All Multilingual Speakers Use Steinian Syntax

I hope you’re taking care and finding peace during these scary, violent times. Take care of your loved ones. Protect your community. It is especially during these times that we must lean on each other.

I’ve been preparing for my upcoming writing residency (my penultimate residency for my master’s program), and I submitted the two poems for my primary genre, poetry, workshop.

This poem was born during a reflection. Steinian syntax, as created by Gertrude Stein, was introduced. And my not being familiar with her work, looked up exactly what composed ‘steinian syntax.’ This is explored more in depth in a previous post here.

I hope to write more poems in this style (and perhaps read some of Stein’s work in between!)

all multilingual speakers use steinian syntax di ba

eschew commas and semicolons everything is together
anong grammar anyways anong rules para ito 
we’re not always so ‘whatever’ about these things kasi
the grammar for tagalog is sobrang mahirap if it’s not
your first language may pandiwa and you know ganyan
self-contained ba ito? filipinos in this house are experts
at nitpicking a conversation about rooms are actually
veiled attacks and somehow someway everything became
passive aggressive and icky and now i’m as mad as i was
when i was sixteen and nay ignored me for a month nay
comes into my room a different room now and breathes 
relief believing she never hurt me i could never open my 
mouth to the truth to her or here or to anyone in this house
maybe that’s why i am constantly clipping against words 
used with no tact but have meaning everything has meaning
or am i just a scorpio stellium sigh mahirap to be this sensitive
this gusto mo bang prose poetry aling gertrude well here galing
diba experimenting with word order grammatical structures ha
aling have you tried a colonial fit no huh kasi purong languages mo
mga puti german puti french puti english puti you feel your emotions
in english you piss me off aling gertrude i want to feel my emotions in
tagalog no bisaya there were never commas or semicolons in our speech
just hands and smacking and chewing and laughing and shaking our heads
we’re not always so ‘whatever’ about these things kasi walang rules hindi the
truth is we make up the rules as we go i look back and see i made a mistake i added
a question mark in the fifth line pasensya aling gertrude i promise im trying ill do better
next time