My friends have finished reading The World is Round, story of Rose and her dog Love and I can't locate in my offspring's room the copy given to her as a child by an adult friend. Though I understand that this book also contains the famous words Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose("she would carve on a tree until it went all the way around") that were originally written for Stein's poem "Sacred Emily" they are now the lines most often associated in the minds of people largely unfamiliar with Gertrude Stein's writing with what her writing is. The recurrence of the rose like a mantra is so unlike the kind of advertising jingles that permeate the brain such as "double your pleasure double your fun with double-mint double-mint double-mint gum" from years ago and in repetition maddening and manipulative though at heart meaningless. The Stein rose mantra goes round only until it settles in and doesn't jangle the brain.
There are countless poems with the Rose Emblematic: My Love is Like a Red Red Rose; A rose by any other name would smell as sweet; Rose thou art sick; Strew on her roses roses and never a spray of yew -- all these flood in with their metaphorical odour of love, disease, and death. Gertrude's rose is rose and nothing but and is assigned no symbolic content, no colour, no scent, no qualifier of any kind. It is simply there and plainly so. No suggestion of beauty or truth but haunting for all its insistent "thereness" that both plays with meaning and provokes questioning.
Today I've been reading and re-reading Ann Lauterbach's essay "Slaves of Fashion" about poetry that doesn't take risks, doesn't push boundaries, doesn't work (or play) as a "place of discovery." For her Gertrude Stein's writing seems a kind of touchstone for poetry that ventures and a reliable one and also for me a kind of tonic and restorative and an actual lodestar in a culture drowning in debased language.
No comments:
Post a Comment