Saturday, March 6, 2010

a letter to Gertrude Stein

Dear Gertrude,
It has been nearly 13 months since I've written about you, not writing does not mean not thinking, does not mean not reading, means only that the words to capture the Gertrude component of my thinking and reading have not formed themselves into parcels to type into the format of a blog.

The table-height pile of books by you and about you has not fallen down, is an icon a monument a tip of the iceberg inviting me back to you.

Blog is a word, a sound, that still makes me shudder. Yes -- short for web log. Something I must do about that alien sound belonging more properly to Vogon poetics.

Note that a ship captain's log is not referred to as a slog. I fear for the sound of language. The sound of language and of language flowing is what first enchanted me about your writing. Your writing did not stay on the page. Our group of women met and ate and drank and read your words out loud to each other. We delighted in your words. I return to your words over and over again to read them, sometimes to listen to the few recordings of them.

I fear for the sound of language when it is reduced to convenience, to dosages of texts and near-cryptic messages conveyed on tiny machines. If the little sendings were small poems with Wonderland instructions ("read me out loud") then the tiny machines could create a streetcarful of people reciting together from bpNichol's Martyrology: part of the process of gaining focus//never could// lost that dimension a long time//the ryme of breathing

The breath. Hearing the sound. Reading Erin Moure's my beloved wager, her writing about sound. She writes, "Sounds unlock memories which precede the laws of social order. Sounds that precede words . . . .Sound is sense, a truer sense, undercutting surface commerce and ideology." And more, much more.

Dear Gertrude, you are so very alive in your words and the influence of your words is deep. Poet Stephen Cain mapped some of the poets whose work means so much to him with your name as the source, the mother of us all, of all of us who love the sound of words, of bpNichol, of Margaret Christakos, of Erin Moure, of so many.

Yes Gertrude I will provide links to all and everything I write here as I return to writing here so that you can see how the words go on. Top of the pile by chance is Steven Watson's Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism. Next on my list to listen to.

Yours amiably [et cetera]