The Writer's Chronicle Gertrude Stein's Grandaughters:
A Reading of Surprise
It's said that Elizabeth Bishop's pet toucan was named SAM, as an acronym for the three qualities in poems she prized most: spontaneity, accuracy, and mystery. Of course, what readers perceive as spontaneity may be the product of deliberate and intense labor on the part of the writer; ultimately it does not matter how conscious the poet was at the moment of writing. So the first quality, spontaneity, is something I prefer to call surprise because that puts the emphasis on the reader, and it is the process of reading poems that is my focus here. Modernist and postmodernist poetry is usually considered more surprising than its predecessors, a shift attributed to such factors as psychoanalysis, world wars, atomic power, computers, and globalization. In fact, contemporary readers expect to be surprised, and in some cases, consider surprise to be the criterion for good poetry. Robert Bly's term "leaping poetry," which he coined in the seventies, is a case in point. He writes, "In many ancient works of art we notice a long floating leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known."1 Distinctions between the conscious and unconscious mind are difficult for the reader of a poem to determine, however, and distinctions between other binary oppositions, such as those between emotion and reason, and mind and body, are increasingly being questioned by philosophers, as well as by neurologists like Antonio Damasio.2 To the reader it doesn't matter how surprise happens, as long as it does. In fact, reader response theory argues that a text exists in the mind of a reader: he or she must "fill in the blanks" or "make the leaps" between ideas in a poem. Thus the act of reading is as creative as the act of writing. Gertrude Stein is considered by many scholars to be a postmodern writer because she recognized—and put into practice—the sometimes arbitrary nature of signs, syntax as ideology and the dependence of language on context. Stein's emphasis on pronouns compared to the imagists' and futurists' emphasis on nouns indicates her awareness of the referentiality of language, and her critique of the self-sufficient image. Marjorie Perloff says, "Like Wittgenstein, [Stein] took the naming function of language to be its least challenging aspect."3 Stein's work is full of associative leaps, as well as puns, word play, and shifts in tone, diction, and syntax. But her fabulous syntactical gymnastics, which have inspired many poets, are not my focus here. Rather, I'm interested in Stein's surprising and playful tone, in the fact that Stein is serious without being pompous or pretentious, and that her writing has a good-natured quality that never condescends to the reader. It manages to be deeply funny at the same time that it critiques and theorizes. Her light touch is often best heard in the poems when read aloud. For instance, consider these lines from her love poem "Lifting Belly": "You see what I wish./ I wish a seat and Caesar."4 I hear the echo of "seize her" and I laugh. Stein's poems never let us forget the link between the verbal and physical, the fact that the body produces sound and that both body and sound change constantly. In what follows I shall look at poems from recent books by five American women—Jeanne Beaumont, Amy Gerstler, Mary Ruefle, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Belle Waring—poets I think of as granddaughters of Gertrude Stein, for they share, in very different ways, her sense of poetic fun and surprise. These poets are at various stages in their careers: Shaughnessy and Beaumont have written one book of poems each, Waring two, Ruefle six, and Gerstler eight. They are poets whose work I want to herald because I reread it with such delight. I find their poems charming, an adjective I mean in its original sense of magical. Their poems create magic with the seeming effortlessness of Gertrude Stein. I am not suggesting Stein as an "influence" on these poets, because influence is impossible to trace, and a fruitless topic of discussion. For example, how does one trace influence through the generations, knowing, for example, that Wallace Stevens read Stein, and that most contemporary poets read Stevens? In any case, Stein's poems are part of our common language, and it doesn't matter whether these poets read her or not. My method is to point out moments of surprise in their work and attempt to categorize these moments, with the understanding that their poems contain much more than I can discuss here. When I study a poem, I see it as an engine firing, and only those words, in that order, can make it fire. But this happens only in retrospect, because at the moment of reading, something else can take place: surprise. Often in the poems I love, the poet thwarts my expectations: by using a word I would not expect, a strange syntactical construct, an omission, a unexpected tone, diction, or some other shift. Such moments have been studied—and prized—by a variety of thinkers since the nineteenth century: the philosopher Immanuel Kant,5 the formalist Roman Jakobson,6 the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and, most recently, the poet and literary theorist Susan Stewart.7 Surprise is part of what poet Octavio Paz8 calls the "principle of variety within unity": Repetition is a cardinal principle in poetry. Meter and its accents, rhyme, the epithets in Homer and other poets, phrases and incidents that recur like musical motifs and serve as signs to emphasize continuity. At the other extreme are breaks, changes, inventions—in a word, the unexpected. What