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May
1st
2014

An explanation of a famous neo-modernist poem · 6:26pm May 1st, 2014

I have been pretty harsh to modernists lately, so I will let them speak for themselves. I came across this explanation on poets.org of one of Gertrude Stein's poems while surfing the web for quotes and information for my last few posts. It seemed like a joke to me at first, but perhaps that's the point. Poet and interpreter are playing a game.

As you read the interpretation, imagine that the poem were about a mushroom rather than a carafe. How much of the explanation would apply equally well? Is it art, a game, or a Rorschach test? Does the art in neo-modernist poetry reside in the poem, or in the interpretation? Does this sort of thing seem fun? Is it more like a poem, a jigsaw puzzle, or a game of Boggle? Does it matter?

Tender Buttons, Objects, verse 1: 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.

A carafe is, of course “A kind in glass”—a kind of object belonging to the glass family, which includes its “cousins”: bottles, pitchers, jugs, tumblers, wineglasses, and so on. A carafe is a “blind glass," presumably because it is filled with red wine (or sherry or port) and so one cannot see through it. It is also a blind glass because it doesn’t mirror the spectator; Nor can a carafe be used, like a pair of glasses, to look at anything. One looks at it and through it (“a spectacle) but it does not improve our vision in any way. “Nothing strange” there. The “single hurt color” probably refers to the wine, red being traditionally associated with “hurt.” But “hurt” may also refer to some sort of contamination: perhaps something (soda water?) has bled into that pure color and changed it. At the same time, the carafe participates in what Stein calls “an arrangement in a system to pointing”—a compositional arrangement like that of the Cubist paintings Stein loved in which each thing is related to every other thing, an arrangement that, in Stein’s lexicon, is called grammar. One of her most delightful texts is called “Arthur a Grammar.”

The carafe, in any case, is “not ordinary” (i.e., not just a pitcher), “not unordered in not resembling” (it is distinct from all its “cousins," but they are all part of the compositional system). And Stein concludes with the curiously postmodern assertion “The difference is spreading.” No two instances are ever identical: even when the same phrase is repeated over and over again, as is common in Stein, there is always difference. And such “not resembling” enlists the reader’s participation in the text’s linguistic differential play. Under the title “A petticoat," we read, “A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.” Here in eleven words, all but two of them monosyllables, Stein produces a miniature erotic drama. One way to read it would be to ask how the “rosy charm” relates to the “disgrace” of the inkspot on the white petticoat? But there are many other paths of entry, the text being, in John Ashbery‘s words about Stanzas in Meditation, “an open field of narrative possibilities.”

Stein’s properties, as her “tender buttons” suggest, are domestic, everyday, female. Her language is not so much about eros as it is itself erotic. The poem called “Peeled pencil, choke” has three words to match its three-word title: “Rub her coke.” And XXXV of “Yet Dish” reads:

Witness a way go.
Witness a way go. Witness a way go. Wetness.
Wetness.

It sounds like a child’s jump-rope rhyme or a cheer, calling up such phrases as “go away” and “way to go!” But how do we get from “witness” to “wetness”? If poetry is, in Ezra Pound‘s famous definition, “language charged with meaning," Stein’s writing becomes exemplary. From Ashbery, John Cage, and Louis Zukofsky to such contemporaries as Rae Armantrout and Harryette Mullen, poets have been playing “Catch as catch as coal up” with her brilliant linguistic inventions.

Extra credit: Try applying the same sort of critique to the next verse of her poem. Put your comments in a spoiler tag so that people can add interpretations before reading yours.

GLAZED GLITTER.

Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.

The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.

There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.

I don't mind if people play these games. I mind if they insist this is how poetry must be written.

But did they? Lecturers and critics speak as if they did. Perhaps Stein was just having fun, playing with words, and invited readers to play along.

Short answer: I don't think so.

