July 04, 2025

All Multilingual Speakers Use Steinian Syntax

2 minutes

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

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By Keana Aguila Labra