I recently went to a workshop hosted by Francesca Wade, author of recently published Gertrude Stein, an Afterlife, which dives into the life and legacy of the ever-perplexing poet. I went in expecting answers (Stein breaks rules like they’re written in pencil) and left with a deeper understanding of how such apparent chaos could contain meaning.

In case you have never come across her work, here is a poem from her collection Tender Buttons:

If you’re anything like I was, you’re feeling a mix of discomfort and curiosity right now. A lot of decisions seem to be almost random or even foolish. Why repeat ‘guided’ so much? What does it mean to use a color for a length (and not any width??) There are many such questions that seem to go nowhere; the more you read trying to find answers, the more questions emerge. At some point you might give up and put her work aside, assuming you just need to work up to being able to analyse her work, to tackle it. But maybe, if you’re lucky, you might decide that actually the nonsense is the point. What if, beneath the surface layer of discomfort, there exists a much more interesting plane of emotions and colour, found only by disregarding typical analysis, and leaning into intuition.

It takes only a quick glance at the poems in Tender Buttons to realise that colours play a central role. Stein was interested in the brain, and the power of words, especially as objects, entities, of their own, and through colour (and the names we give them), we find an incredible concentration of thought-wielding power. What words can force a stronger image in the mind than colours?

The ability of colour words to so powerfully force mental images seems to be a great representative of Stein’s work as a whole, not just with colours, but with a wide array of punchy word choice. Words and phrases like “guided,” “blue coat,” “shadow,” and even the more abstract ‘particular’ and ’exactitude,’ all come to a new level of vividity when Stein wields them, animating them into creatures that walk and talk and perform on her stage.

It’s fascinating how even these abstract words immediately evoke reactions, albeit ones that are hard to describe. To be perfectly clear, the power of diction is nothing new in poetry. What I’d never considered, however, was that the quality or essence of each word, as a sum of its connotation, definition, sound, texture, etc, could matter as much as (if not more than) the logical flow of the sentence the word exists in.

For contrast, consider this excerpt, from Imagist poet Amy Lowell’s Bath:

Here, in addition to the obvious examples of rhyme, we have the repeated ’l’ sounds at important words, such as lathes, planes, cleaves, flaws, jewel, and light. Sound choices. Or we could look at the verbs used to describe the light, words like pours, bores, cleaves, and cracks, which all fuel the sunshine (and the poem) with energy, much like personification would.

Both of these examples show how decisions around the features of a word go a long way, but neither, in my opinion, is quite as daringly decisive as what we see in Tender Buttons. The difference is that in a more standard poem like Lowell’s, syntax and semantics behave nicely. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing$^1$ but with this structure imposed, it is impossible to free the individual word to the extent that Stein does.

Whether or not we intend it, we allow logic and convention to be our constraints, governing what words we can consider. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—the confines of the typical English sentence offer many freedoms, after all; but Stein seems to step outside these constraints just enough to lean into the beauty of words for their own sake, giving each word as much attention as an entire sentence.

With this in mind, I decided to put words to paper, and see what I come up with. This is a quick style exercise, a poem inspired by Tender Buttons:

In writing this, I discovered is that this level of chaos is tremendously difficult to balance. It’s fairly easy to write sentences that make no sense, and it isn’t terribly hard to write sentences with pleasing diction. The trouble is doing both at once. This is one of the many puzzling parts of her work: to appreciate it means letting go of the particulars, or at least the need to understand them, yet the only way to differentiate her work from so-called “Automatic Writing” is to welcome the idea that every word is intentional, and that the nonsense only works because of this meticulous care.

So, reader, I recommend trying a close-read of her work, and seeing what you learn. Just be sure to take a step back every now and then, and, as her words travel from the page to your voice and to your mind, let the words do their thing.

Notes:

1. Most poetry welcomes the confines of typical language, even imposing extra ones, through meter and form, yet we collectively respect and admire several of these poems

References:

1. Stein, G., & Perlow, S. (2014). Tender buttons : the corrected centennial edition. City Light Books.
2. Wade, F. (2025). Gertrude Stein: an Afterlife. Simon and Schuster.
3. Lowell, A. (1955). The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell. Houghton Mifflin Company. ‌