Gertrude Stein Reads “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson”

“Very fine is my valentine and mine, very fine very mine and mine is my valentine.”

We lost Sherwood Anderson — beloved author, dispenser of timelessly poetic fatherly advice — on this day in 1941. And what better way to celebrate his legacy than with a rare recording of reconstructionist Gertrude Stein reading her 1922 poem “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson,” with audio from my alma mater’s wonderful PennSound archive? Indebted to Anderson for the credibility his foreword had lent her 1922 volume Geography and Plays, Stein wrote him this “love poem,” found in A Stein Reader (public library), as a token of gratitude — but, of course, she was in love-love with her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas, to whom an earlier version of the poem titled “Idem the Same” had been dedicated.

Very fine is my valentine.

Very fine and very mine.

Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine.

Very fine is my valentine and mine, very fine very mine and mine is my valentine.

Anderson had befriended Stein during his first trip to Paris after Sylvia Beach, the owner of the legendary English-language bookstore Shakespeare & Company, had spotted him browsing Stein’s then-obscure books and had written a letter of introduction between the two authors. Later, writing in his notebook, he described Stein with impeccable, admiring accuracy:

Imagine a strong woman with legs like stone pillars sitting in a room hung with Picassos… The woman is the very symbol of health and strength. She laughs. She smokes cigarettes. She tells stories with an American shrewdness in getting the tang and the kick into the telling.

A lifelong friendship unfolded.

For more Stein audio indulgence, hear her read from The Making of Americans and give a radio interview about understanding and joy.

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Waving to Virginia: Patti Smith Reads Woolf

“One man will single me out and will tell me what he has told no other person.”

What could be more soul-quenching than two grand dames of creative culture — Virginia Woolf and Patti Smith — coming together? In this short footage recorded at the opening of a 2008 Paris exhibition of four decades’ worth of Smith’s art and photography, she celebrates Woolf’s 1931 novel The Waves (public library; public domain) with a mesmerizing dramatic performance.

In fact, Smith’s choice of narrative is more conceptual — perhaps an allusion to her 1979 album Wave — than an actual “reading”: Only a single sentence comes from Woolf’s original text, and the rest is a kind of free improvisation in a creative homage to the beloved author. Enjoy:

Something within her refused to grow. Something endless, eternal. Something bold. Something warrior-like. She looked up at the stars, she could feel, she felt as if she could pluck them one by one and send them spinning into the world, like small beautiful elastic mercurial weapons. Now too, the time is coming.

Complement with Woolf on reading, film, and keeping a diary, and enjoy some of Smith’s music on Literary Jukebox.

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What Is a Poem? Coleridge on Science vs. Romance, 1817

“It is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.”

“True poetic practice implies a mind so miraculously attuned and illuminated that it can form words, by a chain of more-than coincidences, into a living entity,” Edward Hirsch wrote in his treatise on how to read a poem. “Poetry must resemble prose, and both must accept the vocabulary of their time,” W. B. Yeats argued in his 1936 meditation on modern poetry. But what, exactly, is a poem? In Biographia Literaria (public library; public domain), originally published in 1817 and now available as a free Kindle download, English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge offers an eloquent definition:

A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition; the difference, therefore, must consist in a different combination of them, in consequence of a different object proposed. The mere addition of meter does not in itself entitle a work to the name of poem, for nothing can permanently please which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so and not otherwise. Our definition of a poem may be thus worded. “A poem is that species of composition which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.”

For, in a legitimate poem, the parts must mutually support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of, metrical arrangement.

And yet, the notion that a poem is diametrically opposed to science — while appropriate in the context of Coleridge’s time, as he pioneered the Romantic Movement — seems tragically reductionist today. What of Dianne Ackerman’s beautiful poems about the planets of the Solar System? Or life science professor and clock researcher Mary E. Harrintong’s poetic ode to bioluminescent creatures? Or physicist J. W. V. Storey’s scientific paper published as a 38-stanza poem? Perhaps the mesmerism of poetry, like that of science, lives in that magical place of systematic wonder.

In fact, Coleridge was rather opposed to innovation in poetry, accusing modern poets of having substituted substance of message for gimmickry of medium:

One great distinction between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets and the false beauties of the moderns is this. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but the most pure and genuine mother English; in the latter, the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion, and passionate flow of poetry, to the subtleties of intellect and to the starts of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual yet broken and heterogeneous imagery. The one sacrificed the heart to the head, the other both heart and head to drapery.

It was precisely Coleridge’s cult of precision and knowledge at the expense of abstraction and beauty that inspired John Keats to come up with the concept of “negative capability”, advocating for comfort with uncertainty and nimbleness amidst changing context — a skill later advanced by poets and scientists alike.

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