On Writing Imitations of Gertrude Stein The first Stein poem that I experienced was an excerpt from Lifting Belly. I heard it read aloud, as I was falling asleep, and I think that this has permanently influenced how I think of Stein’s poetry. There is a wonderfully lyrical quality to it, but not in the same way that it can be said that the poetry of Lawrence or Frost is lyrical. There is so much focus here on the sounds of words rather than on their meaning – the important thing is really how the poem feels, but that is not to say that she does not pay a great deal of attention to the content of her work. She even says, in the excerpt from The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, that “Poetry and prose is not interesting. / What is necessary now is not form but content.” So, even though her poetry may seem, and in fact, probably is, nonsensical at times, there is content in the purity of ideas and symbolism that abounds in Stein’s poetry. Imitating her work was no easy thing. I found that the more I tried to be like Stein, the more difficult it was for me to produce any poem, let alone a decent one. I finally found that I was able to work in this style when I stopped trying to over-analyze it and simply let myself feel her writing. I sat down and spent two or so hours just reading various poems and did not think about the fact that I would soon try to imitate them – I just enjoyed them for what they were. I tried to let myself focus on the particular rhythms that she manages to achieve in her work. I was especially interested in the way she plays with tempo by manipulating punctuation. This, in particular, was something that I worked with a lot in my own poems, and I felt that I was fairly successful in this. It was very enlightening to hear her say, when we listened to the recording of She Bowed to Her Brother, that in that particular poem, Stein’s experiment was to use periods in place of commas to break up a line into complete thoughts. While I did not use this technique entirely throughout one single poem that I wrote, I definitely used it in a few places, especially in the second poem, Fall Through. Back. In this, I was really working with punctuation to try to vary the speed at which the poem would be read, especially the longer, block-like sections. I used the technique of replacing commas with periods in the more prosaic sections – for example: “meet me in the trees in five minutes. / do you like this dress. I think. sometimes. / about the sea. do you. ask about seashells.” I realize that a comma is not necessary (and would, in fact, be incorrect in some places) everywhere I put a period in these three lines, but the same is true of many instances in She Bowed to Her Brother. For example: “She started. By not bowing. To her brother. / And this was not the beginning. / She has forgotten. / How she bowed. To her brother. / And. In mentioning. She did mention. That this was. / A recollection.” Commas are certainly not necessary in all of these places, but it is clear that neither Stein nor I is merely peppering our lines with unnecessary punctuation. Rather, I think we are both trying to separate out individual thoughts and really get to their essence by isolating them with punctuation. Another thing that I really tried to achieve was the idea of making each “frame,” so to speak, slightly different. I tried to keep in mind the image of a flip-book or an old fashioned film, where each image or frame is slightly different, and when all of these slightly varied pieces are put together, the complete piece is put into motion. This was something that I really worked with in Love, and Other Insects, and also in the beginning of Fall Through. Back. This concept is very present in Stein’s poem, Patriarchal Poetry. The long sections were the phrases “let her be” and “let her try” are repeated with very slight occasional variations is a perfect example of this sort of frame-by-frame technique. I know that some people found these sections of Stein’s poems to be a bit tedious to read (I, personally, am not of that camp), so I tried to make the similar sections in my poems have a different kind of life to them, which I feel that I achieved by fusing Stein’s punctuation and frame techniques. As I read more of Stein’s work, I found that she often seemed to have a very specific human subject in mind for each poem. This was something that I made sure to address in each of my poems. The first poem, Love, and Other Insects was intended to be a sort of homage to Plath – one of my favorite poets, and played off of some of the images in “The Beekeeper’s Daughter.” The other two poems had subjects that were more personal, but I did find that these human subjects almost morphed into completely different entities as the poems went through the revision process. It became less important to stay true to the reality of the subject matter, and more important to get to the essence of them – to “extract [the] radium,” as Mina Loy says of Stein’s work. One aspect of her style that I really had trouble with is the specific type of nonsensical logic which she uses, especially in many of her shorter poems such as those found in Tender Buttons. My poem, Cats, was written solely as an experiment in using this type of logic, but I’m not sure that I was particularly successful in it. I modeled this specifically on Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, which I feel is one of the best examples of this particular aspect of her style: “She may count three little daisies very well By multiplying to either six nine or fourteen Or she can be well mentioned as twelve Which they may like which they can like soon Or more than ever which