Gertrude Stein in Morocco

I had the honor of convening a collaborative close reading with students at Ibn Zohr University in Morocco yesterday. Their teacher, Professor El Habib Louai, is a friend of contemporary poets and poetry teachers and critics—of PoemTalk and ModPo. He has been interested in the collaborative close reading method. Yesterday, by Zoom, he and I and his students went phrase by phrase through one of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons poems. The poem is “A Table,” and it is quite difficult. The students were initially daunted—by the poem and the participatory method. Very soon things began to click. In a bit more than an hour they discussed pretty much every aspect of this poem, which is about how things can always “mean more.” A table is a stable thing to mean but it is also not, and that is exactly what happened in our hour together: there was so much more than the usual stability in the talk, the work of learning what things are.

A TABLE.

A table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. Is it likely that a change.

A table means more than a glass even a looking glass is tall. A table means necessary places and a revision a revision of a little thing it means it does mean that there has been a stand, a stand where it did shake.

 

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