A Book that Changed My Life: A game of words

Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914). It was the most bizarre thing I’d ever read. It’s supposedly a book of poetry, but in one of its three sections headlined Objects, she just describes different objects. There was something so weird and special about the way she did that. Then I realised she’s not actually describing the objects, but playing with language to achieve the spirit of her gaze.

Take, for instance, her quote from Objects from Tender Buttons (1914): A Carafe, that is a blind glass: A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt colour and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

It’s like a maze of words, a riddle. Reading this book changed my life at 18. I realised that I was attracted to a play on words. A turn from the expressive to the unintentional to the procedural. If you step out of yourself and do non-expressive things to create your poetry, you can get to places you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten to, which can be deep, personal and exciting. With this book, I realised that I was not an expressive poet. 

—Israeli poet Eran Hadas tells Ornella D'souza

Also Read: A Book That Changed My Life: David Ebershoff goes back to the classics​