Gertrude Stein (by Picasso)

 

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

 

January 5, 2023

 

So now to come to the real question of punctuation, periods, commas, colons, semi-colons and capitals and small letters. I have had a long and complicated life with all these.

—Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, 1935

 

A Carafe in Bb Major

by Alex Tretbar (Guest Editor)

 

“The difference is spreading.”

 

Last night I sat down to read the final pages of Gertrude Stein’s small, strange book Tender Buttons. I don’t use bookmarks, as I’m usually able to quickly identify where I left off. I remembered reading the section titled “Cups” on page 49 of my edition, but I saw nothing familiar in the following subsection, “Rhubarb,” which consists of a single sentence: “Rhubarb is susan not susan not seat in bunch toys not wild and laughable not in little places not in neglect and vegetable not in fold coal age not please.” So I read “Rhubarb” and moved on.

 

The book is divided into three parts: “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms.” On page 60 I read “A Center in a Table,” the final section of “Food,” then turned the page and began “Rooms,” which begins as follows:

 

Act so that there is no use in a center. A wide action is not a width. A preparation is given to the ones preparing. They do not eat who mention silver and sweet. There was an occupation.

 

That initial imperative —“Act so that there is no use in a center”—rang through me in such a way that I knew I wasn’t reading or hearing it for the first time, and the heavy declarative statement that concludes the paragraph—“There was an occupation”—struck me with the ghostly certainty of déjà vu (“already seen”), or, more accurately, déjà lu (“already read”).

 

I read eleven pages of Tender Buttons on the evening of December 21^st, then read the same eleven pages again on the evening of December 22^nd, remembering none of them until reaching “Rooms.” How could I read so many pages before stumbling across a certain phrasing or arrangement of words that would seem to indicate I had read them before, and recently? The answer is not that Tender Buttons is forgettable. The answer is that Tender Buttons is slippery. As Juliana Spahr writes, it is “a book always in the process of being read over and over.” It acts as if there is no use in a center.

 

“Lying in a conundrum…”

 

I served 64 months in the Oregon prison system, and was released on July 22^nd, 2022. I spent the final ten days of my sentence in quarantine, in the hole, and I had made grand literary plans for those ten days. In my luggage of plastic trash bags, alongside a half jar of coffee and other essentials, I had stowed a stack of poetry collections, anthologies, and magazines, and I was looking forward to the 240 hours of unfettered reading. I didn’t bring any fiction, save for the handful of short stories sprinkled throughout the magazines, and I came to regret that decision.

 

Now, it wasn’t ten days of traditional segregation: I had all of my canteen luxuries, I was granted time each day for phone calls and microwaving, and the general vibe was not punitive. Plus, after all, my prison sentence was about to end. But the pressure cooker of the cell came to seem like the anteroom between hell and heaven, despite my knowing that prison isn’t (necessarily) hell, and liberty isn’t (necessarily) heaven. I continued waking up at 5, drinking cold tap water coffee, and reading and writing, but the onslaught of poetry’s nonstop ellipsis, misdirection and elusion/allusion began to erode my ability to pass the hours calmly. I thought of Ezra Pound slowly losing it, writing his lonely Cantos in the oblivion of St. Elizabeths. I craved narrative: A then B, so C. I wanted fiction. Characters doing things, and things happening to characters. Undreamlike causation.

 

One of the books I brought with me was an issue of Fonograf Editions, and on its cover was a pink and purple abstraction “indebted to [the Russian painter Kasimir] Malevich’s Suprematist artistic vision, one that believed that ‘the appropriate means of representation is always the one which gives fullest possible expression to feeling as such and which ignores the familiar appearance of objects.’” But in that ten-day moment before release, I was sick of the avant-garde, sick of abstraction, and sick of poetry. I wanted objects—like a milk carton passed through a hole in a metal door—to appear familiar. Tender Buttons may have been a torturous book to possess at that time.

 

Images brand our spirits, and the twin sigils of the final cell I lived in were:

 

 

Yes, a ridiculous pairing, but I believe that there is no highbrow, no lowbrow. There is only brow, and beneath it the all-seeing eye through which we witness our lives.

 

“Nickel, what is nickel…”

 

Stein renders the familiar unfamiliar. Her prose poems (if you can call them that, if you can call them anything at all) approach “A Table” or “A Shawl” from unexpected angles, with grammatically impenetrable constructions, and for this reason her work is often cited as bearing the Cubist torch into literature. Here is the first and most famous piece from Tender Buttons, titled “A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass”:

 

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

 

What are we to make of this? Tender Buttons has engendered much academic handwringing and dissection over the past century, and you are not alone if, in reading the above excerpt, you find yourself shaking your head or scoffing. Perhaps the most agreed-upon facet of Tender Buttons is that we can agree upon nothing when regarding it. It is an object “simultaneously considered to be a masterpiece of verbal Cubism, a modernist triumph, a spectacular failure, a collection of confusing gibberish, and an intentional hoax.” Like Joyce’s Ulysses or Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the book “is perhaps more often written about than actually read” (Poets.org).

