Gertrude Stein and Lorna Dee Cervantes

The more time I spent in Tender Buttons this week, the more I grew to enjoy it. Initially, I found Stein's work disconcerting because it constantly jerked me into an awareness of the almost robotic way I tend to read sentences. Her syntax plays by her own rules. In Tender Buttons, I began to really enjoy that disruptive feeling, because it opened a new pathway of thinking in my brain. When I see the title (or what looks like a title) "A BOX" I expect to read something about a box, a brief description of it's exterior qualities and, most importantly, what it holds (it's interior). Before Stein, I wouldn't consider how I'm limiting my own perception by that basic exterior/interior binary, but I am. The box has an outside and an inside. It holds things. If it holds nothing, it's basically useless. Boxes are things that hold other things. That is a pretty narrow view. Stein's "A BOX" and Tender Buttons opens up new ways of seeing. 

A BOX
Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection come painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analyzed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.

Here, I am not just looking at the box differently, I'm looking at the words differently. "Out of an eye comes research..." Okay, I can start to imagine the ways eyes and research are related. But, "out of selection come painful cattle"? Painful cattle. Painful cattle. Painful. Cattle. Still have no clue. But that's just an example of what happened to me over an over again when reading. It's kind of like that weird feeling you have when you think of a word by itself. I did this the other day with the word meal. Usually, I like that word because it means food/eating. But when I thought about meal, isolating it and repeating it over and over again, it became the weirdest/ugliest word to me. I appreciated Stein's work because it made familiar things strange in a playful and inventive way. 

Lorna Dee Cervantes also had this quality in her poem, "Poema para los Californios Muertos." Cervantes plays with two languages in this poem: Spanish (see title) and English. Here's the third stanza: 

What refuge did you find here,
ancient Californios?
Now at this restaurant nothing remains 
but this old oak and an ill-placed plaque. 
Is it true that you still live here
in the shadows of these white, high-class houses?
Soy la hija pobrecita 
pero puedo maldecir estas fantasmas blancas. 
Las fantasmas tuyas deben aquí quedarse,
solas las tuyas. 

Even when the reader is given a translation for those four lines in Spanish ("I am only your poor daughter, but I can curse these white ghosts. Only your ghosts should remain here, only yours"), we sense the gap that is always present in translation. The fact that I need to look up the English translation means I can't communicate directly with the speaker, adding another layer to the medium of language. The speaker makes me aware of the limitations of English, jolting me into awareness like Stein does with ordinary objects. Like Stein, Cervantes is a poet of consciousness. She points to things that we assume and gestures towards other postures of thinking and relating to the world. 

Gertrude Stein and Charles Bernstein

This week, I decided I needed some help from patriarchal poetry experts to try to gain insight into what Stein was doing in “Patriarchal Poetry.” Criticism helped quite a bit, which may or may not make Stein roll in her grave. When I went back to the poem for closer examination, I realized how it constantly called me to question my own expectations when approaching a text. In a more general sense, how do I expect words to function when they are combined with other words? To give a partial answer, I guess I expect words to function differently than they do in “Patriarchal Poetry.”

For me, words usually require other words to “mean” something, which I think suggests a direct relation to Stein’s project. “Patriarchal Poetry” is preoccupied with the way “meaning” is constructed in everyday speech. Stein subverts my expectations by experimenting with word combinations that only appear to take me further down the black hole of language… how do I read “Patriarchal Poetry” without asking the No-No Question (what the heck does it mean)? To use an example, Stein’s use of repetition does not do what I expect it do. I want to find the poem’s use of repetition so I can point to emphatic moments. Usually, this is where “meaning” is pronounced. Instead, when I read a line like: “Made a mark remarkable made a remarkable interpretation made a remarkable made a remarkable made a remarkable interpretation,” the word remarkable is now anything but remarkable. In fact, its repetition seems to have emptied it of meaning completely. I think this is Stein’s point. I’d say more but I must now compare her to a contemporary poet, because I’m getting a bit wordy myself.

Charles Bernstein also likes to play with language, and he also uses repetition in the poem “Before You Go.” In his poem, the repeated phrase calls attention to itself rhythmically, appearing at the end of each line. Alongside different words, each line’s repetition of “before you go” suggests a different meaning. Towards the end of the poem, Bernstein removes one letter at the end of the phrase in each successive line:

Devil’s grail, face of fate, before you go.

