Motive

Gertrude Stein published Tender Buttons in 1914 and I imagine generations of writers have since enjoyed and struggled with her work. We readers are thrust into the thick of a world re-imagined and re-examined with the impelling first poem:

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

My own powers of observation and imagination cannot compare with Gertrude Stein’s. But to show (to myself) that I care, and to grow as a reader and writer, this is my poem-by-poem explication of all the objects, foods, and rooms in Tender Buttons. You’re welcome to follow this meditation, though I guarantee that almost none of this was the intended reading by Gertrude Stein, and I make no promise to be intelligible.

Thoughts are welcome via desmond [at] desmondcheong.com