a light in the moon the only light is on...

from my anthology of must read (a)merican poems

Gertrude Stein

from Tender Buttons

from “Objects”

“A Cloth”

     Enough cloth is plenty and more, more is almost enough for that and besides if there is no more spreading is there plenty of room for it. Any occasion shows the best way.

~

from “Food”

from “Breakfast.”

     A change, a final change includes potatoes. This is no authority for the abuse of cheese. What language can instruct any fellow.
     A shining breakfast, a breakfast shining, no dispute, no practice, nothing, nothing at all.
     A sudden slice changes the whole plate, it does so suddenly.
     An imitation, more imitation, imitation succeed imitations.
     Anything that is descent, anything that is present, a calm and a cook and singularly still a shelter, all these show the need of clamor. What is the custom, the custom is in the centre.

~

from “Rooms”

     A climate, a single climate, all the time there is a single climate, any time there is a doubt, any time there is music that is to question more and more and there is no politeness, there is hardly any ordeal and certainly there is no tablecloth.

*

In many ways, no other American writer so embodies modernism with the same import as does Stein. The play of her language is compelling. She is to words – in force and approach – what Charlie Parker is to music, what Pablo Picasso is to art.

A tapestry of images and sounds that reveals the inner world of a writer at work – That’s the best way I can describe my own reaction to Stein’s Tender Buttons. The poem – and it’s surely a poem of high order – is fresh with every reading. I never tire of it. She explores syntax in a way worthy of Dickinson – and Stein had no knowledge of Dickinson’s true lines since the Johnson edition was four decades away. Stein pushed through the invisible boundaries of speech, the accepted sentence structures, and poetic form. What she found was freedom – and the modern voice – and a true form.

Tender Buttons is a work that – in spite of its highly personal origins and its descriptives flavored with Stein’s life with Alice B. Toklas – remains universal. This is a poem about the closeness of living, and the setting never moves beyond the walls of an apartment. The reader is given a microscopic view of a world, yet this view is not confining but is illuminating.

Each time I read this work – and I come back often – I never consider meaning in any real or traditional sense. I let that go. That’s not what matters to my connection to this poem. I’m swept away by Stein’s extraordinary imagination and her breath when I read aloud the lines:

“Left over to be a lamp light, left over in victory, left over in saving, all this and negligence and bent wood and more even much more is not so exact as a pen…” (from “Rooms”)