Help me interpret this gertrude stein poem?

Question

Any close readings?

"A LONG DRESS.

What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current.

What is the wind, what is it.

Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it. "

Answer 1

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This is a mixture of sense intertwined, as in most Stein, with her affection for sound and sound patterns.

A paraphrase might run: what is electricity that runs a machine, that runs through a cord (such as once was put around the waists of people in medieval times?). Or perhaps this power is not electricity but wind (also used to run machines through wind turbines)? The prose poem then talks about length--but whether this is a time dimension or a spacial one I can't say, and the past paragraph seems to conflate the two, associating perhaps the "line" of the first stanza/paragraph with a cord. The result of the current in the "serene: length of line is that dark becomes light (through electric current?) and colors are born, are transformed, and all from a line--the line of current carrying the power to make the machine run. The result is something like the line of current itself but it is another kind of line: the lines of which objects and the visible world are composed. At some point the rhythms of speaking take over and any immediate sense content of the poem dissipates.

As with much Stein, the poem is unparaphrasable. It has to be taken placidly in all its puzzlement and contradiction. It defies interpretation and analysis, and that is part of the point...

part of the point, part of the dot, a jot of the dot, a dot jot, notround as itself but itself itself... etc.

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