Turns out it's difficult to know what Gertrude Stein said. Here's the opening to a speech she gave at Cambridge and at Oxford. This is not a transcription; she wrote it down. She didn't like commas because they were "servile", meaning they did what you told them to do and made a text less ambiguous rather than more ambiguous.

There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.

It is very likely that nearly every one has been very nearly certain that something that is interesting is interesting them. Can they and do they. It is very interesting that nothing inside in them, that is when you consider the very long history of how every one ever acted or has felt, it is very interesting that nothing inside in them in all of them makes it connectedly different. By this I mean this. The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen. Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition.

It seems Stein actually did say that people ought to do things her way. She wrote a long essay on punctuation, arguing that the exclamation point, question mark, and quotation mark were bad. She wrote a book on writing, which begins like this:

Qu'est-ce que c'est cette comedie d'un chien. Que le dit train est bien celui qui doit les conduire a leur destination. Manifestement eveille.

When he will see

When he will see

When he will see the land of liberty.

The scene changes it is a stone high up against with a hill and there is and above where they will have time. Not higher up below is a ruin which is a castle and there will be a color above it. Painting now after its great moment must come back to be a minor art.

Will be welcome.

We will be welcome.

Should be put upon a hill. Across which it is placed upon different hills. Lower hills have a mark they mean.

And she wrote this:

Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realise that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one.
from "Henry James," by Gertrude Stein, written in 1932-3

This is, ironically given my last post, similar to something Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: that acting resolutely and without mercy convinces people of the rightness of your cause more than reasoning with them.

In any case, literary critics take her writing very seriously today. You can google "Gertrude Stein" and spend hours reading ecstatic praise of her writing. Picasso said that Hemingway merely copied Stein's style, and at least one Stein enthusiast claimed that, given Hemingway's importance, this meant 20th-century literature was built on the bedrock of Gertrude Stein.

While what I'm thinking is:

SEPARATED AT BIRTH???

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Comments ( 34 )

Is anyone else disturbed by the fact that Gertrude Stein, paragon of 20th century literature, obviously can't pass a Turing test?

Were literary modernists, like musical modernists, ever actually popular with the public, or were they merely fawned over by elitist snobs? I can't picture a lot of people going out of their way to buy and read this stuff. I feel perhaps modernist writings are like fine wine: strong and enjoyable on occasion in moderate amounts. I mean, I consider myself a pretty open minded person, and Emily Dickinson is about as ambiguous and abstract as I can tolerate on a regular basis. For example, I enjoyed reading "The Hollow Men", but it's not something I'd want to do very often.

2067259
In the future, when we invent time travel, we're putting all of our crappy AI programs in detailed androids and sending them back in time to be writers. Experimental literature, modern poetry, it's all trolling from the future.

2067259

...oh god, now that you mention it, you're absolutely right.

And I also have to say that, of Hemingway, I only read "the old man and the sea" and I'm still confident in saying they couldn't have been further apart:
Hemingway writes about things, leaving the reader to infer emotional states, while based on this sample (I haven't read Stein), Stein writes about nothing, and leaves to the reader the exercise of inferring anything at all

To be more serious, though, one of the things that I find [stupid/disconcerting] here is that the criticism you've quoted seems to be about as far from Death of the Author (which I've talked about before) as one can get, referencing esoteric bits of Stein-related information as below:

At the same time, the carafe participates in what Stein calls “an arrangement in a system to pointing”—a compositional arrangement like that of the Cubist paintings Stein loved in which each thing is related to every other thing, an arrangement that, in Stein’s lexicon, is called grammar. One of her most delightful texts is called “Arthur a Grammar.”

I know I come from a very different school of thought where literature is concerned, but this just drives me up the wall, the idea that a text needs to be decoded through the framework of its author's background. Now, I'm not saying you can't go looking at the author's background in analyzing their work, but given that Stein is pretty much just writing nonsense phrases with some occasional rhythm and/or consonance thrown in, this work seems to pretty much demand one of two reactions: (1) dig as deep as you can go and treat it like a puzzle the author has set for you or (2) acknowledge that the author is a pretentious hack who should never have been allowed to waste anyone's time.

