Let's Talk: Gertrude Stein Response Assignment
We're doing something a little different this week, which will prepare you for the difference of Gertrude Stein. In lieu of a discussion question you should write a response to a Gertrude Stein poem from your packet and post the response on your student tumblr. Here are more detailed instructions:
Read the work from your Gertrude Stein Packet. You will notice how very different these poems are from any we have read. They don't make "sense." Stein was not interested in making sense. She was not interested in writing poems that explored human situations and emotions. She was interesting in language stripped of its conventional meaning. She wanted to use language the way the painters of her time (Picasso, Braque) were experimenting with new ways to paint. Look at the cubist paintings on the MPC. She used words to create sound not image.
Read them aloud. Listen to her reading.
Find your way in to a poem or poems. Read a poem and watch how it gets under your skin. Post your response to reading Gertrude Stein on your student tumblr. Say something particular, rather than "I didn't get it. or I didn't like it...." Find something from another part of your brain. Maybe you like reading a certain line out loud, and the more you read it the more you come to understand something about it.
After the interviewer asks Stein to explain her “Van or Twenty Years After. A Second Portrait of Carl Van Vechten” (1923), she proceeds to chide him for trying to “understand” the verse with the same kind of brilliant indignation with which Flannery O’Connor once scolded an English teacher for letting interpretation rob reading of joy.
"Look here. Being intelligible is not what it seems. You mean by understanding that you can talk about it in the way that you have a habit of talking, putting it in other words. But I mean by understanding enjoyment. If you enjoy it, you understand it. And lots of people have enjoyed it so lots of people have understood it. . . . But after all you must enjoy my writing, and if you enjoy it you understand it. If you do not enjoy it, why do you make a fuss about it? There is the real answer."