"[I]n there behind the door": Gertrude Stein's topopoetics
One way to understand Tender Buttons is to consider it as a loving map of the geography of her intimate everyday life at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris,
Jeremy Colangelo, however, believes that Stein's constant destabilizing of the things in the room makes it impossible to relate this work to a real place or the things in it: “It is tempting to read Tender Buttons in terms of the thingly character of its descriptions, and treat the poems as defamiliarized ekphrastic descriptions of the contents of Stein’s apartment. Yet even in the first and most mimetic of the works in Tender Buttons the independence of the thing, its status as the remainder of equipmentality, does not entirely work” (Colangelo, 2021, p. 7). For Colangelo, the problem of the poem's place is that it is incoherent:
How," Colangelo asks, “are we to gather when we have, as in Tender Buttons, objects and relations, but no place within which they may gather?” (Colangelo, p. 6)."What we encounter in Stein is the problem of relating to a space, a location, constituted of objects that cannot be related to and which do not relate to each other, which at once signify overabundantly and yet read like nonsense, a plethora of broken tools that hide within the bodies of other broken tools." (Colangelo, p. 2)
2. Interiors inside Interiors: Relationalities
Colangelo's image of broken tools inside broken tools registers a common frustration. However, a different approach to the geography of Stein's poetry might bounce off an image she plants early in the text, in Tender Button's second poem "Glazed Glitter": "There can be breakages in Japanese" (Tender Buttons 9). Alluding to a Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold, Stein invites readers to consider creation and destruction, wholeness and brokenness, impermeability and permeability not as antitheses but as complementary and interrelated processes.
The three main sections of the Tender Buttons are titled “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms.” Poem titles read as portrait titles or dictionary entries, or perhaps, given their setting in a kitchen, as cannister labels. What portraits and dictionary entries and labels have in common is that they are traditionally linked to their subject by resemblance; a representation here points to and describes the salient features of a being or thing there. A common reading of Tender Buttons posits that the core mission of the poem is to challenge representationalism and resemblance because Stein’s titles are uncoupled from what in a system of representation based on indexical denotation they would promise to denote.
Yet cuing from Stein’s remark that the poem offers a portrait of “enclosures” makes it possible to see that it is not just that the titles do not contain, or constrain, what they promise to hold; it’s that they model a myriad of types of embedded relationships. At one level, these relationships signal the viewing subject’s complex relationship to volumes and space, insides and outsides. As Richard Brigman puts it, objects are what we perceive outside us. Food is what we take in. Rooms are what enclose us. At another level, these relationships have to do with the world itself.
Colangelo is correct; objects throughout the poem enclose other interiors such as a box (11), a purse (19), hats (17, 24), umbrellas (20), a shawl (27), coats (68), dresses (17, 27, 29), bottles (16, 71), pianos (18), eggs (42, 47, 55, 57), a carafe (9), cups (20, 21, 42, 43, 47, 49, 58) and pans (47). That this work is epistemological is important; the poem constructs a kind of strip tease, inviting the reader to continually peel back surfaces to see what they contain. The point of Tender Button’s portrait of enclosures, thus, would not be to log the limits of representationalism through an aesthetics of disconnection and rupture, but rather to log the limits of an atomistic understanding of the world. In the poem’s study of domestic "rooms and places,” the subject is embedded in and enveloped by the world; the world is embedded in and enveloped by itself; the word is enveloped by the sentence. Stein opens the containers of thinking such that the world and the observer become deeply intertwined.
3. Interiors: The Mind
Another way to understand the poem’s “portraits of things and enclosures that is rooms and places” (Stein "Portraits and Repetition" 302) as she later described them, is to consider the poem a geography of the inside of Stein’s own mind engaged in what William James in 1892 described as an “unbroken stream” or a “train” of consciousness. What Marianne DeKoven described as the poem’s "fecund incoherence" ("Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting," p83), then, would be evidence of her mind at work observing and writing (Meyer 4). Indeed, the poem seems to be demonstrating the principle that the philosopher William James, with whom she studied, laid out in Principles of Psychology (1892) that thought is an “unbroken stream” or a “train,” forever in movement, never still.
However, if the poems are a map of a mind engaged in acts of thought, perception, and sensation, the
4. Interiors: Topopoetics and the Place of the Poem
What if we think about the poem instead as a meeting place, a locus where the terms of social encounters are imagined and enacted? Shira Wolosky, in an article on relational aesthetics in the context of feminist poetics, understands the space of poetry as a network of forces—pulsions and collisions and conflicts:
In poetics, textual terms open into multiple, intersecting, and crosscutting likenesses and unlikenesses, repetitions and contrasts, representations, augmentations, negations, and retractions. This is the way in which poetry brings levels of experience into mutual interrogation, confirmation, disputation; by connecting each term, drawn from a variety of positions and contexts, in a figural relation to others, each becoming a figure for—or against or with—others, through various domains in their shifting relationships. (573)