I suspect y'all can guess which camp I'd fall in. But then again, my distaste for most of what pass as academic studies of literature is hardly a secret.

2067270 It depends on the "depth" of modernism.

Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Woolf: Often listed as modernists; popular. I don't think Hemingway was modernist in any way [LATER EDIT: Now I know better], and Fitzgerald was considered a modernist rather than a romantic because his alcoholism was sincere disillusion rather than mere romantic dissolution, and because The Great Gatsby used an unreliable narrator. But if Fitzgerald is a modernist because of Gatsby, Cervantes is a modernist because of Don Quixote.

If you restrict yourself to the people who wrote about and advocated modernism, like Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, Stein, & Williams, then they sold a lot of books, but weren't popular with the public.

2067305

they sold a lot of books, but weren't popular with the public.

Who was buying them then? Sadistic College Literary Professors?

Also, Eliot wrote Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, so he gets a pass from me because I love that collection and the musical based on it. :pinkiehappy:

2067305 2067270
At the same time, it has to be pointed out that the people buying the books the modernists put out were... Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, etc. Not only that, but they were all talking to each other, hanging out together, etc. Whenever I read a biography of a writer in the early to mid 20th century, it strikes me how incestuous that circle seemed to be-- some other famous writer was always spending a summer with them or coming to their parties or what have you.

So, even if no "normal" person was reading them, the elitist snobs fawning over them included the people actually being read, and it's likely that had some effect, whether it was sharing writing "tools" and ideas about literature, or firmly disagreeing with those things.

2067353 You're mostly right, but I just read the Paris Reviews interview with Faulkner yesterday, and he said:

Interviewer: Do you read your contemporaries?

Faulkner: No, the books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends: the Old Testament, Dickens, Conrad, Cervantes-Don Quixote. I read that every year, as some do the Bible. Flaubert, Balzac-he created an intact world of his own, a bloodstream running through twenty books-Dostoevski, Tolstoi, Shakespeare. I read Melville occasionally, and of the poets Marlowe, Campion, Jonson, Herrick, Donne, Keats, and Shelley. I still read Housman.

2067377
That makes sense, and his name doesn't come up in the biographies I've read as floating with that crowd.

And I'm sure there might even have been some of them who were contrary enough to spend the summer with each other and refuse to read the other's works, but in those cases they probably still had some influence regarding ideas.

This is all I can think of after reading the "analysis" of the poem.

img0.joyreactor.com/pics/post/full/funny-pictures-4chan-auto-366764.jpeg

Hemingway wrote a number of parodies of Stein's poetic style.

My favorite is:

Home is where the heart is
Home is where the fart is.
A fart is not art
Yet a fart may not be artless.
Come let us fart and artless fart in the home.

What more need be said?

2067349 The modernist poets were the most popular poets of their time (EDIT: WRONG, see below), but they were still less popular than almost any poets of previous times. Basically they killed poetry. (EDIT: MAYBE)

A good question is: Why didn't the publishers who made money from selling poetry publish poems that people would buy? I don't know the answer.

According to "Brief Timeline of American Literature", the most-popular poem published in America to date was published in 1899, which we can take as the end of poetry's popularity in the US.

You could say the same thing about modernist music. Were Schoenberg and Berg popular? Yes; they were more popular composers than anyone else living. No; they were less popular than third-tier composers had been in the 19th century.

TS Eliot renounced modernism completely in the early 1940s, which was a few years after publishing Old Possum's etc., and before many of his popular plays. Oddly, google shows me many pages about him renouncing his US citizenship, but none about renouncing modernism.

2068070

The modernist poets were the most popular poets of their time, but they were still less popular than almost any poets of previous times. Basically they killed poetry.

