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.