Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition

by Gertrude Stein, Joan Retallack (Introduction), Susannah Hollister (Editor)

In the 1950s, Yale University Press published a number of Gertrude Stein's posthumous works, among them her incomparable Stanzas in Meditation . Since that time, scholars have discovered that Stein's poem exists in several a manuscript that Stein wrote and two typescripts that her partner Alice B. Toklas prepared. Toklas’s work on the second typescript changed the poem when, enraged upon detecting in it references to a former lover, she not only adjusted the typescript but insisted that Stein make revisions in the original manuscript. This edition of Stanzas in Meditation is the first to confront the complicated story of its composition and revision. Through meticulous archival work, the editors present a reliable reading text of Stein's original manuscript, as well as an appendix with the textual variants among the poem's several versions. This record of Stein's multi-layered revisions enables readers to engage more fully with the author's radically experimental poem and also to detect the literary impact of Stein's relationship with Toklas. The editors’ preface and poet Joan Retallack’s introduction offer insight into the complexities of reading Stein's poetry and the innovative modes of reading that her works require and generate. Students and admirers of Stein will welcome this illuminating new contribution to Stein’s oeuvre.

Genres: Poetry, American, Literature

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Gertrude Stein was an American writer who spent most of her life in France, and who became a catalyst in the development of modern art and literature. Her life was marked by two primary relationships, the first with her brother Leo Stein, from 1874-1914, and the second with Alice B. Toklas, from 1907 until Stein's death in 1946. Stein shared her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, first with Leo and then with Alice. Throughout her lifetime, Stein cultivated significant tertiary relationships with well-known members of the avant garde artistic and literary world of her time.

Reviews

[Penny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still wondering if I'll understand any of what I read, but thankfully that's not really the point.

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wild, redundant, full of vague pronouns, and variable repetitions, reading this will make you go slightly mad, but I think that's a good thing and somewhat the point, it's a meditative madness. The language is so twisted and bending, the meaning is full of entendre and pun and play, and all told in a spewing of sing-song. Strangely biographical and self referential, it is a challenging and bizarre tongue twister of a read, but what you'd expect of a mad genius like Gertrude Stein. Reading aloud is especially fun.

[Simone · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the most foundational texts to my poetics. stein is skimming above the surface of language, and diving every so often so that we may be submerged into the ocean that is symbol; a ball, a bird,
a mountain, a dog. stanzas in meditation is the deepest prayer to the mystery that is language and meaning. and it is your responsibility as a poet to read it and fail to understand.

“Believe me it is not for pleasure that I do it. Not only for pleasure for pleasure in it that I do it. I feel the necessity to do it. Partly from need. Partly from pride. And partly from ambition. And all of it which is why I literally try not only not why. But why I try to do it and not to do it. But if it is well-known is well-known.”

[Karren · Rating 4 out of 5]

To read this book, you must read a lot of other Stein works first because she quotes herself. Also you need to read biographical books including her autobiographies like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. If you like rap, read Stanzas out loud and you will get the first level of this book. I found Joan Retallack's preface very helpful but you need to read that slowly with eyes open and pencil at hand. Check me out on Scene4.com where I will write a more complete review come September.

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't really know if this edition is the same as the volume of Yale that I have in hardback, but it probably is. Especially great when read aloud, this is my favorite Gertrude Stein. Found the edition that I have at Rogers' Book Barn up in the Berkshires.

[JK · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best ever. Of all time,

[Richard Anderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a waste of time.

[Connor Lougheed · Rating 3 out of 5]

STANZAS IN MEDITATION - Gertrude Stein (1956): 6

A puzzling and self-reflexive read of what appears to be self-reflection. An unnamed narrator (whom I assume to be Stein) thinks about a group of people remembered from the past and present, including an unnamed she, an unnamed he, and the speaker themself. The speaker contemplates how these people came and went from the speaker’s house, and how the speaker looks down on them in their pseudointellectual ways, and how the speaker thinks best of themself. Stein forgoes any concrete references except occasional colors, animals, and natural things, and even these remain conceptual. Through sentences brimming with “Which” and “May” and “Not” and “Or,” Stein promotes full ambiguity, while remaining only to paint the relationships between the three. Split into five parts of dozens of stanzas which range from short to pages long, the fifth part of which is a gargantuan read, this book propels itself through sudden revelations about the characters and how they think—although I am inclined to believe that these thoughts are only what the speaker thinks about them. This book may be the most subjective ever written. Not for the faint of reading, plenty of inference and contorted language abounds inside. An overwhelmingly difficult amount, in some places of extended drag. Although I do enjoy how words enter the stanzas to be repeated often until the end.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite Stein, especially for the brilliant and little-read shorter pieces included at the back of the book, written between 1929 and 1933. (I'm assuming the text is the same as the Yale version.)

[Emas Negarawan · Rating 1 out of 5]

What. is. this? I do not think I will continue reading this. It is very odd. Meaningless rhymes and random thoughts. "Meditation." Hmmm. Perhaps Ms. Stein was smoking a "pipe" as she "meditated" these poems.

[Joey Gamble · Rating 5 out of 5]

A riveting and evocative innovation of our language, the scope of which we have barely begun to understand.

[Erik Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Think of anything that is said
How many times have they been in it
How will they like what they have
And will they invite you to partake of it
And if they offer you something and you accept
Will they give it to you and will it give you pleasure
And if after a while they give you more
Will you be pleased to have more
Which in a way is not even a question
Because after all they like it very much.

[Bonisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't enjoy reading this, but am glad I made the effort - reading out loud helped.

Part 5 Stanza XVII = favorite to read out loud. Part 5 Stanza LXV = favorite to read silently (minus first line)

The last line of the poem is garbage. I'd love to know why she didn't stop 4 words earlier.

[sofia bessette · Rating 2 out of 5]

gibberish!!! but queer icon

[H]

"I like a noon which has been well prepared/ Well prepared never the less./ Hours of a tree growing" (68)

"They mean me when they mean me" (69)

[Scott]

I only pulled it off the shelf of UCLA's YRL long enough to flip to Stanza LXXI.

It was the first of the stanzas to be published, I believe, in the winter of 1932-33 in Orbes 4, p. 64-67.

It was included in the catalog for an exhibition of drawings by Stein's friend Francis Picabia at Chez Leonce Rosenberg, Paris, Dec. 1-24, 1932.

For that catalog, it was also translated into French, by Stein's and Picabia's mutual friend, Marcel Duchamp.

Gertrude Stein's "Stanzas in Meditation" was reviewed in 1956 by poet John Ashbery.

This 2012 edition has a blurb on the back by poet Lyn Hejinian.

[Claudia Keelan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the purposes of meditation is to detach from the noise of self. In this book, Stein creates constant presences with the proliferation of pronouns, persons who come and go, sometimes sweetly, sometimes annoyingly, and always somehow in the relation to the "i" who is trying to let go of her self-importance. Stein wrote in "Grammar and Poetry" that she loved pronouns for how "mistaken" they can be. Who are you and I, who is she and he, and where after all, is it? Deictic, pronouns show only relative relation. We are among us in this poem, drifting as people do, as thought does.

[Tony Iantosca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extra therapeutic abbreviation.

[Mills College Library]

811.52 S8192s 2012

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

A search for the meaning or the purpose of meaning, of signification. Is each stanza Sisyphus repeatedly rolling a rock up a mountain? Or is each stanza a cloud - evaporating, reappearing, transforming, moving - that we are watching along with Stein, lying back in a field filled with daisies and dahlias?

"Best and most sweetly sweetness is not only sweet."

[hmmm]

ahhhh