Suspended de-animation, recalcitrant fright, before you g

Everything so goddamn slow, before you

Take me now, I’m feelin’ low, before yo

Just let me unhitch this tow, before y

One more stitch still to sew, before

Calculus hidden deep in snow, befor

Can’t hear, don’t say, befo

Lie still, who sings this song, bef

A token, a throw, a truculent pen, be

Don’t know much, but that I do, b

Two lane blacktop, undulating light

The poem's very last line is the only one without any remnant of the repeated phrase “before you go,” and the lines leading up to the end delineate its erasure. This was kind of cool, because the phrase was still reverberating in my head even though it wasn’t there any more.  

H.D. and Ocean Vuong

I really don’t know where to begin with H.D., so I will begin with a cliché. She is a force. In “Oread,” she demonstrates the dizzying power of language to dissolve the boundaries between land and sea (and perhaps even the Oread’s consciousness). In six lines, the poem itself embodies its own command, as the typical images for one entity (the “pointed pines” and “green fir” of the forest) describe another in the sea she is addressing. In “Eurydice”, she employs the same force on a larger scale, re-telling the story of Eurydice from the perspective of Orpheus’ wife. In Greek myth, Orpheus is allowed to go into the underworld to bring his dead wife, Eurydice, back into the world of the living. He is charged not look back at her as he leads her back to earth, but he does, causing her to fall back down into Hades forever.     

Toward the end of H.D.’s poem, the speaker reminded me of that creepy part in Lord of the Ring when the Elf lady almost takes the ring from Frodo… her hair all of a sudden starts blowing back from a mysterious gust of wind and her voice changes into this evil bellowing… anyway, that’s kind of what I pictured when she says: “Against the black / I have more fervour / than you in all the splendour of that place, / against the blackness / and the stark grey / I have more light.”

Ocean Vuong’s “Eurydice” was more a subtle spin on the old myth. By subtle, I mean it was almost quiet in its power. It was also creepy, but in a different way. The image it brought to mind was of a graveyard in the middle of a field. It’s winter (“frosted grass”), and it’s just before sunset, when the sky is sort of light and dark at the same time. I read the poem a few times, and every time I noticed something new. Like this: “Depending on where you stand / his name can appear like moonlight / shredded in a dead dog’s fur.” This one made me do a double take, and after that I was just shaking my head at how disturbingly awesome that image was. But this sound-image struck me instantly: “My voice cracking / like bones inside the radio.” Bones inside the radio… I’m a sucker for strange metaphors. His poem did not disappoint.

Ezra Pound and Louise Glück

In Canto 1, Ezra Pound does what all my elementary school teachers told me not to do: he begins a sentence with “And.” Of course, Pound was breaking that rule on purpose. The Cantos begin in medias res, or in the middle of things, which is a common feature of literary epics like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Dante’s Divine Comedy. “And then went down the ship,” the poem begins, alluding to Odysseus’ journey to the underworld in Book XI of The Odyssey. What’s interesting about Canto 1 is the identity of its speaker. In line three, the plural pronoun of “We” indicates Odysseus and his men. But Pound intentionally brings himself into the mix in line 68, when Divus, the Latin translator of Homer’s Odyssey, is told to “Lie quiet.” Divus’ translation of Homer’s epic is the one Pound used for this canto, which is a loose translation of Divus’ translation of Homer. In a translation of a translation, the author identifies himself even as he identifies with Odysseus. For Pound, the epic was “a poem containing history,” which may seem like the most imprecise definition ever, but perhaps means that the past and the present have something to say to each other.

Louise Glück is another contemporary poet who draws from Homer’s epic. In “Circe’s Power,” she speaks from the perspective of Circe, who is the source of the wind that guides Odysseus’ journey to the underworld:

“Circe’s Power”

By Louise Glück

I never turned anyone into a pig.

Some people are pigs; I make them

Look like pigs.

I'm sick of your world

That lets the outside disguise the inside. Your men weren't bad men;

Undisciplined life

Did that to them. As pigs,

Under the care of

Me and my ladies, they

Sweetened right up.

Then I reversed the spell, showing you my goodness

As well as my power. I saw

We could be happy here,

As men and women are

When their needs are simple. In the same breath,

I foresaw your departure,

Your men with my help braving

The crying and pounding sea. You think

A few tears upset me? My friend,

Every sorceress is

A pragmatist at heart; nobody sees essence who can't

Face limitation. If I wanted only to hold you

I could hold you prisoner.

Glück, like Pound, references Homer’s epic without losing the authority of the poem’s speaker. In “Circe’s Power,” Odysseus is the object of the narrator’s speech. In Canto 1, the reference to Circe’s wind as the source for the ship’s voyage to Hades is brief, almost taken for granted. Glück’s poem is another spin on the epic, boldly asserting Circe’s power in the poem’s concluding lines: “If I wanted only to hold you / I could hold you prisoner.” Both poems are rooted deeply in the past, raising important questions about history, authority, and the source of knowledge.