Because the Poems for the Millennium anthology devotes a lot of space to her poems, I assume she is incredibly significant. I find Gertrude Stein incredibly annoying, though. As far as I can tell, she effectively deconstructs language, stripping all the words of their meaning through mindless repetition and jarring shifts that shatter all of our usual associations with the words. In this, she successfully robs English of any beauty it may dare to have, and she makes me hate my own language, and if I read her for too long, my head might explode. Was the point, then, to provoke a strong reaction rather than to write anything good or beautiful? Did she intend to write poetry that is horrible and annoying to read?
The commentary is unconvincing, and its use of ampersands is irksome, so I just want someone to tell me what reasons there are (if any) to truly appreciate what Stein has written.
im not a big fan of some of steins works. especially the ones that are a single word reprinted hundreds of times over a few pages. at the same time i think she has some great stuff. there is a part of tender buttons that is incredible; goldstein pointed it out in the poetry and poetics class a few years back, i dont know if anyone remembers exactly what it was. he talked about how it was something that he couldnt get out of his mind for a long time. in the end, i find that steins best poetry is the stuff that closer resembles what most people would define as poetry. but thats just me.
ReplyDeleteThis has been my most consistent problem with language poetry thus far. Maybe because beauty connotes some sort of meaning, and meaning is closed? So to write something open, it has to be awful and dissonant and frustrating. This is how I feel about it, anyway.
ReplyDeleteBefore this thread goes any further, I think we (ahem, Crystal) need to define "beauty." I find Stein's Tender Buttons supremely beautiful in part because it asks us to focus on the word/phrase in-itself and on the sound. Keep in mind that in the early 20C, many classically-trained musicians, along with mainstream culture, did not find jazz "beautiful." But I think Stein has similar kind of beauty as does jazz, one that downplays melody and harmony in favor of rhythm (synchopation of time), scale (size and phrase), and dissonance.
ReplyDeleteI guess, it seems to me that a serious love of language is actually little more than disguised self-love.
ReplyDeleteWe ourselves have assigned meaning to words. We created them. It’s silly to me to worship them or put them up on pedestals. It just seems masturbatory.
Anyhow, maybe language is just beautiful because it can be broken, not necessarily because it is tied to meaning in its construction. When it breaks, it's somehow a fundamentally traumatic experience, and it’s important for us to question why it’s so traumatic.
Or, I don’t know, maybe in breaking language down, we prove to ourselves that it doesn’t control us. We’re reigning in Frankenstein’s monster, or “going systematically to work smashing every connotation that words ever had, in order to get them back clean” according to William Carlos Williams.
To Dr. Jenkins -
ReplyDeleteIsn't that analogy inadequate? Music and its units are not analogous to language and its units when it comes to meaning. One note or measure has no discernible meaning attached to it the way one word does, and so it is very different to change the structure of music vs. changing the structure of language. I understand that, for example, Antonio Carlos Jobim is musically shocking because he breaks classical ideas of harmony and rhythm, but he doesn't try to break the idea of the note and its use. I would argue that using words (or letters, as in Pcoet) in nonsense combinations tries to break the basic unit of language. I think that doing that also abandons the concept of beauty because it is tied to sense.
Zoe, the issue is "beauty" in which music and poetry are analogous, at least in the way Crystal brought it up. But the analogy you are using works just as well because poets like Stein, John Cage, Clark Coolidge, and even David Melnick want you to focus on the sonic aspect of words, not their utility as bearers of meaning. In some ways, this emphasis frees words from our fetishistic demand that they do something. Anyway, Stein doesn't break the basic unit of the word. But musicians like Charlie Parker, Theolonius Monk, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrain, Anthony Braxton, Keith Rowe, et al ad nauseum DO break down the in-tune note as the basic unit of musical meaning. They bend notes, shorten them, buzz them, legato them, blur them, all in the effort to get to a new kind of music. Doesn't art always do this? Move forward because it's just not enough to look at /listen to the same old thing? Otherwise, we'd still be painting on cave walls...My final question to you and to the rest of the class is this: Don't great artists always change what we think of as the Beautiful? What if we looked for that change rather than for what the crowd/tradition thinks is beautiful?
