In the 1950s, Yale University Press published a number of Gertrude Stein's posthumous works, among them her incomparable "Stanzas in Meditation." Since that time, scholars have discovered that Stein's poem exists in several versions: a manuscript that Stein wrote and two typescripts that her partner Alice B. Toklas prepared. Toklas's work on the second typescript changed the poem when, enraged upon detecting in it references to a former lover, she not only adjusted the typescript but insisted that Stein make revisions in the original manuscript.

This edition of "Stanzas in Meditation" is the first to confront the complicated story of its composition and revision. Through meticulous archival work, the editors present a reliable reading text of Stein's original manuscript, as well as an appendix with the textual variants among the poem's several versions. This record of Stein's multi-layered revisions enables readers to engage more fully with the author's radically experimental poem and also to detect the literary impact of Stein's relationship with Toklas. The editors' preface and poet Joan Retallack's introduction offer insight into the complexities of reading Stein's poetry and the innovative modes of reading that her works require and generate. Students and admirers of Stein will welcome this illuminating new contribution to Stein's oeuvre.

"One of the best introductions to Gertrude Stein's work I've ever read. Joan Retallack's research is thorough and impressive, and she has done an outstanding job of assembling a valuable and interesting collection of Stein's writings."--Hank Lazer, author of "Lyric & Spirit"
"This exquisitely edited volume of Gertrude Stein's writings is far more informative than the usual 'selected works.' Out of the immense opus that Stein produced over a long and prolific career, Joan Retallack has chosen telling pieces, so as to show both the extraordinary thematic, generic, and stylistic variety, and the coherence of her life's work. Meanwhile, Retallack's delightful and informative introduction can stand on its own as a luminous contribution to our understanding of Gertrude Stein's work and her place in literary history. The fascinating documents that end the book can be regarded as the sweet at the end of a fully satisfying and memorable experience. This is an essential book for both new and long-term discoverers of the wonder of Gertrude Stein's writings."--Lyn Hejinian, author of "The Language of Inquiry"
"Retallack's illuminating introduction is a vital contribution to our knowledge of Stein, revelatory of such issues as racism while viewing Stein's presence on the page and in the ear as performative play that creates a sensual apprehension of a new time (a perception of the activity of happiness). The selections and introduction demonstrate how Stein changed reading and perceiving."--Leslie Scalapino, author of "It's go in horizontal"

"In this very coherent collection of essays, Retallack goes a long way toward constructing meaning out of the restlessness and anxiety that characterize postmodern art. The result is a strong affirmation of the imagination--and, in a way, an affirmation of affirmation itself. The book is powerful and beautiful."--Lyn Hejinian

"Joan Retallack is a thinker of refreshing clarity, frankness and drive, with a wily, engaged intelligence. This remarkable book of her speculative essays is at once a dynamic conceptual art work and an artistically subtle probing of concepts. Retallack has produced a witty, penetrating work that raises the stakes of poetics with her commitment to a utopian ethics of lucidity, attentiveness, responsibility, and hope."--Rachel Blau DuPlessis, author of "Drafts 1-38, "Toll and "The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice

"Joan Retallack shows not why but how poetry matters in these fractal provocations in, around, and through Cage, Stein, Waldrop, Wittgenstein, Winnicott, and a large supporting cast that potentially includes you. Retallack's "newsense" turns knowledge into "nowledge, weaving words into thought's improbable possibilities."--Charles Bernstein, author of "Republics of Reality: 1975-1995

"Joan Retallack is our supreme theoretician of poetic contingency. With great patience, profundity, and good humor, she lays out a 'poetics of the swerve, ' a 'constructive preoccupation with what are unpredictable forms of change.' Whether writing about Gertrude Stein or John Cage, or feeling her way to a more adequate 'feminism'--a feminism that refuses to close off the possibilities of chance and change--Retallack 'essays' toward a 'poethics' that, inWittgensteinian terms, 'leaves everything as it is' so as to dis-cover what it might be. "--Marjorie Perloff, author of "Wittgenstein's Ladder

"Retallack has a deliciously complicated sense of the world, which combines with superb tact and an unpretentious but imposing sense that she is making a poethical wager at every moment in the writing, especially in her sense of the tension between memory and 'productive conjecture'.This is one of the most cogent and capacious rationales for experimental poetics that I have read."--Charles Altieri, author of "Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry and Postmodernisms Now

Joan Retallack offers a book of forms, like the medieval Book of Hours, intended to draw readers into a meditative experience of time, space, language, the many humors of chance and design, as they intersect and leave their traces on the page. All of civilization to date, all of history is after all aftermath, afterthought, afterimage. The language graphics of AFTERRIMAGES lay claim to the fragility--the gift, the terror, and the whimsy--of the remnant that all images are. Their playful nature is born of the conviction that the present tense--tense, tensile with immanent futurity--must extend itself toward the unintelligible and unknown. This is the frontier where the image hovers on the edge of its own transfiguration, the threshold where poetry can take place.