Rough Zippers

My reading has gone from A to B in the last year, with the distance between A and B being the largest distance imaginable, like mole, my favorite distance. So I guess the distance between A and B is 6.29 times 10 to the 23 power. And though I love the writers at Point A, the writers at Point B are so challenging and intellectual it is taking my work into a level beyond the realm of normal and anything I could have expected from myself. In the past the name "Gertrude Stein" embodied many things. GS is complex. GS is puzzle. GS is nonsensical. GS is ridiculous. GS is fear. At first try, GS is so strange and offputing, an immediate reaction could be to disregard her work altogether. But because I have faith in myself as an intellectual and a poet, wanting to tackle her work was always a goal of mine through graduate school. For me, reading Stein was never uncomfortable, but intensely logical. And in poetry, the logical is not always present. I started with Tender Buttons, an experiment in meaning and syntax divided into three sections: Objects, Rooms, and Food. I began to think of her work as an equation, began to think of myself as a mathematician. Word A plus word B plus word C plus word D equals something with meaning that has nothing to do with the actual connotation of words A through D. So you look at the words differently and you connect them through sound. Sometimes this link equals meaning. Sometimes not. Sometimes it is the lack of meaning that means something. But you will begin to become startled by the preciseness of each image, the obscurity of each change in syntax. You learn how to pay attention to words in different ways you've ever learned. If a word has properties, most of us have been taught only two of them: connotation and denotation. So Stein's work in a way is the deconstruction of these properties. Words are shaken free of their meaning. Words are detached individuals, containing no definable defintion or name. You must look at what surrounds each word, how each word and the next work as bricks to construct something altogether new to language. And after you do all this, you are just beginning to make sense and understand her desire for meaning. It's challenging but rewarding. My latest project includes dialogues, monologues, and tryptychs involving this sort of deconstruction, adopting Stein and Lyn Hejinian's strange syntax, love of adverbs, and intense description. It is my greatest undertaking so far in my career as a writer and my first book manuscript is hundreds of times better for having studied this type of work. I thinking of having T-shirts made: "Je t'aime Gertrude Stein." Pretentious? Probably. Oh well. Read Stein and you will understand.