Rereading Stein
Towards the end of last year, I asked a handful of writers to respond to a 1978 feature in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine, ‘Reading Stein’. The original piece gave poets three excerpts from Tender Buttons and asked them to reflect on their readings. Following this, I asked writers to respond to these responses.
- Richard Capener, Reviews Editor
Trolled by Stein
I am reading extracts from Tender Buttons when my phone vibrates. I have been sent an Instagram reel. In the Instagram reel a Twitch streamer is shown in the space of approximately fifteen seconds – let’s say – and the streamer who is displayed is livestreaming some event before the recording is manipulated in a way as to zoom in on a darkened space beneath their bed where there is no monster but there is a dildo.
I am thinking about how stupid this is. Not stupid as in ‘reading Gertrude Stein is stupid’, but stupid in terms of choosing not to read Gertrude Stein. Choosing not to read Gertrude Stein but to instead stare at a streamer on my phone. I am not even staring at the streamer, necessarily – who is obviously very attractive – but at the entire world that exists behind them.
When I talk about stupid, I am talking in reference to the stare which cannot seem to lift itself from the dildo. I don’t want to be seen over-using the word dildo, and I appreciate that it is very crass and at the same time I am hoping – in some other sense – that people don’t think of this piece as chronically self-aware; readers imagining this problematic mind in terms of its historical positionality in which Twitch streamers were infinitely more attention-grabbing than – say – Gertrude Stein. I don’t want readers thinking of this piece as the breaking point in which I moved past my hyperfixation with Jean Baudrillard to enter a mature period in which a Bataillean grotesquery was summoned in the quiet observation of the darkness that lies beneath the spaces in which we sleep. I am closing the phone now.
I am reading Gertrude Stein very slowly. ‘All the standards have streamers…’, writes Gertrude Stein in a sentence that has this reader thinking, I am being trolled by Gertrude Stein. The reader is imagining – in this moment – a kind of synchronicity with the universe, thinking it is highly improbable that Gertrude Stein would use that word specifically unless the templexity of the universe wasn’t so transparent. I am now imagining a turbo-justice court system emerging from my technosocial environment in which I am Josef K. taken to trial in non-fungible token pixel-skin handcuffs. My crimes are listed as follows: inability to seriously engage with the works of Gertrude Stein, use of the word templexity, continuous use of the word dildo, etc. etc. etc.
- Alex Mazey
Rue (27)
Improve emissions: real salaries, sentences. Concrete s©ores, thefts inc.
Vitiate Antigone, signatory rifles – that unnecessary scorecard
assaulted hole, cut boundaries (h)eating costs on trend. Develop land,
acquire vast unintended house blotches at bloc – a Rue that gave
extended rates, red grade, tabloid bodies at gunmetal leasing; sAve
Maria: grieve pit (never quit) if void fuels labor li(n)e, outbonded virus,
safe air. Auric soot, stuff; my spoil: empire boots, barbecue slu(i)t, DOW
Bones – the red you h(a)unted: hot milk, white woosh; holy waste, Ford’s
white debt: school students, Hero in bit hide. What bold continental
convoy. Red ravens, unsown rifles, hollow type. Butane, tax. Halo envy.
Archdioces hatchet, coffin (of goods), referendum gun; tutelage. A boat audit
proves persecution: Trumpist throne, three seats, the gig. Ashes, fuse, dust.
Battered Roe, woe. Prosaic sin(e), fish. Sorry fence (voters retch).
Priesthood carnage: empty souvenirs, ethnic graft, visa – room
for affable hate, hatchet (school shootings, ghetto cough, airport wheeze –
what limited soils floriate?). Hottish tenantless hatting: MAGA
smoke, heat, hit|her. Whiter go(l)d: (s)wept flowers, turtle island, woe
reform, what inch: land, some easements; western argosy, howls. Helm
with us: entity cheque and moaned pioneers; diversify your comae
into abject speciation: endfuel, holyclass, slumlease; we the old own known
autonomous dreariness, vague uniform society, the infrared waste
of a joy rite (ripjoy, ®ash): red leat(h)er, recited ICE. Ivory lungs
screamed European worries, afterlights, exile-trays or joy-of-brand:
religieous saddle, essence in wafery gas, tomahawk in new you/it.
