Gertrude Stein

I was first introduced to the works of Gertrude Stein during the summer six years ago. On muggy days, otherwise filled with sweating and drinking water, I became enamored with writers of The Lost Generation. I read several works from writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Ford and William Faulkner. Thinking back, I can see myself hunched in a corner of the library, reading about how this writer influenced that writer and that writer hated loud drunks (I.E.Hemingway or Fitzgerald). It was a summer of reading at it's finest, but little did I realize, I had only scratched the surface of American expatriate art in Paris. Fall classes began two months later, and a friend of mine in a Lit. course informed me that "a writer named Gertrude Stein totally influenced all those novelists you say you like. She edited Hemingway and was part of the Shakespeare and Co. scene, if you don't know her, you don't know ____ about America's best in Paris. You do know about Shakespeare and Co right? Ms.Beech?". Insulted as I was, the remark prompted me to check out Ms. Stein's works at the library, and that work was, by a sheer matter of coincidence, Tender Buttons. My expectation for the work was something like this: formal poetry, probably akin to Elizabeth Bishop or Mary Oliver...clean imagery, emotionally charged, maybe with human nature or overt sexuality at the heart of the piece....right? WRONG (well, kind of). I had never read anything like Tender Buttons. The poem's words held together in a way that reminded me of ex-girlfriends, old dogs and my grandfather's flannel shirt. There were pictures created without imagery, free association where I expected concrete reality...it was clearly symbolism..or was it? Or was it Post Modern? Maybe it was word association, like in Life Studies....nope, wrong again..maybe. For me, the poem was incredibly easy to read. Every word could be a point of entry to the text. At times, I could almost read Tender Buttons just by looking a a whole paragraph, scanning for words that were important to me. Did I like the work as a whole? Maybe. I did like that the poem allowed me to finally read the way in which I liked: a way open to personal feeling and experience. I wasn't sure about the methods used however, perhaps they were too abstract for my meaning hungry brain. Tender Buttons is a work without rules, a poem that challenges, and at times forces the reader to bring their own personal experience and imagination to the task of reading. As a reader, you must look and look again, constructing meaning with whatever tools exist in your brain, as was said in class, "There is no right or wrong answer." Important writer, important time period. Why is Gertrude sometimes overlooked? Was it the period she came out of? Because she is sometimes dwarfed by her contemporaries? Because she was a woman? Because of the difficulty of framing her works for an academic setting? I don't truthfully know, I'm just glad she is finally included in an anthology.