they wish as a button Just as much as they arrange which they wish Or they can attire where they need as which say Can they call a hat or a hat a day Made merry because it is so” I had a great deal of difficulty with this because I understood this strange logic in Stein’s work, but I did not (and still don’t) really know why I understood it or how it works. I did manage, though, to get a feel for it much in the same way that I did for Stein’s use of different rhythmic patterns in her poems, and I tried to apply that feeling to Cats. Another thing that I had some trouble with is the very childish tone that she takes on in some of her work. This is not to be mistaken with the way in which she plays with language, because she does this, I think, in a very different, more sophisticated manner that requires a higher level of thought process and a true understanding of how both the English language and the human psyche work. However, in some of her poems, there are instances in which she falls into a very young-sounding voice, and uses very specific, simplistic rhyme schemes and meters that somehow work – possibly because she often integrates them into larger pieces of poetry that do not have this structure throughout. Her poem, Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Faded, is an example of this type of poem. The whole beginning section sounds almost like something that one would expect a lovestruck middle-school student to write, but then the last lines – “ And with and without me which is and without she she can be late / and then and how and all around we think and found that it is / time to cry she and I.” – mark a significant and important change in voice, tone, and structure. Since lines like “Thank you for being there / Nobody has to care / Thank you for being there / Because you are not there” are paired with those last powerful, punchy lines, the beginning makes much more sense. I, however, do not feel that I was able to really capture this in any of the three poems that I wrote. I found the experience of writing imitations of Stein to be much like the experience of baking my grandmother’s Irish soda bread. Nobody had the recipe, but I had eaten it so many times that I was eventually able to isolate certain features, translate them into ingredients, and then guess at the proportions over and over again until I eventually came up with a combination that worked. The poems that I have attached to this paper underwent several drafts and revisions in which I experimented with different “ingredients,” so to speak, that are unique to Stein’s poetry. It should also be said that I did not necessarily try to do straight imitations, especially in terms of subject matter and vocabulary. What I wanted to do was to take the elements of Stein’s poetry that I most enjoyed and fuse them with my own writing style to create something that was entirely new, and not, in fact, a mere copy of someone else’s style, and in this endeavor, I felt that I was really successful. Love, and Other Insects come into my sleep. listen. an eye. a tree. trees with eyes that see sleep when they’re awake I like sugar in my tea. honey. Beekeeper’s Daughters – be be my bee sweet my bee be my bee my swollen lips bee swelling yellow-lipped bee’s yellow smile. be this. and this. and also. this. and have you this or this I have a bit of this a bit of the end stuck in my skin. here give me this my bee sweet bee swollen lips yellow lips swollen bliss this is this and this is this and nothing and everything is anything but this sweet my sweet bee give me the end of your skin to kiss I like lemon in my lies lavender in my tears sugar in my tea snake venom bee tears crushed bees in my sting sweet little bee crushed beneath my shoe come sweet my sweet bee be my bee be this be this be anything but this.
Fall Through. Back. did this. come. to an end. because. of the end. this had an ending. which ended. with the end. I am the end. here. take this end. I did not give in. to the end. here. take this end. take this end. here. take this end. here. take this. end. learn this. end. let this. end. end the end. once. the end. was once. the end. here. take this. end. this will. end. I have. the end. this has. an end. and end. no end. no. no end. there is. an end. not. ended. meet me in the trees in five minutes. do you like this dress. I think. sometimes. about the sea. do you. ask about seashells. your daughter has a red hat. your daughter has a red hat. your daughter has a black hat. your daughter has a red hat. let this. end. this is. end. let end. let. this end. your daughter has a black hat. do you. think. about birds. look here. melted. look. here. empty. your daughter has a red hat. look. here. empty. your daughter has a red hat. do you think about coal. your daughter has a black hat. do you think about me. look. this end. this has. end. an end. and end. look. this red hat. look this black. hat. do you like this coat. do you like this coal. do you like this shell. do you like this hat. your daughter has a red hat. do you like this bucket. do you like this metronome. do you. like. this meter. do you like this key. I find it to be pleasant. do you like this hat. look. I have this hat. your daughter has a red hat. I have a black hat. your daughter has a black hat. do you. like this end. a plum. I have this. do you.
Cats Your skin is a split peach. Your skin is a cat licking cream. Your skin is cinnamon counted out in quarters. I weigh half and double in your eyes, Can’t you see this, dear, look – If I cut a peach into quarters I am left with Eight cats divisible by a length of Cinnamon and silk. Button those eyes shut. I wear spats in the summer, stockings in winter. |