Today I have been reading Gertrude Stein. Or rather, I did an extra shift at work (bah, student debt) and grappled with Stein in my lunchbreak. How civilised.
For those of you who haven't encountered this woman, and I hadn't until I was forced to today, her poetry is not what one might call conventional. Initially, I revelled in this fact. To go off on a slight tangent, my lovely boyfriend cooked me a wonderful, romantic dinner on Saturday night, and made me feel thoroughly special. When I mentioned this, he laughed, and told me that I was indeed, extremely special. Whilst he might have been imagining the 'special needs' side of my personality, I delight in not being normal. Not in a weird way, I hope, but in a kooky, try-something-different, be-your-own-woman kind of way.
And so, Stein. Ok, she doesn't follow the expected form, and her poems don't always make a lot of sense, but that doesn't stop them being stunning: even if people don't do exactly what you'd expect, and you don't understand why they do some of those things, it doesn't mean they aren't uniquely beautiful. Stein's poems when read aloud have an amazing aural quality that I have seldom experienced. The words simply flow through you as you read, and it's less about understanding the words as a whole, but feeling each syllable as you form it in your mouth...
But, of course, I have to talk about this in a seminar in 12 hours time without resorting to some over-simplified rant about how everyone is special in their own right. Yes, I love that Stein is different, but let's not lie, I've got to write an essay on it now, and to do that, I feel like I should try and understand it. Rrrrubbish.
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