Saturday, March 08, 2008

Modernist Poem

Let me just start off by saying that this was my LEAST favorite assignment. I put it off all week because I knew I would have trouble with it. As I said before, I never liked poems. I experienced a lot of trouble trying to read Stein's Tender Buttons. I just could not grasp what she was trying to get across. I must have read each words 7 times to try to make sense out of it. But I worked through it. It took a very long time to figure out the point Stein was trying to make. I knew this was not the hard part. The hard part was going to be writing my version of Tender Buttons. I had to write one object, food, and room. This was extremely difficult for me. I had enough trouble trying to figure out the REAL Tender Buttons, and now I had to create my own. I tried to make my sound like hers, however it made no sense in my head, and I ended up adding in more words than I probably should have. I made my version be as descriptive as I could in such a short space.
The easiest part would have been running it through the experiment. All I had to do was write it word for word backwards.
By far this has been the most challenging assignment.

1 Comments:

Blogger Nat said...

I'm glad to hear about your journey through Stein - never an easy one! Do you think that her style forces us as readers to think about language differently? How so? Do the gaps and the vague meanings ask the reader to invest more of her own subjectivity into the poetry? How is this different from passively reading a conventional text?

7:29 PM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home