Meditations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest, ed. Joseph Shafer

I’m so pleased to be here and of course one of my difficulties in life is not just writing poetry; it’s collecting my particles and wondering what I’m supposed to do where, so I thought today was going to be a discussion, of what the poem is about, so I brought a poem on Anne-Marie Albiach. About two weeks ago, at home, I was looking through some old diaries that of course weren’t completed but still had white pages and I saw at the top of one page—oh this was ten, fifteen years ago—“Wrote a letter to Prynne,” “Received book from Anne-Marie Albiach,” and, in little brackets, “She inspires me,” and now that I know her and know her work more, she inspires me more. So there was a birthday celebration for Anne-Marie in San Francisco and I wrote a poem to her in celebration of this, of her, of her poetry, and after I’d finished it, I realized that what I’d written about, because she is very much on my horizon, that I’d written about the process of writing a poem. So I’m going to read this [poem, “Startling Maneuvers”] and we’re going to discuss it—Mei-mei’s going to tell you what it means… [laughter]. (“A Talk on ‘Startling Maneuvers’,” 1998)

There is a lot to admire across the three hundred-plus pages of heft in Meditations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2025), edited with an introduction by Joseph Shafer and foreword by Marjorie Welish. Assorted, it is called, as it is neither collected nor selected, a process of assemblage, “six decades of writing on literature and art by one of the most significant poets of our time,” the late Brooklyn poet Barbara Guest (1920-2006), a poet who first came to prominence as one of the New York School. “Barbara Guest is a poet, first and foremost. And so, when reading her writings otherwise, it is with this vocation in mind.” writes Marjorie Welish, to open her “Mysteriously Defining the Foreword.” “A celebrated New York School poet, Guest assumes that daily life, the intimacy of conversation, and friendship real or imagined are ever at hand. Presupposed also is the cultural life of the city: cafés, painters’ studios, bookshops—at least as New York was in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. But she sees all these as prompts for writing through an imaginative style that invents worlds she knows are out of reach as projected fantasies of another time and place, and yet worth the challenge: the challenge to make of style a palpably lived atmosphere.”

The book is assembled into thematic sections—“LECTURES, ESSAYS, & POETIC PIECES,” “PROFILES,” “H.D.,” “OTHER FICTION” and “REVIEWS”—the breadth of such showcase a writer and thinker deep in the trenches of artistic engagement. She writes on her own practice, and the work of numerous writers and artists surrounding her, including Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Richard Tuttle, Helen Frankenthaler, Piet Mondrian, Anne Waldman, Kenneth Koch, Dennis Phillips, Robert de Niro (Sr.), Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Harry Mathews, Anna Balakian, James Schuyler, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Duncan and numerous others. Her work displays a curious mind, one deep in the thick of it. As Guest quotes from Plato in her piece “Forces of Imagination,” cited as a “talk delivered in April 1999 at Guest’s award ceremony for the Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry by the Poetry Society of America”: “If any poet were to come to us and show his art we should kneel down before him as a rare and holy and delightful being, but we should not permit him to stay. We should anoint him with myrrh and set a garland of wool upon his head and send him away to another city.”

I’m struck by numerous lines throughout this collection, including her opening commentary on a poem by French poet and translator Anne-Marie Albiach (1937-2012), the opening paragraph of that particular lecture I quote above, at the offset of this particular review. Further along in the same piece, responding directly to that particular poem by Albiach, Guest offers: “My interpretation of this is that when you come to the point in a sensibility when you’re approaching a poem, that is the preparation, and there is always a stasis, which contains balance and then non-movement. You are prepared to move but you’re still balancing yourself. And the pull in the composition, which is physical because it has to announce itself and it announces its frailty, its physical presence, and that’s why its tug is phantom-like. And it’s beginning to have its phantom-shadow on the poem. And this pull is so extraordinarily important because if you don’t feel the pull between the poem and you, then you somehow or other don’t manage to produce anything that has much energy.”

As most books of this nature, this scale, have worthy stories to tell of how they came to be, this particular project’s timeline is a bit longer than most, as editor Joseph Shafer writes to open his introduction:

In the summer of 2004, Barbara Guest signed two contracts with Suzanna Tamminen, the editor at Wesleyan University Press. One was for a collected poems and the other for a collected prose. The projects were actually proposed together five years earlier in 1999, after Wesleyan published Guest’s Rocks on a Platter: Notes on Literature, a turn-of-the-century quasi-manifesto in the spirit of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés. But several years went by between that initial proposal and the eventual signing because Guest and Tamminen were busy publishing Miniatures and Other Poems (2002). Once those contracts were filed, conversations about what either a collected prose or poems would entail had to be postponed as their attention was directed back toward the release of The Red Gaze (2005). Thus, when Guest passed away on February 15, 2006, neither a collected poems nor a collected prose had taken shape.   

I’ll admit, I’ve been aware of Guest’s work for some time, but have only taken cursory glances at The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest (Wesleyan, 2013), a project begun while the author was still alive, but completed by her daughter, Hadley Baden-Guest, for the sake of publication. A collection such as Meditations, offering her conversation and thinking on writing and visual art, I would argue, makes for a remarkable entry point to her work, one rife with stellar lines and numerous prompts into other directions. Her work on H.D. (1886-1961) alone is intriguing, and would make for an interesting counterpoint to the extensive work by Robert Duncan (1991-1988) [discussed at length by Toronto poet and critic Michael Boughn through his own essays, which I reviewed here], which she references as well, within her pieces assembled here. “Since the completion and publication of my biography of H.D.,” she writes, to open “The Intimacy of Biography,” “I now realize that I have been seeking that special state of grace I had experienced while writing this book, and this has departed with the disappearance of H.D. and her companions from my immediate life. I reach out in search of that powerful light, or that sombre candle that lit the landscape of my own life as I struggled through the successive vales of a heretofore uncharted realm.”

Separately, I’ve heard talk of Norma Cole co-editing a forthcoming new volume of collected or selected poems of Guest’s poems, which is intriguing, given the fact that the prior volume assembled all of Guest’s published work. It makes me curious at the framing, the argument, of this upcoming collection. Will it include work previously uncollected, unpublished or otherwise unseen? Or will it focus more on certain aspects of her larger publishing history, certain collections, with a refreshed or expanded framing? Either way, I am intrigued.