 

And yet I recommend that everyone read it. Unlike the behemoth works of Joyce or Proust, it can be read in a single evening or two, and there is no constellation of characters and motives and histories to keep straight. There are few, if any, people in Tender Buttons (personal pronouns are haunting in their rare surfacing), and nothing really happens. But there is music, and undeniable passion—even be it bridled or obscured by syntax. Just look at those first seven words of the book: “A kind in glass and a cousin.” Never mind what it “meant” to Stein, or what it “means” to me. It is just a beautiful arrangement of, as Coleridge defined poetry, “the best words in the best order.” The poet Charles Bernstein has provided some of the best advice for readers of Tender Buttons, and it is worth quoting him at length:

 

The sections of the work are not “about” subjects that are discussed but are their own discrete word objects (verbal constellations). Meaning in these works is not something to be extracted or deciphered but rather to be responded to, so that the reader’s associations create a cascading perceptual experience, guided by the uncanny arrangement of the words. The more readers can associate with the multiple vectors of each word or phrase meanings, the more fully they can feast on the unfolding semantic banquet of the work. The key is not to puzzle it out but to let the figurative plenitude of each work play out; for, indeed, this work is not invested in a predetermining structure or in precluding or abstracting meaning. Tender Buttons does not resist figuration but entices it. And the work is rife with linguistic and philosophical investigation as well as an uncannily acute self-awareness of its own processes.

 

“A letter was nicely sent.”

 

I was exhibiting an uncannily acute self-awareness of my own processes. (Have you ever felt clairvoyant in the knowledge that you know what you are about to do? Is it not strange that, before we go to pick up the plastic mug of cold predawn coffee, we know that we are about to pick up the plastic mug of cold predawn coffee? And even if we decide, in auto-rebellion, not to pick up the mug, we construct a new future the knowledge of which is instantaneously and irrevocably ours—until we change our minds again. I used to take drugs, I think, for a simple reason: I didn’t want to know what happened next. I wanted to be surprised.)

 

Alas, in a single afternoon of quarantine I devoured the handful of short stories available to me, and once again I was left with poetry, the desolation of my processes, my circuits and orbits and feedback loops. For five years I had been invested in a predetermined structure, and that structure was beginning to dissolve. Reading poems—whether they were straightforwardly narrative or relentlessly experimental—repulsed me, and so did writing them.

 

The last letter I sent from prison contained the last poem I wrote in prison. Ironically or perhaps not, it was a letter to someone living in the same building as me, another prisoner. Distance is often nonphysical. Here’s the poem: 

 

Special Features

 

there isn’t a thing to say

so close to the relinquished

light of a star

                         what really comprises the common dust

                         of living rooms & cells

                                                                 panting

                                                                 panting

                                    the television is panting

                                 is

               underwater

                 with grief

I look what I think is west

is west it’s hard to tell

      amid so many competing surfaces

      amid

      amid

amid absent flowers & oxidized materials

you can oversanitize to the point where everything becomes

                                                                         is permanently

                                                                         clean

                         & the action movie soundtrack

                         convinces me of climax

                         a nonexistent curtain falls

           the show is

              the story is over   /   I am asleep

                in the deleted scenes of my life

 

To me—the writer of this poem who had forgotten its contents until now, digging through my notebooks, reading it now with the privilege of distance—the poem reeks of wordsickness. But it’s okay to be sick of words. Even the sun can make us sneeze.

 

“Book was there, it was there.”

 

A pink is not of vitamin, is it. Smaller

and smalling. What recedes fortifies

and running now, a mauve. Crossing

a street requiring friends in need of.

We are not a wobble. We nosy. Let us

consider longing now the ultimate form.

 

Or, as my friend Irene Cooper puts it:

 

no commas

~for GS & ABT

 

pop buttons pop projections of rimming. collect the close & closings tendered against the winded heart. red petals the threaded plain & some cleavage is rising. plastics are crashing are the rain sugaring the cavity are a red tempest in a chest. in closure some button slips its absence & is too much is intolerable is undone & so open. open. 

 

Or, as my friend Laura Winberry puts it:

 

the buttons are as tender as we make them

 

[essayistic interpretations of cubism in non-prosaic form, in conversation with Miss Stein]

 

a trach tube is or isn’t a direct pathway to living

(well or at all). so is a catheter, a pic line, a drip

like a bright sweep through the body every eight

hours or so.

 

it doesn’t all have to be so tragic. we see

things and beings through to some kind of end

then start again. so many moments are synonymous

with continue.

 

when mom asides about the new nurse I think

he’s born-again Christian as if he were

also diseased he’s too neat—I laugh.

 

after a night in his tender she admits to being wrong—

he’s lovely and my buddy let me tell you his life story.

 

the subject seen from a multitude of viewpoints

crescendos into a tenderness of context. what was once

angular, disjointed, rearranged

becomes whole.

 

I think what I mean to say is multi

-dimensional, -faceted, -plying as in

nothing is ever what it seems.

