tracing miner(e)al butterflies with spoons: on Gertrude Stein

Don’t get me wrong, Pound & Eliot are pimps. HD’s Notes on Thought and Vision blows me away every time. But it’s the same every time. I’ve read them all several times and it’s the same. Hugh is still old and depressed. There are white petals. I read the same game of chess, still, like most other female readers of poetry, long for a fragrant bouquet of hyacinths, and, like all the other Marie's in the world, have renewed appreciation for my posession of an otherwise too common name. All great feelings, but the same ones, renewed.

This seems precisely what Stein wants to highlight—repetition, thoughts are not fully linear, they go somewhere, they progress, but they get stuck, loop, skip, repeat, repeat (all now explaining in music technology terms that Stein wouldn’t have understood in the same way we do now).

How is it that Stein, in precisely getting at the repetition of thought, experience, while highlighting it, is able to elicit from her poetry non-repetitious response? I get something different out of her at different times. (something I don’t get from Eliot, that is, I still do not read greek, though my italian is now better and maybe that’s something).

My beloved copy of TENDER BUTTONS, the $5 Dover, has been loved some. Not enough yet but some. All of my marks have been in pencil so that I can’t distinguish which were made at what time, knowing that I have now read through it at least 3 times, and have read fragments in many anthologies, of which of course my marginalia is not preserved. Some of my comments, what I’ve pointed out, seem juvenile now. (a little boost to tell me that my poetics has progressed).

I am drawn to MALACHITE. Mineral. real. a greenish blue or precise way to say color. red is vague. and a shape, a spoon leaving tracks. what hardness given way to wings with some black. which makes me examine how spoons are hard and soft or rock and brush-footed. the specificity and vagueness of it. does she mean the butterfly or the mineral? the flying or the real? And Malachi? The last book of the old testament? (I just emailed my friend attempting to find out if Jews uphold the entire old testament or only the first five books of the Torah).