From “A Little Called Pauline”
This is a poem! Gertrude Stein was a really amazing, wild poet. She liked to use sentences in new ways that looked different than other people’s. Why not try saying something silly while saying something serious? she must have thought. Let’s get people to think about words differently because they have to when they read my poems! That’s the awesome thing about being a poet. Your whole job is to write words in different ways that make people pause and think about them more. That’s why sometimes it seems like the words don’t make sense, because a poem works differently than a story. A poem is about other things, like feeling and language. What happens if you close your eyes and say, “A little lace makes boils. This is not true.” What do you see?
This is also a story! When I read Gertrude Stein’s poem “A Little Called Pauline,” all kinds of images came into my head. I saw lots of different possibilities for what the words could represent, and I created a story from them. I wanted to share the story I saw in my head when I read this poem. It’s about a little girl named Pauline who lives with her mom in a house on stilts by the sea. Pauline likes to do things her mom does, like type on a typewriter, and she doesn’t like to wear dresses. She also really, really wants to get a fancy crown at the market on her birthday, but they don’t have enough money ... and Pauline throws a bit of a tantrum. Later, while her mom has a grown-up birthday party for her, she runs away and jumps into a little boat. She rows out to sea. And all her family friends are searching for her. She sees all kinds of beautiful sights on her boat, but then things go terribly wrong, and Pauline needs to be rescued. In the end she is so glad for what she has, more than any crown to put on her head, because she has a whole group of friends and family who love her—especially her mom. A poem can mean so many things! This is just one way I read it, especially because I have a little girl named Odette who is a lot like Pauline!
Poems and pictures together: you try! These words and pictures play together as friends would. They invite you to join in! Take lines from this poem and make your own drawings to accompany them! I call this “poetry comics.” And you don’t have to draw what you think you are supposed to draw; draw what you feel fits with the images that pop into your head; surprise yourself and others; enjoy not knowing. Poetry is not a mysterious riddle you must figure out. It is a continuous adventure with your own mind, and there are no wrong answers to how you interact with it. All it asks is that you do.
—Bianca Stone
Text from the “Illustrator’s Afterword” to the children’s book A Little Called Pauline by Gertrude Stein and Bianca Stone, forthcoming from Penny Candy Books this month. The preceding are non-sequential excerpts.
From the time she moved to France in 1903 until her death in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1946, American writer Gertrude Stein was a central figure in the Parisian art world. An advocate of the avant garde, Stein helped shape an artistic movement that demanded a novel form of expression and a conscious break with the past. The Paris salon at 27 rue de Fleurus that she shared with Alice B. Toklas, her lifelong...
Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of the poetry collections Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books, 2014), Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours (Pleiades Books, 2016), and multiple chapbooks. Her children's book, A Little Called Pauline (Penny Candy Books, 2020), features illustrations based on the Gertrude Stein poem of the same name. She is also a contributing...