Armageddon motors met methane earth at toy: level memoirs, shit
ghost grammarian, migrant dams, Roman ore: Eden meat, smoke, heat. It
buries opposition at a here: ingen margin, a maim, a road (trait) o’ tears;
poison-stripe.
Sued recounts, fell ©oils on Americant arms; due kidgraves edged, intact.
Gremial garnishments as gun to widow mothers (colonies); again, tears.
Shot unity; see night, harsh eagles, biomass, fuels, his tanner end
hooding clansman, hero-noise, toxic profit. Daily English Teachers:
quiet foe, settlerbook.
TARNISHABLE SCREENS & URBAN FUELS
INFUSORIAN TOMB, UN(S)WEPT COMMERCIALS, SELVES
TWO INCOMES, SUBURB OVERFLOW (1799)
Pioneer scar, vitrescent cross, sessential cleaners come feminist hose:
origin stain, eternity scar. Endcut, clot. Fay Roe, ash; grave entasis
bullet, the range: too-unsaddled slave, hope: traduciant cod, one’s sins
on soil: squat-hunched Eve, beaver, (d)outage; nuclear tits, catbath
at debt’s end: vergated garden, axe, tree; labia dust in a diesel’s gloom
void: pres(id)ent fuel, oil barrel ran dim, Eve: quasi-ovibovine gut, fruit
of fatty primaries. Fructuous coup, bias, Roe: wasted (s)oil, some bible
to hunt milkhead: otherbound eyes, white shadows for whole toys.
Bled bonete, lot(ion), s(t)atin: who can rent, which diet. Bhuddist hotels,
honey vents, a next prison: bodycare, roan vulva, holyflu. New towels,
office cancer. Hottish Chad dating about. A tutu eagle (Go Freedom Founders!).
Highest treated guests. Hot frenum; sheets, pits. USRA. Oppressive recount
rebate. Too-fried forest, species: cherry thorn, cross; a win: Eve
of goutiest hymen; period traps, marcescent vagi, saviorhorn
hoochthorn. Whiteface logo, haze: upright beef, fat haloes, cottage shorts.
White oil, tanlot. Slid mats. Gasmeat reflation. Hesitant thighs
tie lewd mother rights (wad, lout); she fell a western stork, owe hip
whose strong lawyers lament her form: molested anamneses which
dream of you: poniarded anemones; witch, hunt (see: equity). Ivy cries
slew clause (known fund): hollyseam, hollowed teens, epic object sanitation,
gynoecium virus; ate menses, too-arduous rain, wet drain. Aftershe of
Eve or girl industry, or poor: fisheyer, jet jade, hieratic clay,
Roe: spare wound, creameries, grief that really exists for Boy Jordan.
Genesis wound, in-way, easter filch. Girl disease, weak aeutonomy
and God, some mortar: hits, meet; slimmer love, meaty heat-not-heart.
Organsm dirt, memoranda (got ham, her anagram). Testimonies take me
at heart (impious abortion, same apart). Adam, Origin, sir€. Generation
(s)pire. Options.
Silence of cultured slots, nude mascara on mire: evicted garden, gat-kids’
hamstring, Eden seamen; girls root with worm on glaciation sausages’
sheeny tissue: base sin, final mothers nursing death, gash, hotel
inhead; shotproof condom hangnails, erotic nixie, hysteresic gall;
beefstork, loot, equit-e.
