By Diana Torres, Poetry Editor
Poetry is about seeing the world anew, and we do this by looking at the world closely. Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein is the archetype of this.
Gertrude Stein was born in 1874 in Pennsylvania. She was a wealthy, lesbian, feminist expatriate living in Paris with her partner Alice B. Toklas until the time of her death in 1946. Stein was an ambitious American novelist, playwright, and an art collector – some rendered her as only an art collector. She was part of the avant-garde movement, an artistic movement that required its enthusiasts to step and think outside of the box. One of the reasons that Gertrude Stein was and still is very admirable is the fact that she didn’t subscribe to patriarchal conventions imposed on women. For example, in the late 19th century and early 20th century, it was likely and expected for women to stay in their hometowns for the rest of their lives, so it was ground-breaking for Stein to move out of the country and travel with her lesbian partner.
Tender Buttons was first published in 1914. It consists of three sections titled “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms.” Stein’s Tender Buttons is transgressive because it exceeded people’s expectations of poetry during these times. Stein shattered the boundaries of poetry since the poems in Tender Buttons can be thought of as prose poems, yet they’re neither prose nor poems. They look like prose, but they sound like poems. One could even call these poems “sketches,” and because Stein was an art collector, we can really see how her love for art shows through in each “sketch.”
In these times, poetry was mainly written about and for cisgender, straight, white men in positions of privilege. In Tender Buttons, Stein disrupts every taken-for-granted convention set on poetry. The language she uses is heavily coded with imagery of lesbianism and sexuality – which was highly unusual and frowned upon – and not only that but each sentence can be difficult to decipher. The title of her collection of poems is a perfect example of this because it can be read to signify nipples or clitoris. Her poems are the equivalent of paintings and she materializes words as her preferred medium. I say she materializes words because she adopts metonymy and catachresis in her diction and syntax.
We can see how Tender Buttons also relies heavily on emotions. For example, in “Custard” she continually moves back and forth between sound and sense and reworks the meaning behind words to emphasize feeling. “Custard” can be seen as a representation of lesbianism. She begins by pointing to what “custard” is and what it isn’t without explicitly stating what she means, which can be read as her setting lesbianism and heteronormativity apart. When she says, “It is better than lakes whole lakes, it is better than seeding,” it’s as if she has placed us with her in this world of custard where we are exploring fertility and sexuality and comparing this world of custard to the one we live in now with heteronormative ideals. Finally, it’s almost as if “Custard” has materialized into an actual custard that is now in our mouths as we swirl and taste it.
“Custard” by Gertrude Stein
Custard is this. It has aches, aches when. Not to be. Not to be narrowly. This makes a whole little hill.
It is better than a little thing that has mellow real mellow. It is better than lakes whole lakes, it is better than seeding.
For more on Gertrude Stein, visit the Poetry Foundation.
Diana Torres is from borderland El Paso, TX. She studies English at New Mexico State University and is one of DiN's poetry editors.
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