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Strategy Response, Week 2

If there can be only one cummings, can there be only one Gertrude Stein? The repetition of "If I told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso" feels so original and specific to this poem, that I wonder where a modern writer could take the technique. Is it really possible for a writer to make a technique their own and inadvertently make the technique off limits to other writers? The mere idea of writing in lower case and using odd enjambment and spacing speaks of cummings, but how can we take that technique and push it further or retract from if to make our own style? I too could come up with a sentence, write it, break it in half and reverse the halves for the second sentence, and continue the trend down the page, but more is at work in Stein's writing. The poem almost speaks to stream of consciousness. I hear voices talking over one another in "If I Told Him" and turning over the same statements. I think the path I can take from Stein's work is invisible until I find it. I don't necessarily need to write in Stein's voice or use the same syntax. Instead, I should appropriate the message of the poem, whatever it may be, and see where that leads me, refuse to stop there, but continue to travel until I find a "technique" to settle on. Stein's poem, in a sense, is off limits, as far as imitation goes, but if I approach the poem as a triggering town, and don't stop with the first lines I create, I may find something worth exploring.

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