A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was the matriarch of the roaring 20s. From her salon apartment in Paris which she shared with Alice B. Toklas, Stein steered the course of 20th century culture, providing a meeting place for the artists, writers and thinkers who were shaping modernity. She launched, inspired or nurtured the work of Picasso, Matisse, James Joyce, Hemingway, Juan Gris, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound and almost every other member of the ‘Lost Generation’, a phrase Stein herself coined. A patron, collector and guide for so many artists, Stein’s role as a poet and writer is often overlooked. Yet what some of her brood were doing for visual arts, Stein was attempting with words. Rejecting the linear rigidity of 19th century, she pioneered a dense, experimental, process-oriented type of writing. Famously elusive about meaning, her work is stream of consciousness and devoid of clear plot. Her poems are verbal collages — how the cubists treated images, Stein treated words and once you have entered the world she creates, it is hard to return to mundanity. Stein’s poems were never commercially viable, yet they quietly infiltrated culture, informing and inspiring a new way of writing. To read them today is to still be shocked by their novelty, but also to encounter something uncomfortably familiar and contemporary.