we call development is merely the alliance between repetition and surprise, recurrence and invention, continuity and interruption. Moments of surprise are moments I initially question, trying to decide whether the poet has earned the right to make that kind of leap. When I'm reading, my first reaction is disbelief, followed by some testing: Can this be true? Do I "buy" the shift? But finally, if the poet has done her job, there's the pleasure of having something I take for granted shaken up. Changed. And thus I am changed, a little but safely because while I feel it in my body, I see it on the page, cushioned by paper, by the distance art provides. Surprises, unlike shocks, are pleasurable. The difference, I would say, is the reader's safety and level of preparation for the shift. As philosopher John Morreall points out, "laughter results from a pleasant psychological shift."9 Surprises affect the reader deeply in the most fundamental—corporeal—way. In an effort to understand the physiological effects of these moments, I'll turn to psychology, where surprise is considered a primary emotion, along with joy, sadness, fear, and anger. One psychologist terms surprise "a highly transient reaction to a sudden and unexpected event. Ongoing activity is momentarily halted... [surprise is] one of the most easily and universally recognized emotions."10 This moment of halting in poems is the moment when the brain is trying to make sense of the shift; it is, I think, the essence of the power of surprise. Psychologists consider surprise to have integrative power because it "indicates the need for a shift within the hierarchy of control." Thus, surprise is valuable because it promotes the sort of mind clearing that is rare in everyday life but ultimately moves our civilization forward. Sylvan Tompkins describes surprise as a "resetting" state because, for a fraction of a second, the mind is cleared of thought.10 This "resetting" or these "shifts of hierarchies of control" are what enable us to go from one way of thinking—that of the dominant ideology—to another, freer way of thinking. The etymology of the word "surprise" may also give us a clue to its function. The word comes from Latin, "sur" meaning "over" and "prise" meaning "to take." When one is surprised, one is taken over—and that's the key to the pleasure, I think. Like orgasm, for a moment, one feels not so much out of control, as blissfully taken over by something smarter than we are. Interestingly, one psychologist notes that the "physiological correlates" of surprise are "those of increased arousal."10 Surprise also helps us learn: psychologist Leon Kamin points out "that a stimulus must be surprising to produce conditioning"10 and psychologist Wulf-Uwe Meyer11 reveals that surprise increases memory. Thus, tiny moments in poems have broad social implications: because of the changes it enacts in its readers, poetry is a way to change the world. The tiny "resettings" that take place when we read a poem prepare us for other, larger "resettings." The ideological implications of surprise are apparent in theorist Amittai Avivram's definition of surprise as "marked choices against default assumptions."12 It is these default assumptions that represent ideology—what we perceive to be "normal" in a world where choice is illusory. For example, one default assumption is that speakers in poems are white. Unless we have "cues" (for instance dialect, name, or setting) that tell us otherwise, we assume speakers to be white because in the U.S.A. the white race is dominant. Default assumptions often privilege one set of binary oppositions over another: white, male, light, straight, reason, mind, and so on. Default assumptions are the stuff of greeting cards and conventional wisdom: mothers love their children, old people are wise, God is good, etc. I am not arguing that these default assumptions are never true, only that sometimes they are not. Poetry surprises us by challenging these assumptions in an intimate and immediate context. The kinds of surprise at the disposal of the poet are analogous to poetry's whole bag of tricks: word choice, syntax, white space—devices that are employed in the service of shifts between language, time, or belief systems. One element, however, bridges these large categories: the sound of the words. Let me begin with an example. In Jeanne Beaumont's poem, "The Valley of My Attention," 13 from her book Placebo Effects the first three lines are Fertile and otherwise If you are like me, when you read the word "valley" in the title followed by the word "fertile," you imagine a geography of mountains and valleys: say, the delta of the Mississippi. "Rest" and "discovery" call forth the image of explorers. The white space of the poem also suggests a river carving out a valley from the elevations at its sides. So when I get to the phrase "your outstretched legs," I'm surprised. I go back and, of course, the analogy between body and geography is clearly in place from the very title. The poet planted both pillars of her structure, but it took me until the third line to see them both. The sound of the word "legs" is an important part of the surprise. The other words are the Latinate words of geography: fertile, terrain, discovery, even outstretched. Then there's "legs," the humble monosyllabic body part. The simultaneity of the body and geographic terms is like the simultaneity of the narrated event and the speech event, that is, like the relationship between the story and the sounds and white space. The ways the poem looks and sounds offer clues helping me to "get it," making me feel I'm in the hands of