Customer Reviews

How I Read Gertrude Stein

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Any one interested in the deeper mechanics of how our language makes meaning out of sound, and how sound itself is interesting into and unto itself should add this book to their collection. I have profitably reread Eric Paul Shaffer's introduction several times for his analysis of Welch's and Stein's interplay as artists and poets.

This is an extraordinary book about the clarity of vision in both Stein's work and the work of Lew Welch--the often overlooked charismatic statesmen of the Beat poets. A penetrating look into the process of how are minds work, of how the creative process unfolds, and of how we create and disassemble our world. It reads like an intricate mystery novel, a precursor to Umberto Ecco's "The Name of the Rose." Lew Welch's power of insight is uncanny. Anyone interested in the "idea" of language and the tools of "seeing" should check this out. Highly recommended!!

This is by far Lew Welch's most intelligently written book and it was done as a graduation thesis for Reed College in 1950, when he was stil in his early 20's. This was an important time for Welch. He was still attempting to find his voice and was just then making his first contacts with William Carlos Williams. Later, when Welch became part of the Beat scene, he would look back at his own innocent days at Reed and try to recapture the excitement and importance of his explorations of Stein in his failed novel, I Leo. But this is not the voice of the hard-drinking, semi-messianic Lew that we find crowding out his talent in his later works; this is the voice of a subtle thinker saying (without the smoke and whistles of today's English departments) some important things about Stein. Considering the date, this is an amazing thesis. William Carlos Williams admitted that he had learned some important things from Lew's thesis, and it continues (now in book form competently edited by Eric Paul Shaffer--but please don't hand this perfomance to Shaffer--Lew Welch is clearly the star in this show) to remain of value for students of Stein's work. We only wish he could have continued to have written so lucidly and to have lived on to help us through some of the stranger developments of American criticism and poetry that now appear--unfortunately--to have become the norm.

Shaffer's stunner of an introduction, as well as the insight and organization of this book, made me see poetry in an entirely new light, as well as the brilliance of Lew Welch. Shaffer's work is extraordinary. I can't wait for the upcoming release of Shaffer's own work, PORTABLE PLANET. He is a very real talent!