A letter to the editor

‘The Nation,’ 1987

Edward Burns

Ulla E. Dydo

Published under the title “Three Lives,” this letter by Edward Burns and Ulla Dydo — written in response to Natalie Robin’s article, “The Defiling of Writers,” appeared in the December 5, 1987 issue of The Nation. You can read the complete text here in PDF format.

May 9, 2012

About this feature

Charles Bernstein convened this “dossier” to address misrepresentations, distortions, and disinformation surrounding Gertrude Stein’s wartime record. Bringing together new and previously published work by scholars such as Edward Burns, Ulla E. Dydo, Marjorie Perloff, Joan Retallack, Leon Katz, Václav Paris, Renate Stendhal, and others, this Jacket2 feature also includes links to many of the materials to which these writers respond.

Preface

Charles Bernstein

Gertrude Stein: A complex itinerary, 1940–1944 Edward Burns

Gertrude Stein: September 1942–September 1944 Edward Burns

A letter to the editor Edward Burns

Joan Retallack on Stein's war years Joan Retallack

Gertrude Stein taunts Hitler in 1934 and 1945 Charles Bernstein

A short response to Alan Dershowitz Marjorie Perloff

Why the witch-hunt against Gertrude Stein? Renate Stendhal

Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, "'Courage to Be Courageous': The Last Works and Days of Gertrude Stein"

'Gertrude Stein's Translations of Speeches' by Philippe Petain Václav Paris

A response to 'Gertrude Stein's Translations of Speeches by Philippe Petain' Leon Katz

Gertrude and Alice in Vichyland — Charles Bernstein

Barbara Will, unliking Stein, and scholarly malpractice Logan Esdale

Stein's propagandistic potential Solveig Daugaard

More on Gertrude Stein

Elsewhere in Jacket2, Joshua Schuster writes about “The Making of Tender Buttons,” and Rachel Galvin reviews Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition. Al Filreis hosts a discussion of Stein’s “Christian Bérard” with Lee Ann Brown, Bob Perelman, and Jerry Rothenberg in PoemTalk #10. You’ll find that program on PennSound’s Gertrude Stein author page, alongside recordings made in the winter of 1934–35, a 1947 broadcast of Four Saints in Three Acts composed by Virgil Thompson, and a 2014 celebration of Tender Buttons’ centennial at the Kelly Writers House.

By this author

Gertrude Stein: September 1942–September 1944

A letter to the editor

Gertrude Stein: A complex itinerary, 1940–1944

Cry me a makar

On translating Lorca into Shaetlan

Christie Williamson

“Only if you want to, and it might not work, but do you think you could translate some of the poems into Shetlandic?” I’d been writing poems fairly consistently in Shaetlan for two or three years by this point, but my primary creative outlet remained theatre. Still, it was too good an idea not to pursue. I knew Shaetlan and knew how to write a decent poem in it. The Garcia Lorca poems whose English translations we’d been giving voice to were extraordinary so, why not? What could possibly go wrong?

“I’ve got a suggestion for you. Can I buy you a glass of wine?” The answer to that question is always yes. We were in rehearsal for Lorca’s Shadow, a devised theatre piece by Moving Parts Theatre Company, and this suggestion from Corinne Harris, the play’s director, was to change the course of my life.

December 5, 2024

The &vs. (andverse) of the Gurlesque

Becca Klaver

Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.

The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.

November 19, 2024