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In honor of the 100th anniversary of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, published in a corrected centennial edition by City Lights Books this year, JULIA BLOCH and LAYNIE BROWNE invited a number of poets—LEE ANN BROWN, RYAN ECKES, CHARLES BERNSTEIN, JASON MITCHELL, ANGELA CARR, SUEYEUN JULIETTE LEE, and RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS—to read from Stein's text and speak about its influence, its origins and its legacy. First published in 1914 in a print run of 1,000 by Claire Marie, Tender Buttons has come to be understood as one of the most important and challenging texts of twentieth-century literary modernism, what Charles Bernstein has called "the fullest realization of the turn to language and the most perfect realization of 'wordness,' where word and object are merged."
LEE ANN BROWN is the author of In the Laurels, Caught, Crowns of Charlotte, The Sleep That Changed Everything and Polyverse. She is founder and editor of Tender Buttons Press, which is dedicated to publishing experimental women’s poetry. She teaches at St. John’s University, curates the Page Poetry Parlor, and she directs the French Broad Institute (of Time & the River).
ANGELA CARR is a poet and translator. She is the author of three poetry books, most recently Here in There (BookThug 2014). Originally from Montréal, Angela now lives in New York City, and teaches creative writing at The New School.
RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS' work includes the "last" volume of Drafts, Surge: Drafts 96-114, a new volume of poetry, Interstices, and the critical book Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry.
RYAN ECKES is the author of Valu-Plus, Old NewsSugar Mule, The Rumpus, OnandOnScreen, and on his blog at ryaneckes.blogspot.com.
JASON MITCHELL's poems have appeared in Hi Zero, Stolen Island, Court Green, Jupiter 88 and elsewhere. He hosts and coordinates the Philadelphia reading series Frank O'Hara's Last Lover in the Rose Room at Snockey's Oyster & Crab House.
SUEYEUN JULIETTE LEE's books include That Gorgeous Feeling, Underground National, and the forthcoming Solar Maximum. A 2013 Pew Fellow in the Arts, she writes reviews for The Constant Critic and edits Corollary Press.
CHARLES BERNSTEIN's most recent book is Recalculating. Bernstein is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn.
LAYNIE BROWNE is a 2014 Pew Fellow in the arts and author of ten collections of poetry, most recently Lost Parkour Psalms. Forthcoming are two collections, Scorpyn Odes and P R A C T I C E.