Tender Buttons [A Long Dress]

Tender Buttons may be a sweeping 20th-century masterpiece characterized by its experimentation and perceived difficulty, but it remains grounded in the experience of the every-day. The three sections, “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms,” constitute encounters with things Stein (and, presumably, all of us) have every day in our own homes. This poem, “A Long Dress,” is also threaded through with domesticity. Certainly clothing itself is domestic, as is the poem’s evocation of sewing “machinery,” “crackl[ing]” with “current” (Line 1). The poem asks “what is this current” that runs through the “machinery” but also that “presents […] a necessary waist” (Line 1). The current, here, implies domestic use of electricity but also the rhythms of life that “present a long line” that “make[ it’s] machinery” (Line 1). These forces are just as pervasive, boundless, and indefinable as “the wind” (Line 3).

The last paragraph of the prose poem presents a series of choices and demarcations (nonrepresentational as they may be) between colors: “only a white and red are black,” “a yellow and green are blue,” and “a pink is scarlet” (Line 4). Among other things, this sequence can be read as an echo of the little choices we make every day in domestic life as, for instance, in the sewing of a dress.