Gertrude Stein

This week Gertrude Stein features in Modpo

A rhyme I learnt when young:

In a notable family Stein
There was Gert, there was Ep , there was Ein.
Gert's writings were hazy, Ep's staues were crazy
And no one could understand Ein.

I would be inclined to say that no one could understand Gert either, but as a poet in the twenty-first century, I should be grateful to Gertude Stein and so do her the courtesy of reading and trying to study her work. By making literary society take her writings seriously, she has freed us, who come after her, to write about whatever we like and in any way we like, too.

Unlike Armentroud, who took snippets of writings and conversations and put them together deliberately in a contrived and artificial way, Gertrude Stein appears to write without deliberation. The pieces from  Tender Buttons remind me strongly of the writings of  my schizophrenic daughter. I could always see that what my daughter said made perfect sense to her although it might have sounded like nonsense to me.  In the same way I feel these pieces make perfect sense to Stein. I liked reading my daughter's  poems and short pieces and could  sometimes enjoy listening  to her  ravings. Not that she was always raving; she could usually talk quite sensibly, but what she wrote was nearly always strange and disjointed. Could Gertrude Stein have suffered from a mild form of schizophrenia, or perhaps been influenced by someone close who was schizophrenic.

Gertude Stein's pieces,  I suppose they should be called prose poems, need to  be read in a different way to the poems we have been studying up to now.  There is no point in trying to extract  conventional meaning out of them. When you read them aloud, the words are musical and pleasant to listen to.  The pieces can be enjoyed on this level alone, but with repeated reading, phrases  will form images, which take you on one train of thought after another. I found I enjoyed Stein's writing more than I enjoyed some of the more self-conscious  poems in the previous weeks of Modpo.

Cynic that I am, however, I wonder whether Gertrude Stein would have acquired her reputation as a writer if she had not been the sister of a very rich patron of the arts and through this connection come to know all the "best people" in the world of Art and Literature. Her close friendship with Picasso couldn't have hurt either.