HER TANNER LIFE & SUBURBAN CLASSES
ROE V WABE (CLINIC SPIT OF MENSTRUAL SUMMONSES)
COMBUSTION FLOW (EVE BURROWS) (9=9, 7=1)
- Franco Cortese, ‘2 perfect line unit anagrams of page 27 of your chosen issue of language’
‘Readily’: Rae Armantrout on Reading Stein
Rather than seeking to explicate Stein’s poetics, Armantrout instead stages in her own text the linguistic activity she identifies in Tender Buttons. As she sees Stein ‘playing’ words against each other, so she matches words and phrases from Tender Buttons against each other. ‘Colors’ and ‘chosen’ from ‘GLAZED GLITTER’ are coupled with ‘shine’ from ‘ROASTBEEF’, ‘the difference that is spreading’ from ‘A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS’ is contrasted with ‘the same’ from ‘ROASTBEEF’ and so on. Although Armantrout provocatively suggests that Stein’s linguistic relationships and word-chains are comparable to an original, divine act of creation, separating ‘light from darkness’, what she demonstrates is that Stein is engaged in something far more subtle and complex than making such a binary opposition. She performs in her own text how Stein’s verbal games keep words in play within an ongoing relationship which enables similarities and differences to strengthen and complicate each other. Because of course, as Armantrout reminds us, Stein’s work ‘is not a sort of solving’, demonstrating rather how Steinian meaning is kept unresolved across the surface of the text as words and phrases jostle and spark against each other. This is the shine and shimmer of energetic meaning-making that Stein, and indeed Armantrout, are concerned with. In her own later poem ‘And’ (a very Steinian title), Armantrout suggests that ‘tense’, ‘tenuous’ and ‘tender’ (as in Tender Buttons?] are related etymologically:
Tense and tenuous
grow from the same root
as does tender
in its several guises:
the sour grass flower;
the yellow moth.
from ‘And’ by Rae Armantrout, Poetry (May 2012)
In her reading of Stein for this LANGUAGE magazine piece, Armantrout demonstrates that the more tenuous the connection between the semantic meaning of words, the more tender and flexible the process of meaning-making becomes, especially if words are placed in tension, ‘played out’ like a chain or put into ‘play’ against each other.
But Armantrout doesn’t just replicate Stein’s textual activity, she enters the game herself. As her response moves from suggesting ‘Here all colors, chosen, shine readily’ (words in italics taken from the Stein texts) to pointing out Stein’s series of modulations, ‘Rid to red to reddening,’ she adds her own word ‘readily’ to this ‘red’ game. ‘Readily’ sounds like ‘redly’ but also suggests ‘read’ and ‘readerly’, adding further burnish to the shining surface of the text by accentuating ‘how’ the Steinian text means is through a creative act of reading – in this case, Armantrout’s own ‘readily’ reading of Stein!
But there is more to say about Armantrout’s piece. The opening couple of sentences of her response appear to engage with an editorial prompt to comment on the ways in which Stein’s texts are relevant to her own writing. Armantrout seems to be saying that her initial conception of writing as ‘thinking aloud about a mystery’ was challenged by her reading of Stein, making her realise this conception was ‘just me’. However, a Steinian way of reading these opening sentences is to look for the game, the word-play in them. ‘That’ in the second sentence (‘Then I understood that was just me’) can be read as playfully referring to the ‘mystery’ in the first sentence. Any external mystery, thought about in writing, flattens out into the me who is doing the thinking/writing. Like Stein, Armantrout returns us to the surface of the text and undermines any sense of linear progression in her argument with this circular opening. Armantrout is perhaps warning us not to expect a critical solution from her any more than Stein provides creative resolution in her work.
And lest I break the chain by concluding here, I would play Armantrout’s ‘just me’ against the opening editorial list of those invited to comment on Stein for this LANGUAGE magazine piece. No Lyn Hejinian, no Bernadette Meyer, no Rosemarie Waldrop, no Carla Harryman or Harryette Mullen. No Fanny Howe or Susan Howe. Just Armantrout, out of the notable number of women poets engaged with Language poetry and explicitly drawing on Stein. This ‘just me’ glances across the surface of Armantrout’s paragraph to accumulate with her concluding quotes from Stein, glinting off words such as ‘exception’ and ‘[re]establishment’ and landing on Stein’s category-defying ‘better, and altogether’ – “ ‘better, and altogether’ now “ adds Armantrout, both emphasising the immediacy of Stein’s word couplings and allowing the plurality of ‘altogether’ to spread. I read this as a gesture towards a ‘better’ inclusivity not just at the textual level but also beyond it. But perhaps this is just me reading Armantrout reading Stein.
- Susie Campbell