The cruelest month: recite what history teaches

Today’s poem for National Poetry Month is from Gertrude Stein.

I do not have a particularly close relationship with Stein as a writer; rather, I’ve always been interested in her as a patron of the arts and an ex-pat historical figure, an American Jew living in France who managed to wait out the Nazi occupation without losing either her life or her collection of modernist art.

I’ve enjoyed The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and a while ago I read a couple of decent biographies of her. But I’ll confess I find her non-representational poetic style difficult to assimilate.

(Although, as a cultural observer she certainly got Oakland right when she mused, “There’s no there there.” She’d lived in the city; she knew what she was talking about.)

And I’ll give it up to my Hungarian-born French professor: if you want to take in one of Stein’s poems, you should really listen to it, because you can’t separate the sounds from…well, whatever it is I think she means.

Here’s Stein reading "If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso".

When I listen to this and think about the paintings Picasso did while Stein was one of his patrons, it somehow makes sense, although I couldn’t analyse it for you.

If you feel you just have to read it, you can find it here.