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.