John Ashbery On Stein

Gertrude Stein
Índice tentativo
Tomo 1:
Matisse p.278-281
Picasso p.282-284
Ort or One Dancing p.285-303
Miss Furr and Miss Skeene p.307-312
Tender Buttons p.313-355
Susie p.362
Yet Dish p.363-372
Preciosilla p.386
Sacred Emily p.387-396
Lifting Belly Part I p.410-424
Lifting Belly Part II p.424-458
Patriarchal Poetry p.567-607
Tomo 2:
Stanzas in Meditation p.3-145
Henry James p.149-169
Ensayos
John Hyde Preston: A Conversation with Gertrude Stein p.164-172

Tomo 1:
Composition as explanation p.520-529
Tomo 2:
Poetry and Grammar p.313-336
What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them p.355-363
Índice del Reader
Business in Baltimore 12
A Family of Perhaps Three 25
An Instant Answer or A Hundred Prominent Men 34
Old and Old 50
A Collection 63
A Patriotic Leading 68
IIIIIIIIII. 70
The Superstitions of Fred Anneday, Annday, Andar A Novel of Real Life 83
If You Had Three Husbands 92
Rooms 108
We Came. A History 120
Many Many Women 126
Wherein Iowa Differs from Kansas and Indiana 223
France 228
Wherein the South Differs from the North 240
Americans 258
American Biography and Why Waste It 265
Lend a Hand or Four Religions 273
Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters: A Melodrama 307
Am There Six or Another Question 313
Objects Lie on a Table: A Play 314
Civilization: A Play 323
At Present: A Play 360
The First Reader 372
Are There Arithmetics 398
A Bouquet. Their Wills. 402
A Movie 432
Film, Dux soeurs qui no son, pas soeurs 436
Many Many Women 126
How Writing Is Written 438
Sentences and Paragraphs 450
Next. Life and Letters of Marcel Duchamp 461
Forensics 463
Bibliography, 1904-1929 by Gertrude Stein 473
Sources 489
About the Editor 493
John Ashbery on Gertrude Stein's
Stanzas in Meditation
first published in Poetry magazine July 1957, pp. 250-54
"The Impossible"
John Ashbery
This is the latest volume in the series of the unpublished writings of Gertrude
Stein which the Yale University Press has been bringing out regularly for the last
decade. It will probably please readers who are satisfied only by literary
extremes, but who have not previously taken to Miss Stein because of a kind of
lack of seriousness in her work, characterized by lapses into dull, facile rhyme;
by the over-employment of rhythms suggesting a child's incantation against
grownups; and by monotony. There is certainly plenty of monotony in the 150-
page title poem which forms the first half of this volume, but it is the fertile kind,
which generates excitement as water monotonously flowing over a dam generates
electrical power. These austere "stanzas" are made up almost entirely of colorless
connecting words such as "where," "which," "these," "of," "not," "have," "about,"
and so on, though now and then Miss Stein throws in an orange, a lilac, or an
Albert to remind us that it really is the world, our world, that she has been talking
about. The result is like certain monochrome de Kooning paintings in which
isolated strokes of color take on a deliciousness they never could have had out of
context, or a piece of music by Webern in which a single note on the celesta
suddenly irrigates a whole desert of dry, scratchy sounds in the strings.
Perhaps the word that occurs oftenest in the Stanzas is the word "they," for this is
a poem about the world, about "them." (What a pleasant change from the eternal
"we" with which so many modern poets automatically begin each sentence, and
which gives the impression that the author is sharing his every sensation with
some invisible Kim Novak.) Less frequently, "I" enters to assess the activities of
"them," to pick up after them, to assert his own altered importance. As we get
deeper into the poem, it seems not so much as if we were reading as living a
rather long period of our lives with a houseful of people. Like people, Miss
Stein's lines are comforting or annoying or brilliant or tedious. Like people, they
sometimes make no sense and sometimes make perfect sense; or they stop short
in the middle of a sentence and wander away, leaving us alone for awhile in the
physical world, that collection of thoughts, flowers, weather, and proper names.
And, just as with people, there is no real escape from them: one feels that if one
were to close the book one would shortly re-encounter the Stanzas in life, under
another guise. As the author says, "It is easily eaten hot and lukewarm and cold /
But not without it."
Stanzas in Meditation gives one the feeling of time passing, of things happening,
of a "plot," though it would be difficult to say precisely what is going on.
Sometimes the story has the logic of a dream:
She asked could I be taught to be allowed

And I said yes oh yes I had forgotten him
And she said does any or do any change
And if not I said whom could they count.
while at other times it becomes startlingly clear for a moment, as though a

change in the wind had suddenly enabled us to hear a conversation that was
taking place some distance away:
He came early in the morning.