 

I don’t yet know how to call this tender,

but something in my body

tells me I will.

 

Or, as the late Trish Keenan of the band Broadcast puts it, in the song “Tender Buttons”:

 

The cortex

The comb

The codeine

The comma

The context

 

Such is Stein’s influence. And the funny thing is that when I first came across that unlikely pair of words—“tender” and “buttons”—it wasn’t in the form of Stein’s book. It was the Broadcast song, a complicatedly hopeful acoustic-electric drone in the key of B-flat major.

 

The website Last.fm allows users to log the songs they listen to on their computers and mobile devices, and this evening I performed a search of my account, which I created in 2006. I searched for “Tender Buttons,” and found that I listened to the song for the first time at 12:38 p.m. on October 22, 2009, 14 days after my 20^th birthday. According to Wunderground.com, it was 54 degrees Fahrenheit in Lawrence, Kansas, at that very moment, the sky was cloudy, and the wind was blowing around 15 miles per hour from the north-northwest. I was probably stoned on that 295^th day of the Gregorian calendar, a Thursday, skipping class and lazing on the green couch of a flophouse attic.

 

If I remember correctly, I was heartbroken at that time, and I would spend many hours by the attic window, watching the leaves of a great tree tremble in the wind. It was years before I knew who Gertrude Stein was, a time when my addiction was still like a kitten: small and manageable, asleep and purring, contained within my palm.

 

The codeine, the comma, the context.

 

Stein’s Enigmas

by Kim Stafford

 

Tender Buttons has been called the stuff of genius, and of intentional obfuscation. Nothing but an utterly original mind could produce such a range of response. Gertrude Stein once said of Paris, it’s not so much what it gives you—it’s what it doesn’t take away. Paris clearly didn’t take away Stein’s almost childish instinct for feral experimentation, and readers have been struggling and reveling ever since in what her pen splashed forth.

 

     For a reader, Tender Buttons offers a challenge, a series of jokes, secrets, a scatter of debris, a net of clues, hints, hunches, all with a rich dose of affection for true freedom of speech.

 

     For a writer, the lessons are many, and a bit different. First off, the lines in her book seem to say, apart from what they are saying, or not saying: Go your own weird way. The lines are presenting evidence that language belongs to each of us, and all of us, and none of us. Language, by Stein’s witness, is a freakish, frisky, irreverent rush of possibility, not to be imprisoned by any grammarian’s so-called rules. Yes, such freedom by a writer may lose some readers, but may also gain the fierce loyalty of some others. 

 

     A printer friend was meeting with a poet to talk about designing a broadside for a poem. Said the printer, “Wouldn’t it be easier to read if you arranged the lines this way, instead of what you have?”

    “I’m a poet,” was the reply. “Is my goal to make things easy?”

    “Ah,” said the printer. “You taught me something there.”

 

    And Stein’s book, over a century old, is still teaching us something, perhaps a different set of lessons for each reader who makes it through the book. What the book seems to want to teach me is to question my practice, when I’m in danger of making too much sense and too little music. To question my goal when I’m trying to persuade instead of sing. To question my purpose on earth when I’m relying on the rational instead of birdsong.

 

     I can’t do what Stein has done—or can I? Is it just that I haven’t tried? What’s to stop me from breaking the rules I’ve followed so obediently for so many years, to stop me from achieving escape velocity from the firmament of the clear, the cogent, and the utterly tamed?

 

   Some years ago at a conference for artists, the Indigenous old-time folk singer Buffy St. Marie was to give a talk, and I thought, foolishly, that she would coast along on her former fame, maybe play a few classics, and be done. Instead, she sang ideas at us with fierceness that stunned me. Among many calls to trust our own way as artists, she used a word I had only associated with the fight for Indigenous rights. She told us an artist must maintain complete sovereignty over what we do and how we do it, saying, this is my poem, song, painting…this is my language, my tune, my colors…and the way I do what I do belongs to me.

 

   Last summer, I met a pine tree in Scotland, alone on a hill, its trunk crooked, its branches quirky, lopsided, eccentric in the extreme. It was more ruin in wood than civilized for the lumber trade. Perhaps it had been left alone when they cut the others, simply because it managed to be strange. 

 

     In the tree’s presence, I found myself jamming words together with maybe 5% of the freedom of a Gertrude Stein, but still more in keeping with the tree before me than what I might have written without my encounter with Tender Buttons. For what if polite forms of language are lying, really, about the true, knotted complexity of the world, and what Stein does in Tender Buttons hews more closely to the rugged real?

 

        Lone Pine in Scotland 

 

One flung green gown on one hung

shade skirt growing outward, glowing 

inward, light-hungry, root-thirsty, long 

wind-limber, limb-laddered, ever loyal

to the nation of its kind, but hermit here, 

monkish nun hospitable to wasp and crow, 

rain-wet silhouette of old trunk with young 

twigs, buds, needles, cones glistening for 

dawn above by dusk below, earth-offered, 

ring-hearted, bark-guarded, pitch-scented, 

pollen-dusted citizen, sentinel, sovereign.