Do you have a source for that? I'm really curious, and I can't find anything about poetry sales in the 1920s or 30s.

I wonder because I'm a big fan of Dorothy Parker, even while recognizing that as a poet she's not exactly an artiste. But I'm wondering if, say, T.S.Eliot actually out sold her, of if he's just more "important" than her. I know there are a lot of cases in history where the "great" author of the time wasn't always the most popular.

Edit: I did find an article that mentions, "Edna St. Vincent Millay enjoyed the status of a best-selling poet in the 1920s, when her slim volumes could be found in every genteel home in the nation (Huntsman, What Quarry sold 60,000 copies in its first month in 1939, respectable sales even by today's tumescent best-seller standards). She was the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize, then in its seventh year." I don't believe she was modernist. Don't get me wrong, I'd be happy to blame the death of poetry on the modernists (I also love Millay), but I'd hate to do so unfairly.

2068277 I can't find a source online either. I know that lots of people read poems in the 1890s, and I "know" (or do I? it's a thing lying in the back of my brain tagged "fact", but by whom I don't know) that few people read poems in the 1930s. Virginia Woolf said modernism started in 1910. Eliot published "The love song of J Alfred Prufrock" in 1915. I blame the modernists. There isn't any other feasible literary movement to blame. There may be some economic force to blame instead.

I have NO source for saying the modernist poets sold better than any other poet, and I shouldn't have said it. I suppose I believed it because they're the poets from that time period that people seem to talk about the most today.

A popular author who apparently wasn't considered great at the time was Steinbeck. He was one of the best-selling authors in the 1930s, but that literary club you mentioned rarely mentioned him, based on my reading the first 4 volumes of the Paris Review interviews. They interviewed Steinbeck, but nobody else mentioned him.

The great author who is no longer considered great is John Dos Passos. Everybody talked about him in those interviews; he was up there with Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. Now he seems to be forgotten.

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

Reading this reminded me of a poem I read once and really loved.

Turns out it was by Gertrude Stein.

Now I feel bad. :( Thanks.

2068445 Wait--so why did you love it? I don't get it myself, but if you loved it, then it's good, at least for you.

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

2068537
I love word salad. As a famous person once said, "What fun is there in making sense?" If it doesn't make sense, I don't have to figure out the meaning and can just enjoy the sound of the words.

And seriously, there's tremendous cadence in the line starting with "Drink pups". I just adore word poems.

2068653 I can appreciate it as sounds, but the commentators say it's got deep meaning.

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

2068770
Who cares? Everything should have meaning, but if it's so deep you need a literary shovel to extract it, then what's the point? It's masturbatory.

Just say it out loud and pretend you're having a stroke! :D

2068873
This must be why you and I never agree on anything. :rainbowwild:

I'm just incapable of reading this stuff without thinking that whatever establishment promoted this woman as anything other than a mindless hack needs to be torn down, its foundations laid bare, and the earth salted beneath where it once stood.

Give me Oscar Wilde or Gerard Manley Hopkins any day. Or even Lewis Carroll, if nonsense is a must! But if I want word salad, I'll just find the nearest aphasia clinic and bring my tape recorder.

2068873 2068958 I can appreciate it the way PP does, and I suspect that's all there is to it. It's just hard to take it lightly when I was introduced to it as being deep philosophy, and critics keep telling me to take it seriously.

And it's depressing to accept that's all there is to it, and thousands of distinguished academics have been hoodwinked for 90 years. I wonder if Stein secretly laughed at them.

I'm guessing Bradel is in the same boat--this is something I could've enjoyed if somebody had emailed it to me and said "Read this out loud!", but I can't help but hate what the critics have done with it, so it's hard to appreciate the thing itself. It's like you'd been raised in a church that, every week, played the organ, said the mass, played a three-minute Youtube comedy video, and then gave a sermon on it. It would be hard to find them funny.

