Cain supplies notes to the effect that “Stanzas” is an allusive referential reduction of “Rooms” by Gertrude Stein. He tips his hat to Steve McCaffery’s homolinguistic translations of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (Every way Oakly).
In a tour de force Cain alludes to two passages from Whitman in his singular reduction of Stein.
Gertrude Stein
Rooms
Tender Buttons
Nothing aiming is a flower, if flowers are abundant then they are lilac, if they are not they are white in the center.
Stephen Cain
Stanzas
False Friends
Floral foul shot, Whitman’s multitudes, pearly pistils.
Walt Whitman for the lilacs and multitudes:
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
This bit from Song of Myself
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Cain’s own line contains multitudes. A pearl handed “pistol” lurks homolinguistically within the line given the “shot” that fires it off. And the botanical basketball may just come home to roost after its foul/fowl shot.
And so for day 2957
16.01.2015