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’s work breaks rules like they’re written in pencil, and I wanted to know how such seemingly reckless chaos could have actual meaning. In case you have never come across her work, here is a poem from her collection Tender Buttons:

If you’re anything like me, you’re feeling a mix of discomfort and curiosity. A lot of decisions seem to be almost random, bordering on meaningless. 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.

Speaking of colour, it takes only a quick glance at the poems in Tender Buttons to realise that colours play a key role in this collection. If Stein was interested in the brain, and the power of words, especially as objects, entities, of their own, then colour is possibly the most concentrated version of this brain-manipulating, word-empowering experimental communication that you can find. What words can force a stronger image in ones mind than a colour?

The ability of colour words to so powerfully force mental images seems to be what Stein’s work is all about, not just with colours, but with the words and phrases like “guided,” “blue coat,” “shadow,” and even the more abstract ‘particular’ and ’exactitude. 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.

Consider this excerpt, from 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 all fuel the sunshine (and the poem) with energy, not unlike what you might get from personification. 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 between Stein’s work and a more standard poem like Lowell’s is that here, the syntax and semantics behave nicely. 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.

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. ‌