how to read gertrude stein's tender buttons

i was in an experimental poetry workshop by anne boyer this summer (an amazing class that i highly recommend to anybody, whether you're actually fixated on poetry like me, or even if you don't care about poetry but are just looking for a super fun way to get a lit credit)

the first thing we did in that class was read tender buttons, and our first homework was to answer the question, "how are you supposed to read tender buttons?" this could be answered in a set of directions, or in a frame of reference, or any way you wanted to answer it. claire brankin, for instance, if i recall, wrote that you were supposed to read "food" as a recipe. etc.

here was my answer:

do not read tender buttons alone. read tender buttons over someone's shoulder, or they over yours, so that you are scrolling or turning pages hesitantly, trying to predict where they are, re-reading and jumping ahead to keep up with a speed you can't predict. be constantly aware of the fact that you're reading. alternate between speed-reading, eyes zagging across the lines, and slow-reading, letting the voice in your head self-consciously pronounce every word silently behind your mouth. preoccupy yourself not only with the text and your own thoughts but with unshared predictions of your partner's parallel thought-trains. try to think totally around everything, back and forth, all in the instants between words, the speed, the meaning, the text, the repetition, every possible way you and your companion can interpret things and every relationship and juxtaposition between your two readings. all while you're still trying to decide when to scroll down.

the next day in class, we had all brought objects, and we were to describe them like gertrude stein might. i wound up looking at this bizarre baby-doll head thing cast out of kind of swirled black rubber? it was pretty horrifying. this is what i wrote.

out of sight, don't look, old and young, disintegrating. hollow and hollow and heavy staring. staring out staring down staring empty staring staring. closed. staring strong stars. under there is a swash and under there is a jab and under there is. and flesh wishes it were and isn't, glinting and matte and velvet. satin. eggshell. a swirl, a swash, a dent, a drip, a dent and you didn't, you didn't, did you. you didn't and she couldn't. disintegrating, can be seen through cannot do the seeing. can't do the seeing, the saying, the sighing the sewing the suing the selling.  a surface, a seam. a give, but no reverberate. no pulse, a morbid a mordred. impermanent but not breakable. sssssibillance. skin pilled, pooled. a foam, a foam a foam, hollow and wrapped heavy, dipped heavy. heavy and accusatory and glaring and staring and daring. not caring. swashes of flaw, not of fill but of flow and drop and bounce. and bounce and jar. and jar and fling. and fling and stain and stain and dab and satin, velvet, eggshell. matte. made unmade, raw. flat. unsmooth. round but split. round but empty. a wooden jab, a pop. a pock. apocalyptic. a shine. a dent. don't you? won't you? will you, still, still will you? still? a ruffle. a tug. this feels a little like a murder, and the glance, and the gash. and the rub smooth. and the wide open, the open wide. the tried. the cried. the fried.

sorry for the shameless writing plugs. but i am super exciting to be working with this poetry because i <3 tender buttons.

belated amsterdams

(i'm using this weekend to catch up on some blogging!)

the first thing we did in type 3 was an expressive typographic exploration with a given piece of text.

"born in amsterdam– a city that's steeped in history, yet prides itself on being quite progressive. a place where open mindedness always trumps convention. a city that doesn't know the meaning of status quo. a unique spirit indeed."

here's what i came up with:

this... did not go particularly well for me. the first assignment in a class is always somewhat terrifying, nevermind being under a new teacher, and expectations are hard to predict. these three compositions are the result of me ignoring my instincts for how i wanted these to look and pushing and pushing and pushing because i was afraid of looking like i hadn't done enough. they were also almost last in critique, so the class had already heard "too much! saying too many things all at once!" over and over again, so by the time we got to mine, i was just kind of like, "sorry... we don't have to say it again," and felt foolish. so, with the rocky start, i set the bar low for mr. kidwell's expectations of me, so hopefully from here on out, my work will look much better.

rhetorical find & share

these here are two related designs by mr. a. m. cassandre, from 1935, depicting oceanliners. i thought these used hyperbole really nicely to get across the idea of massiveness. in each ad, the ship is seen from an extremely low angle, as though it were about to run us over. we are necessarily viewing the ships as though we are looking straight up at them, with their taking up the entire skyspace. this exaggeration of space works very well because it helps us understand the grandeur of these crafts as it might be comprehended through our own eyes, rather than seeing the whole thing to scale at a comfortable distance. a critical difference between these two pieces comes in how the secondary elements are used, whether to continue to magnify the size, or to give a different perspective. in l'atlantique, the ship is depicted a second time, much much smaller. this instance shows how, despite the gargantuan size of the ship, it will always be overwhelmed by the immensity of the ocean. in normandie, on the other hand, the second visual element, the almost-microscopic birds, serve to continue to heighten the scale of the normandie, placing it as dominant, even over the ocean.