When finally those that really got glamour I want to relate this smut to Vienna after the war I want to live in a kingdom of style and camp The book is raw with personal experience and an affectionate subject who assumes multiple social classes, races, and academic backgrounds with an ADHD-like willingness to juxtapose objects and voices. But this is not a conceptual piece it’s not literally a list of objects. She is collecting the data and critically re-purposing it for our intellectual consumption, making us hyper-aware of the overloaded object consumption our everyday lives entail, and critically engaging with the ‘selves’ (including her own) that emerge out of this frantic consumer-capitalist object identification. In “Ash Blonde” McClure writes, “it’s always been clear to me / that an object-choice / is an object-identification too.” And it is clear as well that with each object choice in Tender Data, McClure identifies a palette of objects from the contemporary female experience. McClure takes us on a complex journey of objects and subjects that are desperate for a liberation poetry may not be able to give. However, Tender Data does not appear to be written with the intention, as in Stein’s case, of subverting these cultural objects, but rather is obsessed with them, reflecting society’s ongoing obsession. Tropez, Mercedes Benz Fashion week, W Magazine, Park Slope) the female healthcare debate (fertility, abortion, Plan B) and finally the average American Consumer (Coca-Cola, TJ Maxx, VH1, New York Dolls). She bounces between her own lineage of female writers (Kathy Acker, Mina Loy, Willa Cather, Jeanette Winterson) cultural signifiers of the cosmopolitan elite (Cipriani, St.
In Monica McClure’s Tender Data, a book of poems whose title clearly conjures Stein, McClure also catalogues objects, but exchanges Stein’s domestic objects for contemporary cultural ones.
In liberating her objects, she symbolically liberates herself and the other women who, at the fore of the modern era, would read her book. Her poems both underscore the ridiculousness of glorifying the domestic by breaking with the Victorian obsession with adoring things and liberate the things themselves from our obsession with them. Stein’s buttons are simultaneously analogues and object manifestations of the female experience. Each object relies first on its domestic connotation in order to then be re-imagined in Stein’s perverse poetic transmission of it. She writes, A Box, A Plate, A Frightful Release, Objects, Careless Water, Roast Beef, Mutton, Single Fish, Rooms, Buttons and a lot more.
In Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Stein catalogued the domestic objects that influenced her female identity.
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