ReplyDeleteIs beauty then carefully-crafted change? Specifically "artistic" change, play with convention? Play that breaks convention down, prism-like, deconstructing it? Stein certainly does that. I find it difficult, though, to accept that definition of beauty, at least unreservedly. I'm not sure even that great artists do always change what we think of as the Beautiful. Yes, they change traditions and forms, but they often do so in a way that broadens those forms by expanding and recasting them instead of deconstructing them. Of course this is extremely subjective, but I think that there is a difference between deconstruction of a form, which is what Stein seems to do, and expansion or renewal of it.
ReplyDeleteI could not disagree with you more, Crystal! I think Stein is terrific. The repetition! It's so great. Stein does remind me of music, not jazz but minimalist classical like Steven Reich or something. Her work has been compared to Cubism (apparently she was BFFs with Picasso) and Postimpressionism (Cezanne in particular). It is helpful, I think, if you are trapped in the "THIS ISN'T POETRY" mindset, to think of her work in terms of other forms. (And to Zoe I would ask: why does a comparison to and a borrowing from another form require a perfect analogue?) But in a way this seems like an easy way out.
ReplyDeleteI can't speak for a definition of beauty/Beauty, new or old...but I really, truly find Stein compelling. Even beautiful? I definitely do not find it ugly, and certainly less jarring than Melnick (look on the bright side!). I find her work celebratory but commonplace at the same time. Like the rhythms of overheard speech, words we use all the time. Nothing so special but made special somehow, familiarity combined unfamiliarly. Her poems capture, in her words, "the excitingness of everyday life." How can anyone question that as a valuable goal of poetry? (Of course you can, and I'm sure someone will make me try to defend myself.) If Stein's intent was to provoke the reader to annoyance and frustration, then she failed with me. My reactions are laughter and delight.
I don't think she even begins to deconstruct language...maybe strip a bit of its meaning, maybe bruise language, but wholly deconstruct? Shatter and ruin? Surely you jest. I don't even find that that much meaning is lost from the words--I think they rely on their associations and meaning to work. What would the significance of Stein be if her words made perfect sense? (To be a little clearer: yes, I see a distinction between "sense" and "meaning." Maybe the difference is just scale?) Besides, I would argue that meaning isn't all there is to language. Words are symbols on a page, sounds from a mouth. Who says every human event is meaningful? I rejoice that this isn't the case.
I LOVE STEIN.
While the relationship of Jazz to Stein, never really occurred to me (and I still find it a bit questionable, I could definitely see it in theory. However, being a Jazz lover to begin with, I can most certainly see a relationship between the poets we are looking at and Jazz. You are definitely looking at a redefinition of not only what constitutes music, but the capabilities of single notes...the same for poetry, just replace words with notes. I would even say that I feel that where poetry seems to find trouble with the Levenas's "unsayable" (perhaps due more to audience than poet, and much more attributed to the function of words as to musical notes), Jazz seems to cross right into it. I mean how many times have there been no words for you to convey exactly what you're feeling, yet a song can do it perfectly? Maybe that's just me.
ReplyDeleteStein is hard for me to approach. I find, personally, that her works are fresh and interesting for about the first five minutes, but after that their significance dwindles considerably with each pass of repetition. I don't think my attention span is the problem, I just find that there's nothing there. And if that's the point, then okay, I get it, but it's not sending shivers of epiphany down my spine.
ReplyDeleteI don't think she deconstructs language to any great degree. Tender Buttons is proof of that. However, the little flashes of images and things I got from Tender Buttons reminds me a lot of how Robot Chicken does things. Disconcerting.