On to Writing

Sooooo, yeh. I said I would do this about Stein:

Chapter 3: Gertrude Stein’s Vatic Realism and the Presence of Difference (c. 45 pp.)
This chapter is still in outline form. The introduction extends the definition of vatic poetry beyond the strictly religious and relates that vatic of the sensible transcendental to poetry often considered merely “experimental”. Stein’s is not a poetry of being two, but her work, innagural of the objectivist tradition, begins to imagine in that direction. In her syntax and repetitions, her insistence of leaving the connection to the reader, Stein’s work is not only interrogating assumptions about language and reference, but is seeking a new fidelity to a new world. The uncertainty and relativity coming from science, their influence on painting in cubism and abstraction, Stein’s tensions and syntax and fragmentation attempt to represent this new reality, and as such her poetics is an early representative of trying to thinking otherness without domesticating it to the needs of the subject. It is, in other words, a vatic poetics when read from an Irigarian perspective as I develop it. The explication focuses on Irigaray’s terms interval, wonder, and sensible transcendental and offers readings of “Lifting Belly” and a selection of other poems, possibly to include “Patriarchal Poetry.” (Though that strikes me as a bit too easy. I’m still thinking about this.).

And it is. I'm not touching PP. And even the LB move is sort of obvious, but given the claim in the title, let's start the readers off gently, yes? Now, what about this lovely little poem, "Flirting at the Bon Marche," which fugues on the line "Some are coming to know very well that they are living in a very dreary way of living." Which, at its end ONLY makes sense as the syntax of the interval, of waiting for sense, of pause even as the subject makes an assertion that some of us are not living drearily, and the syntax itself shows just how risky and hard it is to Not Live Drearily. Well, well. Fun, Fun. Now, if only I could just get Miss S to stop using the word "very" so much. It's like me with the word "and." I'm all about the addition, aren't I? Also the longer sections of "Tender Buttons" and maybe some of "One Hundred Prominent Men," which does this really fun character sketch of 100 facets of the patriarchal personality, but assigns each to one man. Hilarious. How it plays up the sheer impossibility of actually embodying that type. Ah, the fun part, the taking shape of the ideas, how it glitters on this cold cold day.