A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass

Gertrude Stein wrote “A carafe, that is a blind glass.” In Stein’s typescript, only the “A” is capitalized in the title. The poem is the first prose poem in her collection Tender Buttons, where Stein describes an assortment of objects, food, and rooms in puzzling, repetitious prose. “A carafe, that is a blind glass” contains neither stanzas nor line breaks, which is why it’s a prose poem. The explicitly beguiling elements in “A carafe, that is blind glass” and Stein’s other works—The Making of Americans (1925) among them—show why scholars continually present Stein as one of the greatest Modernist, experimentalist, and avant-garde writers in the Western literary canon. The poem reflects Stein’s commitment to applying inventive painting techniques to the written word. Starting around 1907, painters such as Pablo Picasso began an artistic movement called Cubism, where painters intentionally distorted ordinary objects, as Picasso does in Bowl of Fruit, Violin, and Bottle (1914). Stein, too, presents a byzantine perspective on objects, starting with the carafe.

Aside from her work, Stein is known for her personality and personal life. Although she never used the term “lesbian,” she had a romantic, lifelong partnership with a woman named Alice B.