This came up again in our workshop today, so I thought I’d share this with all of you. Emily M hunted down a great link of Gertrude Stein reading If I Told Him. It’s a lot of fun to listen to her reading — check it out! Also, there’s a really bizarre dance by a company in the Netherlands choreographed to part of the poem — if you’re not into modern dance, it might not be your thing, but I love it because of the very physical connection between the words and the body.
I liked our conversation today about accepting published work as meaningful because it’s just that — published. For me, that innate acceptance is less about the fact that a work is published, and more about the fact that my professors (who I trust) have culled it from a much larger body of published work. It made me wonder, though — what have you read that you don’t think should have been published?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: class discussion, Gertrude Stein |
Eating Our Words 
katie: you mention the physical connection between words & the body – i haven’t watched the piece you posted yet, but i will – but i just wanted to say that this connection is the very thing that gave me entry into modern dance when i finally understood it was possible. in quite the same way that people feel alienated and dismissive of poetry, especially stein, (the common “i don’t get poetry”), i’ve always felt myself an outsider of modern dance, disbelieving of the manipulations, struggling to piece together a seeming inacccessible choreography of bodies. when i went to see a hybrid piece of dance/theatre/film by william forsythe – kammer/kammer – based on text by anne carson, accompanied by violin music of bach, everything changed. before the performance, i told my friend that “i don’t get dance” and she said: “how could you not? for me, dance is the closest art there is to poetry” – here was my entry. i approached the piece without intellectualized expectations, and began to see the language bodies speak outsode of the actual linguistic realm, the body as discursive, a body-poetics, where the motion and angles of contact/friction, the weight and weightlessness, became the language, the story of the body. i’m thinking of this as i prepare for tonight’s midd dance performance, and your stein post has reminded me to remember the poetry of it all, so thanks. now for stein in the netherlands…
I don’t know, guys. Even after listening to the Gertrude Stein reading, I still really don’t like her stuff. I tried, I really tried– I was optimistic, but it just doesn’t do anything for me, it’s repetitve and droning, and possibly worse read aloud. Not my cup of tea, I guess, but that’s okay.
surprise, surprise, i love gertrude stein and the dance performance made me love her more…..i love how their movements really illustrated the rhythm of her words. i must admit that only listening to her made me a bit doze off a bit, i prefer reading it aloud myself, which surprised me bc i thought i would love hearing stein’s actual voice.
at one point in class we were having a conversation about how one writer will do something different and risky, but to emulate that (ah, it was cisneros) is very difficult. i wonder if the same thing goes for stein. ever since i started reading her i love repetition in my work, but sometimes i feel i should leave that task to her. i guess i’ll just have to see what comes out…
Miranda, I’m also still struggling with Stein. I did like the dance piece though– I wish we could see more of it. For some reason I liked Stein better paired with the dance. The bodies moving to the rhythm made more sense to me, as did the repetitions. I was drawn to it in a way that I was not drawn to the Stein readings, even when read aloud. Maybe I’m just a more visual person? Who knows. Like Stacie, I often feel outside of and alienated by dance, but maybe I also felt outside of and alienated by Stein’s work, so pairing them made sense.
Yessss! This is how Gertrude Stein is meant to be read. I think that the way the words flow lend themselves very well to dance which is surprising to me because I’ve never been a big fan of dance accompanied by words or even songs with words.
I suppose this is probably because usually, I search for meaning in the words, or am distracted by the meaning of the words, or dancing literal interpretations of words seems trite. Whereas with Stein, its not at all the meaning, rather, its the sound. I feel like the audio of Stein reading aloud works just like music, and the dancers move completely in response to the sound of the words not the meaning.
I like it.
I fall somewhere between Miranda and Jessica on this one. I really enjoy individual Stein moments, but the greater pieces just don’t do anything for me. It’s funny that Jessica should mention that she considers Stein a master with repetition, and that perhaps others shouldn’t touch the technique as she does, because I appreciate several of the Stein-influenced works from our class far more than the original article. I suppose I consider what she does a legitimate accent to a piece, but I’ve yet to appreciate it as the foremost motivation for a work.
What do y’all think about stuff like this? Are writing techniques effective when they are purposes in and of themselves? This is what I have trouble with.
I think we have to remember when Stein was writing, though, Jack — she was the forerunner to so much of what we read today, and really laid the foundation for what happened later with the Language poets and postmodern writing. I think you could argue that Stein’s influence has had far more weight and success than her own individual writing. I find “Tender Buttons” difficult to read in long sittings or stretches, but she’s playing with language, and ideas of excess, in a way that revolutionized (to some extent) the way writers were allowed to use their words.
I don’t know that “Tender Buttons” belongs in the category of a writing technique being used as a purpose in and of itself. That makes it sound not only gratuitous — which it is, to some extent, don’t get me wrong — but also meaningless. Technique (be it structure, or play with language, or repetition, or any of these sorts of elements) seem, to my mind, to be most effective when it complements the content of the piece. If what Stein was going for was Cubism in words, and a sort of soundscape (that word again!) within poetry, I’d argue that she achieves that in the form she’s chosen.
I’m glad you guys like the dance. 🙂 I’m not a huge Stein fan, nor am I a huge modern dance fan, but this is a case where — again — content seems to have found a really pleasant, fitting expression.
As a small side note, I just want to say that something clicked for me while listening to Stein and watching the modern dance video simultaneously. The instantaneous connection made between the dancers and her words really enhanced my outlook on Steins own connection with her words as she reads them out loud. When I listened to just her voiceover, I wasnt sold because I felt that her rhythm was forced and her tone was too formal. Once it was set to dance, however, I truly started to understand her sense of underlying beat and the decisive line and word breaks that make her work what it is.
I am not sure if I am ready to talk technique because I have only just recently discovered Stein, but I can say that emulating her style in my own work has been a great way of breaking free from my own structure limits and also getting to know a new sense of time…
Her use of language is definitely unique and has merits in exploration, but as a piece of work to be viewed by an audience I think “As I told Him” is lacking. It seems to me to be an exercise in the sound of words, but that’s all.
On the other hand, I don’t really know what separates a poem from an exercise. All I can really say is that an exercise such as this one grabs me much less as a reader/listener.
The dance was “interesting.” I though listening and watching the dance enhanced the experience. If the art of Stein’s work is in the process – the means not the ends – then this is more successful and tangible with the dance.
Also, why those costumes? Not to say I didn’t like them. Do they have some greater/deeper meaning? Every part of the dance was in sync except for at times the color showing of their costume – sometimes both light blue, other blue the other black and vice versa.