Is This What You Wanted to be, Alone Standing by Yourself? Is This All You Wanted to be or Was That a Cry For Help?

     As an avid reader I like straightforward sentences that make logical sense and flow along line after line until they have said something coherent. Gertrude Stein is my enemy. Standing out is an important thing for any artist; to blend in with the masses is to be quickly forgotten. Stein certainly knew this and so we have her, very unique and different, jumbled mess of words. Her poetry is awkward looking on the page and when read it makes no sense. Arguably the sentences in her poetry are not sentences at all as the Writing Center at Pasadena College says: "To be grammatically complete, a sentence must have a subject, verb, and present a complete thought" [1]. There are no sentences in her poetry that fulfill that definition. And not only does her poetry make no sense, it is so close to making sense that I feel as if I have failed somehow. Reading Tender Buttons is like reading a complicated essay in academic jargon; I feel like I should understand what it is saying but it looks like a bunch of gibberish to me. Reading "Patriarchal Poetry" left me feeling like I needed to kick something and reading the bio in Anthology of American Poetry (page 54-55) did nothing to help me understand why Stein repeats "to be" thirty-nine times in twelve lines.

     This repetitiveness is also not limited to Stein's poetry; it extends to the titles of the poetry in each section of Tender Buttons. The Section Food contains four poems in a row titled "Chicken", three titled "Orange" followed by "Oranges" and "Orange In", and following those are two poems titled "Salad Dressing And An Artichoke." Everything in me wants that to mean something but my brain can make no sense of it. The section Food is also the only section to have a list of what at first glance seems to be the titles of all the poems in that section and at second is slightly different. Does this make the entire section one, large, jumbled up poem? Perhaps it is meant to be read all together with the titles actually just being bold, interrupting lines. All I know is that I am thoroughly confused and this book has left me mentally exhausted.

(Title from this song.)