While Gertrude Stein (left) is best known for epic books such as The Making of Americans or The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, many poets' favorite Stein work is a slender, modest volume first published in 1914 entitled Tender Buttons. Broken into three sub-sections (Objects, Food, Rooms), each consisting of hybrid-genre portraits of inanimate objects, Tender Buttons subjugates meaning to music, finding new meanings in a tired old language, as well as a great deal of rhythm and sonority. Put more simply, they don't mean much, but they sound great. Tender Buttons is a meta-poetic work, that is writing about writing (or writing that explores and challenges the expressive potential of writing), or more succinctly, writing for writing's sake. Here are a few examples:
COLD CLIMATE.
A season in yellow sold extra strings makes lying places.
MALACHITE.
The sudden spoon is the same in no size. The sudden spoon is the wound in the decision.
AN UMBRELLA.
Coloring high means that the strange reason is in front not more in front behind. Not more in front in peace of the dot.
A PETTICOAT.
A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.
A WAIST.
A star glide, a single frantic sullenness, a single financial grass greediness.
Object that is in wood. Hold the pine, hold the dark, hold in the rush, make the bottom.
A piece of crystal. A change, in a change that is remarkable there is no reason to say that there was a time.
A woolen object gilded. A country climb is the best disgrace, a couple of practices any of them in order is so left.
A TIME TO EAT.
A pleasant simple habitual and tyrannical and authorised and educated and resumed and articulate separation. This is not tardy.
A LITTLE BIT OF A TUMBLER.
A shining indication of yellow consists in there having been more of the same color than could have been expected when all four were bought. This was the hope which made the six and seven have no use for any more places and this necessarily spread into nothing. Spread into nothing.
A FIRE.
What was the use of a whole time to send and not send if there was to be the kind of thing that made that come in. A letter was nicely sent.
A HANDKERCHIEF.
A winning of all the blessings, a sample not a sample because there is no worry.
RED ROSES.
A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot.
So what I want you to do is try to write a poem (or poems) in the mode of Tender Buttons. In part, this is an extension of the Micro-forms prompt, however, while that exercise aimed to help you write one well-honed phrase (with the thoughts that if you can write a solid line or couplet, you can build a great poem out of solid lines), this assignment is all about sound, juxtaposition, image, rhythm and repetition, providing you with an opportunity to play around with those very important poetic components without concern for meaning. So write lines that sound wonderful but don't mean a damn thing — or write lines that assert an ambiguous meaning, but are presented in an attention-grabbing cadence. Try to make a portrait of an everyday object, or just write for the sake of writing. Finally, don't feel constrained by length here: as you see above (and you can read the book in its entirety here) there are some very short, one-line poems and some that extend to much greater lengths, either in a lineated poetic form or in prosey blocks. Disconnect your poetic expression from meaning and see what glorious sounds you discover!
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