So where do Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace fit in the literary canon? Are they generally associated with particular movements?

She didn't like commas because they were "servile", meaning they did what you told them to do and made a text less ambiguous rather than more ambiguous.

I find this part interesting, since I recall you lambasting Cormac McCarthy for a similar style of punctuation use here, yet also praising his "big-S style." I personally enjoy both of the quotes that you cited in that comment, in the same sense that I enjoyed darf's Αλεκτρονα, despite the writing often feeling like it was simply "stupid shit that makes his stor[y] harder to read" (at least, that was a bit of how I felt about it before, I might give it another shot some time in the future). On the other hand, I find Stein's writing (that is, what I see in this blog. I haven't read anything else from her) to be rather repulsive.

Do you think the issue is in Stein's Style or her style? Αλεκτρονα and the McCarthy excerpts that you linked sort of had a sense of poetry for me that I can't find for myself within Stein's writing (including her actual poetry), which is what I think my reason is for disliking it.

Or maybe (probably) the writing isn't similar in any way and I'm just being an idiot.

Nickel, codenamed Glazed Glitter, was a man of many words, which was ultimately his undoing as a communist spy.

We had been crippled after his successful infiltration. But things are different now. There is no longer any need to search for the leak. There is still hope that we will someday recognize and properly deal with his kind, but for now we must reject new additions to our operations, for it is the most obvious and attractive candidates that will be our ruin. Glitter was certainly an attractive candidate.

We had recognized his communist tendencies early on and attempted therapeutic intervention, but it seems he did not accept our help sincerely. Even the Japanese are not invulnerable. We cannot rely on them in the future. It is an allegiance assumed only from neutrality. It may have held in the past, but it was reinforced only superficially and by inconsequential aid. It certainly required no obligations, though perhaps there may be use in offering our "aid" if we cannot accept theirs.

Not quite what you asked for.

2069126 I think she's doing something different. It's the opposite of tongue-twisters. "Style" doesn't apply. It isn't "poetic" in the usual sense; it doesn't give me emotions. It's more like running your finger over an interesting old piece of wood. It uses languages as sounds rather than as meaning.

2069168 Gertrude Stein was a spy! :pinkiegasp:

Comment posted by equestrian.sen deleted May 2nd, 2014

2069075

I'm guessing Bradel is in the same boat--this is something I could've enjoyed if somebody had emailed it to me and said "Read this out loud!", but I can't help but hate what the critics have done with it, so it's hard to appreciate the thing itself.

I'm actually not sure that I am in that boat. Maybe I am—maybe I'm just letting my overwhelming dislike for what passes for the academic study of literature get to me, and there's good reason to think I might—but it's hard for me to imagine a context in which I'd really enjoy Stein. As far as I'm concerned, she's writing gibberish. I just can't imagine a scenario where I wouldn't feel like she was wasting my time. I could be reading people who make sense and have interesting things to say, or engaging in play activities, or writing my own things, or doing statistics work, or who knows how many other things.

I think it may be the Turing test thing that's really getting me. I can't imagine wanting to read random word strings generated by a computer. And I'm guessing the information content on her writing can't be a whole lot higher than that.

2069323 My take on it is it doesn't have information content. It's pretty sounds. Pretend the words have no meaning and listen to the sounds. That's the best way to approach it.

2069215

Gertrude Stein.
A spy. A spy. Ass pie.

I'm a terrible person.

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

2069075
You could always absolve the author of blame and just blame the critics for taking themselves so seriously.

2069121 They're much later. Pynchon is post-modern, though his hifalutin' baroque story structures and his poetic prose might be more like the paleo-modernists.

Wikipedia says of DFW,
Literary movements: Postmodern literature, hysterical realism, metamodernism

2069988
Alright, so you're not annoyed at them or anything like you are with Stein?

I remember reading Gravity's Rainbow two years ago, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, even if I only understood about half of it.

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