Gertrude Stein
Read the poem HERE.
As I hope you can see from other essays here at One Culture, finding connections between science and poetry entails more than finding poems that contain scientific terms or concepts. Satisfying connections will connect ideas: a scientific idea and a poetic idea. On the surface, a poem is words. Those word express ideas, though often in subtle and clever ways, and it those ideas to which one might find satisfying connections to things scientific. To work with the ideas in a poem, we have to find them, which means that we have to arrive at an interpretation that we can try to fit, like a puzzle piece, into a picture where a scientific idea and the poem are integral parts.
What is an interpretation?
In Interrogating a Poem, an essay that features Billy Collins's poem "Introduction to Poetry", I compare the acts of reading science and reading poetry, and I describe what I am trying to do first with any poem: to interpret it.
In my science-trained way of doing most things, I am looking for an interpretation that makes the poem’s pieces fit together. But I am not, or hope I am not, torturing the poem for a confession. In fact, even when I find a comfortable interpretation, one that turns the poem into an understandable message, I do not assume that my interpretation is the only satisfying one, nor that it was what the poet had in mind. It is my interpretation, one that gives me—but perhaps not you or the author—a feeling that the poem says something coherent.On the other hand, I will be disappointed if you do not at least understand my interpretation. Although it might not suit you, I am unlikely to be satisfied with my interpretation if you cannot at least see the logic of it, and see the evidence for it. In other words, whether you find my interpretation appealing or not, I want to you see that it fits the evidence, the words and ideas of the poem.
Gertrude Stein's "Susie Asado", a poem that seems to defy interpretation, provides a good example for talking about the broad range of possible meanings for the term interpretation. At first reading, the poem seems to make no sense at all. In fact, recently I had to choose some poems to memorize and recite in a class, and I picked this poem because I was curious about several things. Will memorizing the poem help me understand it better? (Works for many poems—a topic for another day.) Will it be harder to learn than a more conventional poem? What cues will help me to know what's coming next when I try to recite it? Usually a poem has at least one of three things that interest the reader and guide the reciter: rhythm, rhyme, and reason; in this poem, frankly, there appear to be none of the above. So how will the experience of learning and memorizing a nonsense poem differ from the same experiences with a poem that gives me more obvious vines to grab and swing from as I go? More on this later.
Now, who says that this is a nonsense poem? This is merely one interpretation—the notion that we need not even try to say what the poem "is about", because it is not about anything at all. Perhaps Stein was playing with sound or spoken rhythms, and had no logical message to convey. Or perhaps she was doing nothing more than throwing words together and then watching, like a child who had set up a prank, for the fun of seeing what readers made of it (let's give them something to talk about?). If that's what was going on, she must have been delighted with the result, because 'Susie Asado' has evoked analyses that run the gamut thoughtful to silly.
First, did Stein give us any hints? I, for one, would not even want to know the answer to that question until I had had my own crack at the poem. My interpretation might suit me better than her own description of what she was doing, and if so, I would happily try to understand hers, while still preferring mine. After all, what did she know about the experiences that I would bring to her poem? That tells you one thing about me and interpretation. To me, interpretation does not mean divining what the poet meant, or answering once and for all the question of its meaning. Interpretation means making meaning from what's on the page. But after having given this poem much thought, and after having found some very satisfying ways to think about it, I did go looking for her insider's word on the poem. All that I can find of what she said about this kind of poem is just as incomprehensible as the poem itself, and as mystifying as a great deal of other things she wrote and called poetry (1). So there is no way that I can purport to write about what she meant to do or say.
But some are far less timid than I. Search the web for, say, "susie asado analysis", and you will find writers glibly making such unjustified claims as "The poem says...", "Stein is saying..." "This expression means...", and so forth. And the meanings are all kind of things, including playing with sound, depicting a flamenco dancer, railing about the repression of women, mounting a favorite bandwagon, or making clever puns from words or phrases of the poem. To me, all this variety merely reveals that the more ambiguous the poem, the wider the range of pre-existing interests a poem can be stretched to fit. This poem has been widely and repeatedly tortured for confessions! Many of them are, in my opinion, worth about as much as most confessions made under duress.
Here is what, most of the time, an interpretation cannot be. Unless the poem's author has made a public statement about its meaning, the interpretation cannot be a description of what the author intended. And if the poet has any respect for readers' ability to develop insights, then he or she will avoid telling us what the poem means, but instead simply give us the poem as a vehicle for finding meaning. Nothing lowers my respect for a poet (or any artist) more than having her or him tell me what a their work means. Such unwanted help is a standard part of Poem-A-Day, from the Academy of American Poets, and my standard procedure is to avoid it and, if the poem interests me, to go about the task of making meaning from it. The poet's job is to produce the poem, polish it, publish it. Then it's my—and your—turn to have a go at it, and the poet must stand aside and not try to spoil our fun by saying, "No, that's not what I meant!"