He thought they needed comfort
Which they did
And he gave them an assurance
That it would be all as well
As indeed were it
Not to have it needed at any time
But it is usually not events which interest Miss Stein, rather it is their "way of
happening," and the story of Stanzas in Meditation is a general, all-purpose
model which each reader can adapt to fit his own set of particulars. The poem is a
hymn to possibility; a celebration of the fact that the world exists, that things can
happen.
In its profound originality, its original profundity, this poem that is always
threatening to become a novel reminds us of the late novels of James,
especially The Golden Bowl and The Sacred Fount, which seem to strain with a
superhuman force toward "the condition of music," of poetry. In such a passage
as the following, for instance:
Be not only without in any of their sense

Careful
Or should they grow careless with remonstrance
Or be careful just as easily not at all
As when they felt.
They could or would would they grow always
By which not only as more as they like.
They cannot please conceal
Nor need they find they need a wish
we are not far from Charlotte's and the Prince's rationalizations. Both Stanzas in
Meditation and The Golden Bowl are ambitious attempts to transmit a completely
new picture of reality, of that real reality of the poet which Antonin Artaud
called "une realite dangereuse et typique." If these works are highly complex
and, for some, unreadable, it is not only because of the complicatedness of life,
the subject, but also because they actually imitate its rhythm, its way of
happening, in an attempt to draw our attention to another aspect of its true nature.
Just as life is being constantly altered by each breath one draws, just as each
second of life seems to alter the whole of what has gone before, so the endless
process of elaboration which gives the work of these two writers a texture of
bewildering luxuriance -- that of a tropical rain-forest of ideas -- seems to obey
some rhythmic impulse at the heart of all happening.
In addition, the almost physical pain with which we strive to accompany the
evolving thought of one of James's or Gertrude Stein's characters is perhaps a
counterpart of the painful continual projection of the individual into life. As in
life, perseverance has its rewards -- moments when we emerge suddenly on a
high plateau with a view of the whole distance we have come. In Miss Stein's
work the sudden inrush of clarity is likely to be an aesthetic experience, but (and
this seems to be another of her "points") the description of that experience applies
also to "real-life" situations, the aesthetic problem being a microcosm of all
human problems.
I should think it makes no difference

That so few people are me.
That is to say in each generation there are so few geniuses
And why should I be one which I am

This is one way of saying how do you do
There is this difference
I forgive you everything and there is nothing to forgive.
It is for moments like this that one perseveres in this difficult poem, moments
which would be less beautiful and meaningful if the rest did not exist, for we
have fought side by side with the author in her struggle to achieve them.
The poems in the second half of the book are almost all charming, though lacking
the profundity of Stanzas in Meditation. Perhaps the most successful is Winning
His Way, again a picture of a human community: "The friendship between Lolo
and every one was very strong / And they were careful to do him no wrong." The
bright, clean colors and large cast of characters in this poem suggests a comic
strip. In fact one might say that Miss Stein discovered a means of communication
as well-suited to express our age as in their own way, the balloons (with their
effect of concentration), light bulbs, asterisks, ringed planets, and exclamation
marks which comic-strip characters use to communicate their ideas. In Winning
His Way, for example, she experiments with punctuation by placing periods in
the middle of sentences. This results in a strange syncopation which affects the
mseaning as well as the rhythm of a line. In the couplet
Herman states.
That he is very well.
the reader at first imagines that she is talking about a group of states ruled over
by a potentate named Herman; when he comes to the second line he is forced to
change his idea, but its ghost remains, giving a muted quality to the prose sense
of the words.
Donald Sutherland, who has supplied the introduction for this book, has
elsewhere quoted Miss Stein as saying, "If it can be done why do it?" Stanzas in
Meditation is no doubt the most successful of her attempts to do what can't be
done, to create a counterfeit of reality more real than reality. And if, on laying the
book aside, we feel that it is still impossible to accomplish the impossible, we are
also left with the conviction that it is the only thing worth trying to do.

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Gertrude Stein

John Hyde Preston: A Conversation with Gertrude Stein p.164-172

She asked could I be taught to be allowed

while at other times it becomes startlingly clear for a moment, as though a

He came early in the morning.

Be not only without in any of their sense

I should think it makes no difference

And why should I be one which I am

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