keeping Alice safe in this female-to-female relationship by not naming her.

In the third pairing reading “A Substance in A Cushion.” through “Thou shalt have take the Lord’s name in vain,” the whole discussion of calling unto G-d through holy texts yielded a side benefit and that was learning about Kushiot, a word sounding something like cushion and representing a comprehensive way of performing close readings of difficult texts as presented by the sacred text of Torah and other religious texts. In this subpoem, Gertrude establishes the importance of the partnership she is establishing with Alice. This partnership, like God’s attention, should not be summoned without substantial cause. Because “A Substance in A Cushion” is such a rich text full of words that associate themselves well with Jewish prayer clothing and implements (e.g. tallit, tefllin, tzitzis) as well as philosophic constructs (e.g. noumenon—a thing incapable of being known), Steiny believes The Button Collective will be looking at this subpoem again. This subpoem pairing really punches in this idea of Stein evoking an object without naming it.

In the fourth pairing of the Ten Buts thru Ten Comms Project reading “A Box.” through “Thou shalt remember the Sabbath day,” came a sacred pause to honor the wherewithal of creation. For Gertrude, the creation of union with Alice is a sacred troth worthy of the pain that they have chosen for themselves as outliers to normative man-woman relationships and also worthy of the time to celebrate this creative union. Steiny sees now that another descriptive single word for “A Box” subpoem 4 besides kaleidoscope is insight.

In the fifth pairing reading “A Piece of Coffee.” through “Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother,” Steiny learned about the importance of the first five Ten Commandments and how the individual commandments can be categories of meaning. In the case of the Fifth Commandment, the exhortation extends beyond parents to also honoring teachers. In a union, one benefit from the other, one learns from the other, one is uplifted by the other as was the case between the partnership of Gertrude and Alice.

Because in “A Piece of Coffee.” Stein proceeds with more noticeable linguistic play than the first four subpoems (at least noticeable to The Buttons), the big discovery was seeing that the last stanza of this subpoem is heavy with the word may which summons Gertrude’s significant but heartbreaking romance with May Bookstaver. However the use of may is coupled with other words (may not, may be, may not be) that negate the link to Bookstaver. Because of the recently restored may’s to Stanza in Meditation and the flap Gertrude had with Alice over the use of this word, the discovery here in Tender Buttons is significant. And it’s useful to know the article A (as in Alice) appears 17 times throughout “A Piece of Coffee.”.

Largely, the close readings of TB subpoems six through ten seen through the sixth through tenth Commandments tended to bring out more domestic associations as opposed to those on a higher plane. Possibly there was more to see with these individual pairings since the project lost steam as the ModPo curriculum demands heated up in its last weeks of the course. This lack of collaborative close reading activity brings the discussion to the question about using other kinds of lens with which to do close readings.

COULD I BORROW YOUR READING GLASSES PLEASE?

What other kind of lenses could be used? Tracy Sonafelt suggested these after she came to a crossroad in how she wanted to approach Tender Buttons (more on Tracy’s crossroad shortly):

“Reading the poems under the aegis of the first ten elements in the periodic table would also have been interesting. Reading the poems in conversation with ten Shakespearean soliloquies or ten early twentieth-century paintings or ten letters of the alphabet or ten grammatical concepts would also have been engaging.”

The problem, Tracy said about these approaches, is,

“…none of those approaches would have come out of the text. They would all have been read into the text, and that is what I have come to resist. Imposing an external construct on a literary work first and then looking afterward for evidence to support that construct is the exact opposite of the approach I see as most valid and authentic. It works. Virtually any framework will work with poems as open and as metaphorical as these. It may even be a lot of fun, but I don’t think it’s close reading. It’s concept reading.”

With a great deal of thoroughness, Tracy offered a detailed explanation why she felt that primary emphasis on the text without outside sources was important in discussing what Stein was doing in Tender Buttons and specifically in subpoem 13 “A Seltzer Bottle.” Steiny will quote Tracy and gloss certain parts of Tracy’s thoughts, which she titled “A lit-crit issue.” She begins with two quotes.

