Response Post

Meagan wrote in her blog about “Picasso” which was a piece that I really did not want to write about.  This was mostly because I did not understand it.  I got a bit of the ideas that Meagan did a great job talking about in her post.  But I did not understand why it was written in the style it was and further how this was cubist.

When I thought about cubist writing, I thought about works William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”.  Cubism is looking at things from different perspectives to form a whole.  So I saw how combining singular images to form a poem and a bigger idea or image was cubist.

I think Stein went at it in a different way.  It is almost like she uses different syntax to form different perspectives.  It is like she uses words and order to create this viewpoints without forcing them into images. 


I found the fact that there are no images in "Picasso" interesting and that there are no difficult or complex words.  She uses more generic words like "thing". The reader has to do a lot of work as does the structure of the sentence and all those simple words.    

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University