Stein and Dickinson

To start. I get the impression that Stein's period is like Emily Dickinson's dash. Both striving after something, as Stein says, "I felt that writing should go on." Both recognize the need to pause and fumble. Stein notes that verbs are more interesting because they allow for mistakes. Dickinson also seems to relish the ability to defend her position against the possibility of mistakes arising in it due to lack of investigation by continuing her sarcastic and caricatured correspondence with Higgins. Both women also seem to feel that this need must be marked out on paper (Stein likes the way they look) in a way that strikes me as a practical sort of field composition. Stein does suggests the practical necessity of these moments of not "going on": Inevitably no matter how completely I had to have writing go on, physically on had to again and again stop sometime and if one had to again and again stop some time then periods had to exist." This portion her definition is also interesting because it seems to use in terms of a cycle (ex. period of revolution) rather than as and end point.

I like the notion that the possibility of mistaking adds richness and interest. But this seems like a difficult effect. One that goes hand in hand with the suggestion that poems are names. That "slowly if you feel what is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known." That "this that I have just described, the creating it without naming it" allows one to go around the inside mistaking and then "discovering." This is what reading Stein or Coolidge's Polaroids is like for me--the feeling of mistaking only to come to feel that I've been somewhere, that I've learned something. There seems to be something in mistaking, ambiguity, over-definition that requires something of those who approach it. Taxing as this something might be, it takes us round showing each name has been and is being revived. Like sculpting till a finished work is in a museum and they have all come to sand.