“A poem need not have a meaning and, like most things in nature, often does not have. ~ Wallace Stevens (from “Adagia,” Opus Posthumous, 1959)

“How irksome to have to explain my poem when I don’t know what it means either. This is the trouble with analysis in search of a prose meaning for what is not prose. ~ R.S. Thomas (when a friend asks him to explain one of his poems)

“This is the meta-Sonafeltic portion of my response. I find myself at a crossroads in this Steinian journey, my friends, and I am uncertain how to proceed. I have always taught my students to use a text-centric critical approach to the literary works we read and study. I have leanings toward formalism and New Criticism, but I don’t completely discount biography, authorial intent, and reader response. I just believe that the text is primary. ‘Show me your textual evidence,’ I tell my students. ‘Can you back that up with a textual example? What in the text supports that claim?’ I ask. I want them to follow a text down the interpretive road it carves out, not take the text by the hand and lead it with a map they impose on the text themselves.

“But with Stein, the semantic and syntactic cues and clues on which I normally rely and in which I root my textual approach aren’t easily accessible because, as my husband, the Biblical scholar, said in my conversation with him about this, “Stein is actively subverting the normal process of exegesis.” Exactly. So what we’re led to do, in the absence of surety about what we draw out of the text is to, instead, read in our own preconceived notions, biases, or personal associations. Instead of exegesis, we practice eisegesis, turning Tender Buttons into a kind of literary Rorschach test. Maybe that’s what Stein wanted, for the poems to lead us into ourselves, to reflect ourselves back to us, but I think she was up to something much more revolutionary, namely, deconstructing language and remaking it in a radically new way that would fundamentally change the way we view the world. I have thus begun to think that while we can deconstruct the poems in Tender Buttons, describe their features and patterns, draw connections among the sub-poems, and juggle lots of possible associations and connotations, we can never really decode them and are, in fact, not meant to.”

FROM SENSE MAKING TO SOUND MAKING

Here Steiny affirmed that she had no problem with Tracy’s approach since Steiny could see Tender Buttons like The Making of Americans moving from “sense making to chaotic sound making.” And to be sure Steiny understood what Tracy was saying, she took the time to review what Tracy wrote:

“I think your approach applies to the term Exegesis that includes a wide range of critical disciplines: textual criticism is the investigation into the history and origins of the text, but exegesis may include the study of the historical and cultural backgrounds for the author, the text, and the original audience. This is the part of exegesis that is not working for you, right? This is also the part you of exegesis you have labeled the normal process of exegesis, yes?

“Exegesis also includes cataloging other literary genres seen in the text and analysis of grammatical and syntactical characteristics of the text itself. This is the approach that you are currently pursuing in looking at “A Seltzer Bottle.”. Correct?
“Next you discuss EISegesis, which, as you say, puts the way of looking at Stein’s prose poems into the psyche of the reader who pulls out associations from his/her bag of experience and imposes that on Stein’s collection of words. It is what we do when we stand in front of an abstract painting.

“In many ways the approach you have settled on synchs with the approach my friends who are graduates of St. John’s College of Annapolis embrace for analyzing texts. They read the Great Books and often in the original language. In their college curriculum, they don’t do subjects separately but they do insist that one can only look at the text before them and separate that text from the author and from the author’s living space. It is a way of looking and it often yields valuable and satisfying information.

“I have no objection to this approach and it will be and is valuable with difficult unyielding texts like “A Seltzer Bottle.”

“That said, Stein is difficult to separate from other works and from her living space because she threaded that into work. She was a prolific reader reading in wide ranging disciplines. 
“While Stein did not write many personal things in her notebooks (literary journals), her work often contained details from her day. For example, I went to Yale to her main lit archive to research her relationship with Christopher Blake, a man still living who claims to be her last protégé. In fact there were things written about him that were in the form of Stanzas in Meditation and that he indeed seemed to be a writer she cared for deeply.

“Anyway I think the approach you prefer is valid and we will all learn much from it. I just don’t want to discourage other approaches and I know you are also NOT discouraging other ways of seeing, studying and enjoying Stein. Maybe this falls into a My Gertrude Stein like Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson.”