someone who knows what she is doing. In other words, surprises should, upon analysis, be part of the grand design. The way it looks, how it sounds, and what it means must work together. Of course, different readers have different tolerance levels for certainty and surprise, and some might argue that every line should jolt the reader. But most poets play with one element of the language or poem at a time. Sometimes they choose which element to play with in a particular poem. Or they gravitate toward a certain field of play because of who they are. The more elements poets play with simultaneously, the more readers are lost, because many people don't want to play that hard when they read. The first step toward this flexibility of thought is resisting assumptions. This is something we do instinctively when we avoid identifying roses as sweet smelling or the sky as blue. But it takes a certain quantity of "known" to act as ballast for the "unknown." Mary Ruefle's poem, "The Cart," from Cold Pluto14 employs rapid contextual shifts to surprise us in each and every line, but the poem contains itself by ending in the neighborhood where it began. I follow the thoughts of the speaker the way my eyes would follow the rolling grocery cart, and at the end, the poem comes back to the idea of hands letting the cart go. If the poem didn't come back to hands and letting go, I wouldn't find it as satisfying—the "mind journey" might seem aimless. Yet the poem is not narrative; that is, it's not the story of a rolling grocery cart or the person who sees it. The Cart The empty grocery cart is beginning to roll (Reprinted with Mary Ruefle's permission.) The whole poem is a series of reversals. In that way the poem exists between certainties, in the space that is truly the space of poetry. The poem perches between the binary oppositions it presents: heavy/light, dead/alive, happy/unhappy, empty/full, holding on/letting go, being covered/ being exposed. And it reverses the usual hierarchy of these concepts: Being alive is better than being dead, as is being happy, full, covered, and holding on. For example, "Somewhere a woman is swathed in black veils/ and smiling too." Like the moment of the cart's rolling, the poem is in motion; its betweenness is its message. Note that the poem does not tell the story of the cart—it is not important that the cart hit something, only that it might. I'm reminded of Jacques Delteil, the French surrealist, who wrote, "I believe in the virtue of birds, and a feather is all it takes to make me die laughing." Similarly, Ruefle's poem hinges on its deeply surprising contradictions. Ruefle's work is riddled with surprise, yet her surrealist sensibility is meshed with tough intellect; upon close examination, her poems "hold up" to scrutiny, the leaps make a kind of (non)sense and do not seem random. In another poem, "Tilapia," in Post Meridian,15 she also shifts contexts, this time meshing "restaurant" and "Biblical" references to surprise the reader. Tilapia I walk into the restaurant, a genetic legacy. (Reprinted with Mary Ruefle's permission.) The most surprising moment in the poem for me is the line "Christ did both and this is the fish..." When I look back, I see that I am prepared for that leap with the mentions of mortality and Israel and origins, but nevertheless it opens the poem in a new and deeply satisfying way. The rest of the poem, with its meshing of "biblical" and "restaurant" language, builds to a close with the speaker asking for a lemon. This act that both completes the eating of the fish, and will "if executed in perfect faith," rip the cellophane off the world. What cellophane? The cellophane that prevents direct experience, that prevents change. Just as the citric acid of the lemon can dissolve cellophane, the poem exposes a level of thinking about faith that is not "the deeper layer" (as though the restaurant and fish discussion were mere window dressing), but rather something dependent on it. The silver backing is the reason for the tender core and the restaurant meal is the reason for the faith discourse. This strategy is different from the one where the poet uses a "trivial" experience at the beginning of a poem in order to expound on a matter of greater importance later on. Conversely, Ruefle's poem is made of the material it speaks about; the medium is the message, as both Gertrude Stein and Marshall McLuan would agree. Another kind of surprise, one regularly attacked in beginning fiction workshops, is a shift in point of view, or more precisely here, a shift in address. Belle Waring's poem "Look," the first poem in her book Dark Blonde16 begins Your street at sundown. The second person address of the poem initially reminds me of Alan Jay Lerner's song, "On The Street Where You Live," from My Fair Lady. From the first two stanzas, I'm primed to take this as a love poem (the specificity of the apartment description, for example), so that when I get to the word "Citizen," I feel a rush of surprise—hey, she's talking to me, not some personal loved one. I'm not an eavesdropper, I'm the reason for the poem! The genius of this move has to do with the shifting point of view. In the initial reading, the speaker is looking at one lit window from the outside. The surprise is in realizing that I, the addressee, really am inside that window, and that I am being asked to look outside at the blue sky. Tone is the most difficult kind of surprise to discuss because shifts in tone are often subtle and nuanced. Tone is the writer's attitude toward the subject or audience. Sometimes it is helpful to pin a provisional adjective on the tone: for