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Sunday, November 02, 2003 ::
3:27 PM ::
gertrude stein's motives II
I recently cracked out The Party Train, an anthology of prose poetry I haven't really looked at since graduate school, and the introduction quotes Gertrude Stein as saying that Tender Buttons represents "my first conscious struggle with the problem of correlating sight, sound, and sense, and eliminating rhythm."
Weird. The book strikes me as an attempt to de-correlate sound from sense, but maybe that possibility isn't entirely ruled out by that quote. But this business of eliminating rhythm strikes me as totally strange, because one of the things that impressed me about the book is its musicality: it seems veritably obsessed with the rhythm of language.
"To bury a slender chicken, to raise an old feather, to surround a garland and to bake a pole splinter, to suggest a repose and settle simply, to surrender one another, to succeed saving simpler, to satify a singularity and not to be blinder, to sugar nothing darker and to read redder, to have the color better, to sort out dinner, to remain together, to surprise no sinner, to curve nothing sweeter, to continue thinner, to increase in resting recreation to design string not dimmer."
I mean, it's not iambic pentameter, but that sentence certainly doesn't strike me as one from which the rhythm has been eliminated-- or are GS and I just using the word differently somehow? Labels: book_commentary, poetry_commentary
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