After spending a couple of classes discussing Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, I asked my students to write a prose poem that had no meaning. I had watched them creatively finding meaning as they analyzed Stein, much like dirty cops planting drugs on innocent people, so looked forward to what they might produce. The only restriction was that they had to use “real” words. Most of the students gave up, complaining that words had meaning and that the brain was wired to make sense. One clever kid invoked Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” claiming it made sense even though it was all nonsense. And his real name was Dodgson, someone added. So, does form create meaning? I asked. Another student abdicated, giving all rights to meaning to the reader. I made note of the guy who asked, “What are we learning here?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Cool.”

dandelion clocks
three more months
to retirement

*Publisher’s Note:

From “A Piece of Coffee.” in the “Objects” section of Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein (Claire Marie, New York, 1914). The complete text is available online:
The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tender Buttons

Bob Lucky

is a regular contributor to haiku, haibun, and tanka journals. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Flash, Rattle, Modern Haiku, KYSO Flash, MacQueen’s Quinterly, SurVision, Haibun Today, The Haibun Journal, and Contemporary Haibun Online (the latter for which he served as content editor from July 2014 thru January 2020).

His chapbook of haibun, tanka prose, and prose poems, Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), was an honorable mention in the Touchstone Book Awards. His chapbook Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018) was a winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize in 2018. He is also the author most recently of a collection of prose poems, haibun, and senryu, My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019); and an e-chapbook, What I Say to You (proletaria.org, 2020).

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Scribble Away: Notes from Bahrain, March 2022, haibun sequence by Bob Lucky which was shortlisted for the inaugural Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun

⚡ A Posthumous Lesson From My Mother and The Party, two haibun by Bob Lucky which were nominated by MacQ for the Red Moon Anthologies, and selected for publication in Contemporary Haibun 17 (Red Moon Press, 2022).

⚡ Featured Poet: Bob Lucky in Issue 10 of MacQ