Letter from the Editors

Dear Readers,

Our thanks to Brian Teare for today's special Poet's Pick!

We are bringing you a special poem each weekday in April as part of our annual fund-raising campaign and in celebration of National Poetry Month. Please help us to continue our service to you and to poetry by making a tax-deductible contribution to Poetry Daily! Find out how you can make your contribution online or print out the online form and send it with your check or money order, payable to "Poetry Daily" in U.S. dollars, to:

The Daily Poetry Association
P.O. Box 1306
Charlottesville, VA 22902-1306
USA

Contributors of $50 or more may choose to receive a Poetry Daily coffee mug; contributors of $75 or more our Poetry Daily travel mug (vintage edition with our 10th anniversary logo); and contributors of $100 or more may choose to receive either our Poetry Daily deluxe cap, or the anthology Poetry Daily Essentials 2007.

Thank you so much for your support! Enjoy today's special poem!

Warmest regards,

Don Selby & Diane Boller
Editors

"Red Roses"
by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
from Tender Buttons

          A cool red rose and pink cut pink, a collapse and
a sold hole, a little less hot.
    

Brian Teare: Modernist Roses
When I think of Modernist poetry, I often think first of roses—how during the teens and twenties they change texture, shape. “To engage roses/becomes a geometry,” writes William Carlos Williams in 1923, and when I think of the rose of his Spring & All, it’s so adamantine it’s a young man’s manifesto, a weapon. He would with his rose puncture the “constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world”—a barrier “all writing, up to the present…has been especially designed to keep up.” Indeed, if once “The rose carried weight of love” Williams will have us know “love is at an end”:

          The rose is obsolete
          but each petal ends in
          an edge, the double facet
          cementing the grooved
          columns of air—The edge
          cuts without cutting        
                
Yes, I love Modernist roses, those hard, obdurate flowers that signal a turn away from the profuse bloom of Victorian sentiment toward a different kind of flowering: the twentieth century. From the operatic “Forsaken Garden” of Swinburne, “Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses/Now lie dead,” we enter in 1916 the austerity and formal composure of H.D.’s “Garden,” whose rose is “clear…cut in rock,/hard as the descent of hail.” And if I love that bold unlikely simile and its hard consonants, I love even more her assertion that “If I could break you/I could break a tree.” It’s a tough rose that grows in the Modernist poem, from whose surface we too “could scrape the colour…like spilt dye from a rock.”

Though they struggle to grow in the increasingly industrialized poetics of the twentieth century, Modernist roses remain persistently present, pertinent to young women writers who begin to explore their dissatisfactions with gender and romance as the Victorians had written it. I love the ambivalent, difficult, truculent poses of these poets—their politicized and dissatisfactory roses, cast off and aside. “Rose of arrested impulses/self-pruned…tepid heart inhibiting/with tactful terrorism/the Blossom Populous”: I love how Mina Loy’s autobiographical mock-epic “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” (1923-25) lampoons her mother’s stifling Victorian femininity. And I love how clichéd feminine virtues figure into Marianne Moore’s subversive 1917 discourse on beauty, “Roses Only,” whose argument she triumphantly cinches with the pronouncement “Your thorns are the best part of you.”

And though I love all the above roses—and many more—I must admit that Gertrude Stein’s are for me the rosiest. Why? Because if the Modernist rose is not always soft and “love is at an end,” if the rose of a poem is a trouble, I think less of “A rose is a rose is a rose” than of the red roses of Tender Buttons. I love how one sentence published in 1914 takes the heavy connotative baggage with which the rose had traveled through literary history, opens up its dusty wardrobe, and strips it of the knickers and frippery that hid its deeply physical nature:

Red Roses.

          A cool red rose and pink cut pink, a collapse and
a sold hole, a little less hot.

It’s not just how their connotative presence has been shorn of Romantic sentiment—it’s how, by virtue of this transformation, they begin to live differently within language. If Stein is as a lesbian playing out the woman-as-rose trope, she does so chiefly by reducing it to its latent referent—the vagina—and by deflating the flower’s stereotypical roundness and fullness: “cut pink, a collapse…a sold hole.” Further, she deflects received Romantic connotations by turning to the sonic properties of poetic language to augment the reader’s experience of the “roses”; by virtue of a lot of l and some heavy sibilance what had in the 19th century been chaste petals turn astonishingly luscious, lubricious. As suggestive of sexuality and physicality as the images themselves: dental and labial, you have to put the words in your mouth.

And whether you approach the passage via eye or ear or tongue, via sex or sonics, the words subversively announce themselves as the primary materials out of which the roses are built. This fact suggests something important about the experience of sexuality, though, like Stein, I can’t say exactly what it is. It has something to do with the fact that, though her roses are essentially fragmentary, even without a verb, they’re still not incomplete. Rather, they escape complete articulation: color, texture, temperature: each a trace, a suggestion of meaning. As Barbara Guest writes in “Roses,” her own tribute to what’s ineffable about Modernist roses: these are roses “from which/we learn the selflessness of roses…a 1912 fragrance sifting/to the left corner where we read/’Le Marveille’ and escape.” 

About Brian Teare:
Brian Teare is the author of The Room Where I Was Born and the forthcoming Pleasure. He lives and teaches in San Francisco.

Don't forget! If you enjoy our regular features and special events like this one, please join Brian Teare in supporting Poetry Daily by making a tax-deductible contribution.