Now at last, I come to the meaning that I have found in this poem. As I said earlier, I memorized it. Just last night, after a day in which I worked a bit on this essay, I did not fall right off to sleep, and in my version of counting sheep (does anyone actually do that?), I mentally recited "Susie Asado" to myself for the first time in months, delighted, but no longer surprised, at how it has stuck with me, despite its lack of obvious rhythm, rhyme, or reason. As is often true of the rumble of a long freight train on the nearby tracks late at night, the lines of the poem are the last thing I was aware of until morning.
What did I learn from memorizing it? As I expected, it was tough going, compared to memorizing "On a Bird Singing in its Sleep", by Robert Frost. Originally, I spent most of a flight from Boston to Chicago just getting a decent handle on it. But once I had it, it seemed to have inexplicable sticking power in my mind. Now it's mine, I thought. But there was more to come. When I took the class that called for recitation, I decided to throw Susie in there for the reasons mentioned above, and also as a contrast to almost anything else that such a class might produce. Reciting the poem for practice, I had a choice to make. I could just spew out the words inexpressively, as if they had no meaning, or I could use expression to make the poem sound meaningful.
Either way, I discovered something that I would never have noticed had I not rehearsed the poem repeatedly. My mouth and tongue fell in love with 'Susie Asado'. It's words and phrases come out as if my speech organs were designed especially for them. For another class meeting, I memorized "Crystal Moment", by Robert P. Tristram Coffin (2), a poem whose title is said to be an apt definition of a narrative poem. This vivid story-telling poem is certainly made for the visual and auditory imagination, but not for the mouth—or not mine, anyway. The phrases that read so well simply stick in my mouth like dry bread. Is the fluid way Stein's poem runs out of me related to the kind of thing that Stein was seeking in her "nonsense" poems? I cannot know, but to me, this effect is an essential part of my interpretation of the poem: it is in some sense, tailor made to be spoken.
In the process of memorizing and rehearsing, I completely lost track of one of my original questions—what cues will help me to know what's coming next when I try to recite it? This problem simply never came up. The next line would pop into my head and out of my mouth when its time came. Uncanny, but some poems that tell a very logical story do not guide me as well as does this poem.
What about the conventional kind of interpretation, the what-does-it-mean? kind of thing. Of course, I have no idea what Gertrude Stein meant in that respect, so I naturally look around me for things I can connect it to. One of my favorite activities is watching birds. At some point in my encounters with this poem, I was suddenly struck by the similarities between this poem and the song of a mockingbird. Since that revelation, it is very hard for me to think about the poem without hearing a mockingbird sing. If someone were to tell me that Stein was trying to evoke the song of a mockingbird, I would have to say that she succeeded famously. But no. That's 'Susie Asado' and me, but probably no one else.
What are these similarities? Mockingbirds are the flagship bird of the family called mimic thrushes. Mockers sing long songs composed of fragments from the songs and calls of other birds. They repeat each call, sometimes imperfectly, two or three times before moving on to the next. Finally, their songs are loops: eventually they come back around to the beginning and run through the same sequence again. To other birds, their songs must sound like nonsense, at some point perhaps even sounding like their own song, then diving off into something unrelated. In fact, I have heard a mockingbird fool a jay into responding, only to move on to the next fragment, leaving me picturing the jay with a cartoon ? over its head. Look at "Susie Asado" and see if you can find these characteristics in it. Read it aloud and see if it reminds you of mockingbird song. (Whether you find my interpretation appealing or not, I want you to see that it fits the evidence, the words and ideas of the poem. Is there an echo in here?)
So by the time I got around to reciting the poem for a class, I had three options for expression: 1) no expression, nonsense sounding like nonsense; 2) normal expression, nonsense sounding as if I thought I were making perfect sense; and 3) birdlike expression, using the same expression for the same sounds, regardless of what normal expression would call for. In the end, I decided on the option 2, mostly for the comic effect of acting and sounding as if I were making sense, while completely puzzling my listeners. The other options give interesting results as well. Try it.
So that's me and 'Susie Asado'. I first found it in the third edition of Poem a Day (1), and it appealed to me immediately for reasons I cannot imagine. I have found very little of else from Gertrude Stein that held my interest. But Susie and I have been friends ever since.
••••••••••••
1) In Poem a Day, volume 2 (Steerforth Press, 2003, p. 68), Stein is quoted thus:
The strict discipline that I had given myself, the absolute refusal of never using a word that was not an exact word all through the Tender Buttons and what I may call the early Spanish and Geography and Play (sic) period finally resulted in things like 'Susie Asado' and 'Preciosilla' etc. in an extraordinary melody of words and a melody of excitement in knowing that I had done this thing.OK. We're all clear about that, huh? (Read 'Preciosilla' HERE. Don't expect immediate enlightenment.)
2) Read "Crystal Moment" HERE. Try reading it aloud, and see if you have to untonguel your tang.
3) Links to sundry online writings about "Susie Asado":
• Three motley interpretations HERE.
• More HERE, with some overlap.
• Another feminist interpretation HERE, with a nice closing comment about meaning in poetry.
• More freewheeling fun HERE.
