Tender Buttons

Superior Essays
Identities of Tender Buttons and Life Breaks In Have you ever gotten so used to seeing the same everyday objects that you barely notice them anymore? Haven’t you been having terrible mood swings over that? Both Gertrude Stein and Mary Cappello in their books dissolve the tediousness of both everyday-use and everyday-felt elements and objects in a very exceptional way. Personally, I believe that Stein uses very common and simple adjectives in expressing certain objects, food, and rooms. She applies and associates very familiar adjectives with nouns and objects that are not typically used together, so each poem explores various ways of looking at everyday-use objects. On contrast, Mary Cappello, in her book, focuses on only one everyday-felt …show more content…
She uses only several words in writing one entire poem, and I’m very sure that it is so confusing to most of her readers, but in the meanwhile, each and every word has its own meaning and goal. Her famous poem about Picasso (282) is written entirely in only a couple of words; she repeats the same exact words over and over again. I mean, this is the woman who said, “Rose is a rose, is a rose is a rose.” On top of that, and as I said previously, Stein only cares about making the end rhyme sound perfect than making perfect sense. She gives a very abstract and a general word and leave the rest (thinking) to the readers. One example would be the poem “Rub her coke.” (Tender Buttons, 326) It is so short and brief so that it matches its three-word title “Peeled pencil, chocker.” Stein always recommends her readers to read her poems aloud. So, if we speed the pace of this poem while reading out loud, the words “rub her” would become closer and be read “rubber” and when saying the poem aloud and fast, we would not tell if “coke” is calling “cock” or “coat.” On the contrary to that, Professor Cappello is all about making sense to her readers and choosing words that are spoken by all sorts of people. She even uses images and drawings so that her readers could better engage with and understand what she is trying to deliver. “My teacher used the word ‘environs’ as a verb as in ‘video art easily environs the viewers’ Moods environ us” (Life Breaks In, 41). Here Cappello is even criticizing her teacher for using a noun as a verb. So, she uses the same word as a verb in a sarcastic way describing how moods control and enclose us. She is warning or actually teaching her readers the appropriate way of using that specific

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