Poetry Thursday: Gertrude Stein!

[@jscottphillips503]

A glass of wine with Gertrude Stein I know I'll never share. But I don't mind. That's just the kind of cross each man must bear. I'm on my way, I cannot stay another day.

[@saintdonoghue]

Yer an Imagist GENIUS!

[@heathergregg9975]

Gertrude Stein was independently wealthy. What she would have written if she had to earn her living by her pen might have been rather different.

[@aiaiaaooe]

When I was a kid reading 20th century poetry, coming from nursery rhymes and songs, I felt like they were a refreshing and strange detour from my very small conception of 5,000 years of writing, as well as providing me just strange novelty that was entertaining as a kid. Fortunately, my reading had its own trajectory, and that led me backward to the classics, and I still have some nostalgia because I grew up with it and had fun, but since I was a teenager, I haven't been able to enjoy them like I initially did. For the most part, I really moreso enjoy reading the correspondences, diaries, and biographies of those guys. Absurdism *should* be able to be expressed without just lying to and ripping off an audience, and absurdism was its main appeal to my childhood brain, but now I mostly just see conmen that spit on their audiences with contempt. Hart Crane is still a fun one for me. I still often see his purposeful marring of otherwise sensible poems as interesting without feeling completely mocked though still conned-- maybe he read The Confidence-Man a few too many times, ha! A caning and a few Ave Marias will knock some sense into me for a short spell, Steve!

[@aaronfacer]

I've never been able to get on with Gertrude Stein -- the writing always seems overly simplistic but somehow incomprehensible at the same time. There are some blocks of prose that I have enjoyed in the past, but these weren't among them!

[@ColombianThunder]

I do get some enjoyment from Gertrude Stein, but I don't think in any way she intended. She's completely incomprehensible, the equivalent, as you said, of throwing paint behind your back onto a canvas, except with words. It's nonsense. There is something fun to it in that regard, but it is nonsense.

[@Phorquieu]

But, where do you draw the line? Ancient Roman and Greek poetry didn't actually rhyme, although it definitely displayed rhythm and some kind of verbal "musicality"... And the great John Milton and Christopher Marlowe definitely wrote poetry that did not display rhyming sentences... I can see what's wrong with Gertrude Stein's writing style (and (most?) of modern poetry in general)... But I don't think all poetry has to have rhyming words and follow "set-in-stone" line structures and word patterns.

[@saintdonoghue]

I don't think I mentioned rhyming at all in this video, did I? But when you're reading ancient Greek and Roman literature, you never have any doubt at all whether you're reading prose or poetry, right? Because they have different forms; they're different things.

[@kevlee57]

Maybe you just didn't get her biblical references😁.

[@saintdonoghue]

HAH! We're never going to forget that particular troll, are we?

[@konstantinos-6-6-6-8]

I wouldn’t write off modern poetry completely (it’s at least funnier than trite victorian crap) but boy does Stein suck!

[@douglasreynolds7903]

What you read wasnt even a form of communication. It doesnt even convey a coherent thought. Good grief. Your comments preceding were golden and vindicates my distaste and confusion over modern poetry. Not that rhyming is always required, but the words should at least move my mind to understand what is being said. That was a joke from her. She could be a military code talker. Unfortunately neither side would know what the mission was supposed to be.