Here’s how Tracy answered Steiny:

“Karren [a.k.a. Steiny], I think you have summarized my position pretty clearly and cleanly. My academic background (both undergraduate and graduate) is in English language and literature, not in education (I back-doored my way into teaching), and is thus largely exegetical. So I certainly embrace textual criticism and historical-cultural-contextual criticism. I am also not opposed to some biographical criticism, especially if supported by primary source evidence, but I still assert the primacy of text itself. I am entirely resistant to eisegetical approaches even though I can play that game and have done so previously with TB. I’m quite familiar with the St. John's Great Books approach (I have some continuing ed training in that approach) and think it’s a partial analogue to the critical method I embrace. You are right that I am not discouraging other critical approaches to Stein. A critique of methodology is part of literary criticism. Resistance is part of intellectual inquiry. Resistance ≠ rejection.”

SloPo, A FORM OF TALKING & LISTENING

Suffice it to say, there was additional exchanges on the subject of approach dealing with text, subtext, meaning, chance and so on but most importantly how one approaches Tender Buttons will remain open. All discussion is welcome. And yes, Steiny was willing to apply any lens to the first ten subpoems of Tender Buttons for review purposes, but felt by shifting the attention to the Ten Commandments actually yielded some meaty things to think about relative to Stein (and her work) who came from extended family who were orthodox Jews.

Furthermore, Steiny subscribes to the educational standard that review and reflection is periodically valuable. If all The Button Collective does is move through Tender Buttons like a group of constantly hungry carnivores or culture vultures (more apropos to those who visited 27 rue de Fleurus just to say that they had been there), we would be out of synch with Stein’s rubric of talking and listening. Surely we want to carry forward what we are discovering. So welcome again to SloPo.

Ten BUTS Thru Ten COMMS: RED STAMP & DESIRE

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In the tenth pairing of the Ten Buts thru Ten Comms Project reading “A Red Stamp” through “Thou shalt not covet,” the Steiny Road Poet waded in to cross match first identifying some words to work with and then moving backwards through the text.

A RED STAMP.

If lilies are lily white if they exhaust noise and distance and even dust, if they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace, if they do this and it is not necessary it is not at all necessary if they do this they need a catalogue.

WHAT ONE NEEDS TO LIVE VS WHAT ONE DESIRES

Here are some words that Steiny thought she could work with: need, not at all necessary, if they do this and it is not necessary, lily white.

Comments from Steiny:

“Thank G-d the word need appeared in this Button! It gave me courage that I could find something to talk about in this read through but once I traveled backwards through the poem, I saw other possibilities.

“Need is a companion to desire.

“Covet means: 

1. To feel blameworthy desire for (that which is another's). See Synonyms at envy.

2. To wish for longingly. See Synonyms at desire.

Root meanings of covet include the word Cupidus (Cupid) 

[Middle English coveiten, from Old French coveitier, from covitie, desire, from Latin cupidits, from cupidus, desirous, from cupere, to desire.] 

“Since we Buttons decided that we saw "A Red Stamp." as a coded love poem that hinges on desire and physical sex, the fit for the Tenth Commandment works here.

“not at all necessary goes hand-in-hand with being commanded not to covet. What one desires is not necessarily what one needs to live, though in love there is no reason like this. In the orthodoxy of religion, what Gertrude desires (i.e. Alice) is not  permissible. So Gtrude cannot put her love story out in the world straightforwardly so creates her catalogue, her register of marriage and troth through Tender Buttons.

“if they do this and it is not necessary continues the discussion of a love relationship not permissible by Judaic or Christian standards. However, one should not dismiss the repetition exacted here. It really smacks in the thou shalt not if not the entire thou shalt not covet command.

“lily white—means beyond reproach and this is how Gertrude sees Alice once she falls in love with her and so Gtrude gives Alice her red stamp of covetous attention in defiance of thou shalt not...”

