National Poetry Month with Sarah Ann Winn and Gertrude Stein

On Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein

I opened the book: its small size foolery, its tom-secrethood. It was one thing first and then another. One one one. Only one thing, crowded. It opened, then opened again inside. Fractal. It made perfect unsense. I was redheaded in my mind, I was stepchild stephooded, little red, little wolf, tamed. This wolf-worded woman who never knew me, who died long before I came around, she wrote around and around, sometimes en francais. She gulped me down and I bellyswam. I didn’t want to be cut free.

from Tender Buttons, “Objects,” (excerpted)

GLAZED GLITTER.

Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.

The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.

There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.