example, serious, ironic, or sly, but such adjectives are invariably crude compared to the complexity of a poem's enactment of tone. Sometimes the tone shift is encapsulated in a single word, as in Waring's poem "Use the Following Construction in a Sentence," when she writes, "my hot new herringbone date pipes up/you're such a sensitive girl." The key to surprise in this phrase is the word "herringbone," which refers to a pattern of wool used in suits, a pattern that takes its name from the skeletal shape of a herring, a fish. With this word the tone shifts from serious to sarcastic, and I realize that the speaker is making fun of her date. Notice also the way "herringbone" sticks out in the line, the only polysyllabic word in a row of monosyllables. That adds punch. Waring adds irony to the situation of the date by using the words "hot" and "new" with the herringbone image—a man in a herringbone suit is anything but "hot." (Imagine, instead, the date wearing leather.) I also love the way "pipes" is a verb in this phrase. That is, a man wearing a herringbone suit might also smoke a pipe. No surprise. The surprise here, however, is that Waring uses "pipes" as a verb—a verb usually used with children's speech. For example, children pipe up, with little noises interrupting the conversation of adults. In one stroke, Waring has taken the wind out of this date's sails, reduced him to an interrupting child. This irony is further underscored by what the man says; that is, he calls the speaker a "girl," when at this point in the sentence we already see him as a slightly ridiculous figure, acting older than he is with a herringbone suit and a patronizing figure of speech. Jeanne Beaumont's poem "Excavation" employs tone shifts for another kind of critique. The poem seems to me to be a commentary on American capitalism, one that exposes language as ideological. Excavation What the water said if the shoe fitwhether the boat ever drifted to shore did the meek inherit where the doorway led when the end began what only hairdressers knew for sure what burned in the fire who started it how often it rained which grains were grown to ferment who bent to pick up the flowers what scent was left flag remnants jars what dreaming meant length of teeth where the buck stopped ways to spell relief who said it first who was buried in June what shapes spoons were the median rent what the wish was of who blew out the candles who dimmed the lights how long nights were customs of tailors how they carried their young outdoor marketplaces misguided beliefs stars' names coin shapes which pets which pox who turned the woman's head painted it turned whether the neck was broken what parts were accident free prizes from every box what color the day was (Reprinted with Jeanne Beaumont's permission.) The surprise for me in this collection of phrases is the way public and private languages are mixed. The reader discovers pieces of platitudes and advertising slogans alongside the biblical phrase, "did the meek inherit." The poem presents us with the bits of language that might remain after disease, accident, fire, dream. Interestingly, the three advertising slogans, "ways to spell relief," (Rolaids), "what only hairdressers knew for sure" (Clairol), and "free prizes from every box" (Cracker Jack) are not presented with the names of their products, which accentuates the dislocation and relies on the reader to supply the source. Beaumont braids together platitudes like "if the shoe fit," and "where the buck stopped" with stranger and "more original" phrases, like "length of teeth" or "what the water said." Thus, the juxtaposition of these bits of language against other bits of language creates surprise because we don't expect to see them together in this highly original context. Beaumont is an anthropologist excavating the debris of our language; like pieces of pottery, these phrases represent our culture. And the reader accompanies her on her "dig," indeed creating her own by supplying context and story. The Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin argues that all language consists of bits and pieces taken from diverse contexts—he called this dialogism or heteroglossia—and that this inconsistency is not something to be ironed out but rather something to be celebrated. He applied his theory of dialogism only to the novel, but I think that poems like Beaumont's "Excavation" are proof that all language is dialogic. In fact, because the space of the poem is more compressed than that of prose fiction, the effect of dialogism can be more remarkable. In "Excavation," dialogism is the poem. Dialogism is valuable because it points to the differences in language systems; their juxtaposition produces mind-altering surprise. In contrast to Beaumont's formal inventiveness and use of white space, Amy Gerstler's poems are formally conventional: they adhere to the left margin and use stanza breaks and line lengths conservatively. Yet in this sea of certainty are many strange fish: Gerstler's surprises often result from the contrast between her tone and her subjects. Look at the end of "Request" (Crown of Weeds)17 a love poem in which the speaker imagines the object of desire suddenly coming to his or her senses, a hundred years hence: I hope, at that moment The surprising pleasure here is the contrast between the elevated diction and formal syntax and the desires expressed. Notice the lack of contractions, the use of constructions like "I hope" and "I pray" and the Latinate diction like "advances" and "overtures" contrasting with the image of the speaker and her beloved being showered with fruit—and