Tender Buttons: Initial Idea

After reading through the poems and researching Gertrude Stein and her methodology I decided to emphasize the sound over the sense. She wrote these poems with the sound having more importance than the meaning, but I found it hard to initially get past where I thought there should be meaning. My idea is to break down the words into their phonetically syllable spellings with the stresses being highlighted. This forces to reader to recognize only the sounds and rhythm. This rids the poems of the initial hurdle over the senselessness.

My first concept with this breakdown of syllables reminded me of dictionaries, where you would normally find this kind of breakdown treatment of words to learn how to say words correctly. Next I tried setting the text into rhythmic lines with the spaces matching the undulations of sound. After showing my rhythmic pages to my roommate he voiced a concern about readability. After this I created a page of normal spelling but I kept the emphasis on the different sounds through hierarchical means. A mixture of these two ways is my new design methodology. By using the busted up syllables to clue the reader into the correct way to read the poems while still allowing them to see the original spellings I hope to push the reader faster into understanding the beauty of the poems.

My choice of poems and the materials I’ll use are to give the intimate empirical experience of book reading, which include tactile sensations and other sensory perceptions.