Tender Buttons

I would like to live in Audre Lorde’s brain

an experimental ode to perceiving the strature of objets, food, and rooms. written in a rambling, stream-of-consciousness-like style with the twist of a vignetted and uninterpretable words. “a sentence of a vagueness that is violence is authority and a mission and stumbling and also certainly also a prison. calmness, calm is beside the plate and in way in. there is no turn in terror. there is no volume in sound.” “why is there more craving than there is in a mountain. this does not seem strange to one, it does not seem strange to an echo and more surely is in there not being a habit. why is there so much useless suffering. why is there.”

this might be the best thing i’ve ever read

this might be the best thing i’ve ever read

Tender Buttons is a strange, strange collection of poems. Stein experiments and pushes the limits of language and the constructs of definition. Everything is sexual. Everything has double meaning. Everything can be questioned. Tender Buttons will leave you wondering why you ever believed your preschool teacher in the first place. It will challenge you to challenge yourself.

"It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity from society. But giving in to the rest of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies." The depth of thought here coupled with words easy to understand and the authority with which she uses them is what amazes me the most. Overall just fantastic.

This was amazing. Just from the title, you can see the strength with which Lorde writes, and it never falters. I was blown away by her writing; it was impossible not to be enveloped by her points, and analyze them all with her. "We are making the future as well as bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the present, and that is what it means to be a part of history"

Inesperado. Esa es la mejor palabra con la que puedo describir esta obra. No me atrae la poesía, pero esta obra es diferente a lo que esperaba y diferente a todo lo que leí de poesía anteriormente.

Read for my audit of Modern Poetry (English 222). Was super attracted to the 'automatic writing' demonstrated in Tender Buttons. Though my attempts at reading meaning into the writing may have been futile. Perhaps I have to be satisfied with the idea that the words had meaning in the moment they were created, even if that meaning was lost to the reader (and likely Gertrude herself). I still managed to come up with some quality bulls**t, projecting my ideology, and quite frankly, whatever the hell was on my mind already, onto the text. Loads of fun to read out loud, especially to people who have never heard the words 'Gertrude Stein' or 'cubism' or 'modernist poetry' before. I was determined to go through the entire text and painstakingly interpret each passage to find any scrap of meaning. A few months later I realise that this mission was pointless, both in terms of the optimism I had about my own work ethic and the purpose of the text. So I've given up, and I will suffice myself with randomly picking up the text to enjoy the sound of a passage (and maybe an audio version to talk me to sleep).