babies—by monkeys! The equivalence of fruit and babies I find particularly funny—the fruit is bruised, but the babies are unharmed. This vision of paradise is entirely new. My favorite moment in the poem is an aural awakening: the sound of the words, "with a delicate snap, like a rice cracker." Those words, allied to the image of the deliciously light cracker, change the "obstacle" before our very eyes: we see and hear the obstacle being reduced to something frivolous, capable of being held in the fingers and snapped by the teeth. The rhetorical situations of Gerstler's poems are clear and even conventional, but her language is fresh and surprising. Another example of a tone I admire is Gerstler's poem "The Story of Toasted Cheese" (Medicine)18, which pokes fun at Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," or rather, our culture's reification of Bishop's poem: The Story of Toasted Cheese Toasted cheese hath no master. The Fronds of God, Indoors, toddlers munched crumbs (Reprinted with Amy Gerstler's permission.) Look at how the poem echoes Bishop's rhyme scheme but then becomes wilder and wilder in its rhymes: disaster; master; cow pasture; repast, sir? It suggests a runaway train. What holds the poem together is its very lack of unity, as if in response to Bishop's complete control. The poem is brilliant in its silliness, in the way not one line is close to iambic and in the way it starts with toasted cheese and ends with an aster. Like Gertrude Stein's spearing of Marinetti in her poem "Marry Nettie," Gerstler makes fun by relying on her audience's acuity. Gerstler chooses the "low" subject of toasted cheese to contrast with Bishop's "high" subjects of art and loss. If we praise Elizabeth Bishop's poem for its perfection, for the way the details hold together and appear seamless, this poem is the postmodern response: the center cannot hold, and it's a sham to pretend that it does. Of the five poets mentioned here, Brenda Shaughnessy's kinship with Gertrude Stein is perhaps the clearest. Shaughnessy's book of love poems, Interior with Sudden Joy19, employs linguistic surprise, often alongside the categories of surprise mentioned above. Like her teacher Lucie Brock-Broido, Shaughnessy mines the dictionary in order to re-invent it. This kind of surprise functions like a template placed over our expectations, producing poems rife with inversions, puns, and game-playing. Here are a few stanzas from her poem "Your One Good Dress": . . . And the red dress (think about it, In the these stanzas and those that follow, the description of the dress holds the poem together and keeps the reader from getting lost, but Shaughnessy takes that dress and flies with it. There is something childishly charming about the puns and word play throughout the poem: the pun on "redress," the characterization of the other dresses, and the "Cinderelly" dull-chic. In another stanza, the serious directive "Bury your children in it" is followed by the adolescent "Visit your pokey hometown friends in it." My favorite surprising moment in the poem, however, is the list of Columbus's ships, which I transform in my mind into dresses, their masts and flags flying. Am I now. You put on your Nina, your Pinta, your That line "Make it simple to last your whole life long," is taken from a song ("Sing") by Joseph Roposo, the musical director of Sesame Street. The juxtaposition of Columbus's ships next to a saccharine line from a popular song surely must be one of the most unexpected juxtapositions imaginable. In retrospect, what makes me "buy it" rather than dismiss it, is that both images have the longstanding quality Shaughnessy is revering in the dress. I have mentioned a mere handful of moments in the work of a handful of poets, but I could as easily have discussed the poetry of, to name a few more, Stefanie Marlis, Heather McHugh, Molly McQuade, Harryette Mullen, Laura Mullen, Judith Taylor, and C.D. Wright. During the time and space of reading poems that employ surprise, our assumptions have been challenged: about what will happen a hundred years hence, our ideas about the nature of hands, and our notions of the good black dress. We live in a world of default assumptions: nothing we say, eat, drink, buy, or make is free of them. Poets who employ surprise are unconventional thinkers; as William James20 wrote, "Genius, in truth, means little more than perceiving in an unhabitual way." The best poems challenge convention by pointing it out all around us, by showing us that the world does not have to be the way it is. Gertrude Stein was original partly because she was writing against the patriarchal tradition of poetry. As she says in "Patriarchal Poetry," "Let her be let her./Let her be let her let her try. Never to be what he said. Not to let her to be what he said not to let her to be what he said."4 The contemporary women poets whose work I have been using as examples are, as Stein was, outside the center of literary power that is mostly white, male, Christian, straight, academic; a center of power that takes itself very seriously. I think it is possible that funny, quirky and surprising poems can enact deep changes in the way we think; as Stein says, "For a long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause everybody accepts" ("Composition as Explanation"21). AWPNatasha Sajé is the author of a book of poems,Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994) and many essays. She teaches at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, and in the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program.
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