News at Eleven: When [Alice B.] Toklas discovered

that [Gertrude] Stein had fallen in love with a woman named May, in a frenzy of rage she destroyed May's letters, which had served as raw material for one of Stein's early novels. By Toklas's own admission, she became irrational about the very word "may." In Stein's poem "Stanzas," every "may" becomes "can," adding illogic to what one critic called "perhaps the dreariest long poem in the world."

from The Washington Post: Staying on

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