IN THE VAST SEA OF THE POSSIBLE

This concludes the close reading of the first ten subpoems of Tender Buttons through the Ten Commandments. This journey was often as difficult as the first read-throughs but hopefully some new light was shed. Ellen Dillon, thinking of all things buttonical, offered this quote from Rachel Blau DuPlessis as commentary on how the members of the Tender Button MOOSG— interact with Stein’s difficult texts:

“a reverence for textuality so intense it moves into an antic quality within the seriousness, an exilic, nomadic sensibility, a certain kind of humor … a quarrel with the negative space some call God, a particular, actually somewhat skeptical, somewhat hopeful attitude to fulfillment and messianic hope.”

Dave Green provided this response to Ellen’s offering,

“Yes, we are antic buttonical exegetes here, not unlike the text-crazed Talmudic scholars of yore. We are nomadic because the words we study have had their denotational links cut and therefore we are continually sailing on a vast sea of possible meanings. Our messages themselves cross the globe every day and night. We strengthen our communal bonds and hold a light against the darkness via humor (we believe this works better than buying goddamn big cars). We question everything, as the truth is complex and elusive; sometimes feel lost amid the vast ocean; but always remain hopeful we will glean a measure of understanding and have fun in the process.”

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.”

Ten BUTS Thru Ten COMMS: UMBRELLA & THEFT

In the eighth pairing of the Ten Buts thru Ten Comms Project reading “Mildred's Umbrella” through “Thou shalt not steal,” Steiny approached by pointing out certain words and asking questions.

MILDRED'S UMBRELLA.

A cause and no curve, a cause and loud enough, a cause and extra a loud clash and an extra wagon, a sign of extra, a sac a small sac and an established color and cunning, a slender grey and no ribbon, this means a loss a great loss a restitution.

Here are some words that might suggest a scenario where a theft or maybe mugging might be happening: a cause, loud enough, a loud clash, a sign of extra, a small sac, cunning, this means a loss a great loss, a restitution.

Here are some questions and answers: 

Q: What would cause someone to steal?

A: Given that there is a sign of extra as well as an extra wagon, Steiny ventures that someone who does not have extra, who is poor and in need and unable to control the urge to take what is not hers might indeed steal.

Steiny hears a loud clash of...something we don't know what.

A:

Q: Would a sign of abundance (extra) encourage someone needy to steal?

A: Because there is mention of a cause and a loud one at that, maybe there is a demonstration on the street that spurs the needy one to steal.

Q: Has someone absconded with a sac, a small sac?

A: Eleanor Smagarinsky said sac in French is a woman’s handbag and these are often stolen.

  

Q: Who was that cunning person and why would he/she steal?

A: Again, this might be a person who takes in a street demonstration, possibly against an employer who has not adequately paid his/her employees and maybe the needy one was once employed by this stingy boss but laid off or fired.

Q: What was the thief wearing? Maybe a slender grey dress with no ribbon?

A: Hard to say what the thief was wearing be it a slender grey dress with no ribbon. Steiny is now more interested in ascribing the slender grey and lack of ribbon to the handbag, which may represent a great loss to its owner.

Q: Can there be restitution?

A: That sign of extra, that small sac stolen and meaning a great loss. How can this be restitution for someone down on his or her luck. For as cunning as this thief might be, he or she is impulsive and not thinking through what this act might mean in the long run. Prison being among the consequences.

Q: What happened?

A: Something straight on (without curve, as in no curve) happens to the person who becomes a thief. Possibly the urge to steal is brought on by the abundance seen on a street. Someone, probably a woman of means (an established color) carries sac à main (handbag). The needy one devises a plan through cunning. The bag is slender and grey and has no strap (no ribbon). During some kind of mob scene on the street (possibly a demonstration— a cause and loud enough, a cause and extra a loud clash, the perpetrator bumps into the woman of means, grabbing the sac, which the thief feels is restitution for what society owes him/her.

Q: If we see Mildred's umbrella as protection could that be a factor in not having any complications (no curve)?

A: Ah, the story could be revised, if the woman of means used her umbrella to fend off the

thief.

Q: Now flipping back to the original close reading “Mildred’s Umbrella.”, could this Ten Commandment read through with that shalt not steal be a plea to the Higher Power not to take Mildred's life?

A: In the world of interpreting Gertrude Stein, anything is possible. Mostly it is about thinking outside normal limitations. Steiny thinks this study group would be good for leadership training.