Gertrude Stein’s Biographical Body: More Than Remains


Gertrude Stein’s Biographical Body:  More Than Remains


Amy King

The test of a “politics of poetry” is in the entry of poetry in the world in a political way.

                        –Barret Watten, “The Conduit of Communication in Everyday Life”


As I say all novels are soothing because they make anything happen as they can happen that is by remembering anything.  But and I kept wondering as I talked and listened all at once, I wondered is there any way of making what I know come out as I know it, come out as not remembering.  I found this very exciting.  And I began to make portraits. 

                        –Gertrude Stein, “Portraits and Repetition”


            “She has always made her chief study people” (TAAT, 45), and ultimately, transgressed the genre formalization that depicts people within standard biographical terms.  Gertrude Stein divined her own methods for presenting her impressions of others.  Within an increasingly industrialized culture, she considered the attempted representation of people to be a production of personas that risked a formulaic confinement.  Stein’s acute awareness of assembly line manufacturing spurred her to work against the commodification of language – and make language her own, more than ever.  That commodification continues to limit the activity of how we identify and label individuals, so that our pre-packaged culture dispenses rigid versions of people or “types,” thus belying the possibilities language can inspire.  Beyond the obvious cardboard cut-outs of “right” versus “left”, another result of such characterization practices can be seen through the popular trend in memoirs and biographical works.  These books perpetuate the mythos of America:  pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps, overcoming odds, etc. as if there were no other noteworthy ways of living to admire. 

           These “rememberances” at base evidence a historicizing condition.  Someone is remembered within the context of certain circumstances, achieving particular goals, etc.  Additionally, such recollection assumes the rubric of proper grammar and syntax as a prerequisite for comprehension.  The static popular use of words served as “soothing rememberances” for eased consumption.  For Stein and others now, it is the equivalent of being spoon-fed prescriptive paths for life.  Her own biographical notes illustrate her resistance toward the “easy road.”  Stein’s various portraits and biographical pieces ignored grammatical laws and brought language into focus, while bearing no regard for soothing or instructing audiences by example, and thus, her work confounds the commodifying impulse and elevates the “text-as-object” condition.  Industrialized production would lay down for writers the dictates that disguise the materialism of language and obliterate the need for people to actively handle words via their imaginations, and thus, their own emotional predilections.  Readers seek to know the meaning of the story, rather than working with the text-at-hand, infusing, constructing, and enacting meaning  as a collaborative effort, as an action.  Consider the old metaphor of selling a house:  the realtor finds it easier to sell a house under the mythology of “how many good, familial times will be had” through the obtainment of the product, rather than on the actual design or by speculating on the unglossed potentialities of what may happen once you’ve moved in.  Likewise, words were just vehicles, a product meant to deliver an end result, until Stein’s concern with their presence caused unrest among the critics. 

            Comprehension, as based on common grammar and artifice, Stein felt, makes “all novels soothing” because it simply familiarizes the way language is used.  This familiarization produces the desired, prescriptive result.  For the conditioned reader, the stories delivered may resemble the meat of life; they can be the tales that reveal life’s lessons, titillate or make us cry.  However, that conventional writing style does not identify some essential truth ready for us to learn and live by.  Rather, it anticipates a common readerly response and attempts, through rule abeyance and manipulation, to deliver the anticipated story-lesson.  Stein undertook the development of a different science, one that did not divide the intellect from the emotion of the individual.  Wisdom was not to be limited to the reader’s “correct” understanding of the lesson therein.  The molecular structure of the sentence did not belong to a literary science of naturalization but came under the determinations of the individual scientist, philosopher, and person to test their own hypotheses, according to instinct, whim, and whatever other personal calculations might come into play.  In Stein’s work, words were not stand-ins for other realities.  The lines and phonemes became tangible realities themselves.

[To be continued]



Daisy Fried’s Poetry Exercises


Daisy Fried on Poetry:












5. Write a poem without adjectives.






friend, mayor, president, corporate CEO, etc.






lists of events, lists of names…





20. Write a poem about falling out of love.



23. Write a hate poem.







30. Radically revise a poem you wrote earlier this month.

The Continuing Collapse


 Global Warming:  These Are Things That Are Not Re-forming

A chunk of Antarctic ice about seven times the size of Manhattan has collapsed, scientists said Tuesday, putting an even greater portion of glacial ice at risk.

Such occurrences are “more indicative of a tipping point or trigger in the climate system,” said Sarah B. Das, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.


Vaughan had predicted that the Wilkins shelf would collapse about 15 years from now. The part that recently gave way made up about 4% of the overall shelf, but it was an important part that can trigger further collapse.

“The most dramatic early consequences of the climate crisis are in the least accessible areas: near the North Pole and the South Pole,” said former vice president Al Gore. “Since it’s not on live TV, it doesn’t command as much attention as it should.” –from several sources, including CNN

The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld



–from Slate

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing


Nominations To Begin For 2008 Poet Laureate of The Blogosphere


Nominations To Begin For 2008 Poet Laureate of The Blogosphere


Billy is pleased to announce that will again host the Poet Laureate Of The Blogosphere Election for the 4th year in a row with nominations beginning April 1, 2008. The Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere is the only laureateship chosen by readers.Previous winners are 2007 Amy King, 2006 Ron Silliman and 2005 Jilly Dybka.

Dim Sum: Tonya Foster & Evie Shockley



The following excerpts are taken from “Dim Sum: Tonya Foster & Evie Shockley — Braiding: ConVERSations: To, Against, For”

but it is not–no more than words themselves are.

 –Paolo Friere via James Scully (Linebreak 133)


“I have become a lot more aware over the past year or two
how often gender dynamics operate in really screwed-up ways
within a community I had complacently assumed was a lot more
progressive and enlightened than it sometimes reveals itself to be.
conversations, or how men get threatened and aggressive when women
speak up about these things.”

  –K. Silem Mohammad


…If Audre Lorde is correct in saying that “poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought” (in her indispensable essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”), then it can be argued that envisioning and articulating what is desired but does not yet exist is one of the primary tasks–or, less prescriptively, primary opportunities–of the poet’s work.



–CONTINUED in “Dim Sum: Tonya Foster & Evie Shockley — Braiding: ConVERSations: To, Against, For”


3 Responses to “Dim Sum: Tonya Foster & Evie Shockley”

  1. Jim K. Says:
    March 2nd, 2008 at 5:12 pm eEver notice how Evie takes the foreground of
    pictures and the sound of readings? There is
    a direct presence. No other.
  2. Jim K. Says:
    March 2nd, 2008 at 7:43 pm eLooking over wrongs, I’ve noticed
    over the years that oafishness and
    subconscious deflection are often
    the cause than intention and aggression.
    Which is to say, maybe things are less
    deliberate, more subtle, but paradoxically
    harder to dig up. Just a thought from mulling
    the comments I’ve seen by editors of both
    genders for years. True Anthropology might
    find more natural things than the old wounding
    paradigms presupposed. If it could ever escape
    the hothouse of likely well over 100,000 trawlers
    trapped in an inland sea, and all the political
    3rd rails, that is.
  3. Jim K Says:
    March 2nd, 2008 at 10:05 pm eOops…I am out of sync with the
    aggressiveness thing that happened..
    sorry bout the babbling.

How To Frame Politics?


 A New Frame: Strong Communities



















  1. andrew lundwall Says:
  2. Amy King Says: