Anyone Smell Burning Paint?

Prepositions are like burning paint. Forget grammar and think about potatoes.

—Gertrude Stein

The despotic words that I inherit

Wanting recognition of their merit,

Syntactic insolence gets worse and worse,

With young prepositions asserting rights,

Adjectives complaining bitterly of slights,

Conjunctions that have learned to curse,

Pronouns unwilling apparently to wait,

Verbs that attack the prefrontal gate.

Fractious nouns keep slipping out of date,

While rhyming couplets—idle, vapid things—

Desiring hotter music drag their wings.

I write a poem almost every day—

But could anyone unravel what's to say?

Rejoice, O fond musicians, in your craft,

Whose genius elevates you far above

Loquacious vocables in search of love!

Written upon reading Francesca Wade's superb new biography Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (New York: Scribner, 2025)

Friday, January 9, 2025