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.

Garrett Caples, Retrievals

 Poets tend to enjoy reading, so when [Kenneth] Rexroth points out a deficiency in this department, he refers not to quantity but kind. The very pleasure poets seek in the act of reading renders many of them incapable of pursuing any topic to its necessary depth, because doing so would likely compromise their enjoyment. They might have to read some pretty boring shit in order to get the information they need to take an informed position. Their own emphasis on aesthetics, poetics, the formal aspect of writing leaves them vulnerable to oversimplification and elegance where substance must prevail and prone to purely theoretical articulation where particularity and application are all that matter. For all its theoretical politics, the present Eurocentric avant-garde displays little curiosity about the actual mechanisms of American imperialism that dictate our day-to-day life in the form of the ubiquitous crap we make other peoples make for us next to nothing. Such realities are too ugly and complicated for theory, and theory’s shown itself unable to cope after 9/11. When the twin towers collapsed, a lot of elegant ideas went with them. (“Philip Lamantia and André Breton”)

Lately, I’ve been going through San Francisco poet, editor and critic Garrett Caples’ collection of essays, Retrievals (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2014) [see my review of his most recent poetry collection here], an assemblage of interrogations that circle around a central core of surrealism across the early and middle parts of the 20^th century. The twenty-one essays collected here move from André Breton and Philip Lamantia into Barbara Guest, Richard O. Moore, John Hoffman, Richard Tagett, Marie Wilson, Jean Conner, Arthur Jerome Eddy, Sylvia Fein and multiple other writers, artists and critics, many of whom were well known during their individual periods of activity, but overlooked across and through the years that followed. Originally composed as individual pieces for a variety of journals, magazines and other venues, the essays gathered together offer exactly what the title suggests, attempting to retrieve or reclaim individual names of artists across decades’ of work, most of whom touched upon the central core of surrealism. As he offers to open his essay on Jean Conner, “Becoming Visible”: “When I began work on Retrievals, gathering those essays I’d written on various writers, artists, and ideas that, for one reason or another, had dropped off the cultural map or never fully made it on, I could resist the temptation to add a few more.”

There is such wonderful discovery through these pieces, as Caples writes about seeing a particular artwork and working to dig up information on that particular artist, for example, working to follow a particular loose thread as far as it might go. The pieces are simultaneously critical as well as personal, allowing his wealth of inquiry and research into forms both informative and highly readable. His piece on spending time with Barbara Guest’s last work, as well as spending time with her across her final few years, is quite lovely. Other pieces touch upon his association with City Lights, having been poetry editor there for a number of years now: “As 2013 is the 60^th anniversary of City Lights Books,” he writes, to open his piece “Apparitions: Of Marie Wilson at City Lights,” “I’ve been reflecting lately on its lost history. When I started working there, for example, I came across a catalogue from sometime in the early ‘60s, advertising City Lights publications to the rest of the trade, and I was immediately struck by the appearance, not just of the press’s own titles but the full list of various Bay Area small presses—Oyez, Auerhahn, and White Rabbit, if I remember correctly—which often enough were only available in the bookstore’s then-downstairs poetry section. In a way, City Lights was Small Press Distribution (SPD) avant la lettre, distributing small poetry presses not because it made money but because it was a cool thing to do.”

I’d been a few weeks attempting to find my way into the collection, but found the prologue, “Wittgenstein, A Memoir,” had such an intimidating weight, that I could only find my way in, and way through, by starting to read from the centre of the collection (his piece on Barbara Guest, actually). In certain ways, this collection reminds me of Douglas Crase’s more recent collection of essays (collected across decades of his own critical work on poets and poetry, although covering much of the same period of American poetry) [see my review of such here], in that both collections have allowed me and my own reading new spotlights on a variety of writers that may have fallen into the long shadows of others, especially across the decades since. Some interesting elements through his collection I hadn’t previously considered including Caples’ assertion that surrealism, at least André Breton’s assertion of it, was far more multicultural a movement than anything else occurring during that period across American/French art, writing and thinking, or even the fact that the CIA was deliberately and quietly promoting Abstract Expressionism over surrealism, concerned, in part, over any possibility of revolution or revolt that surrealism might prompt. What is interesting, as well, is Caples’ work around assessing and reassessing the work and life of Philip Lamantia (Caples was also the co-editor of the 2013 collection, The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia), a poet I had little to no prior knowledge of. As the essay “Philip Lamantia and André Breton” begins:

That the standard biography of André Breton by Mark Polizzotti, which has all the appearance of being exhaustive, nonetheless excludes Philip Lamantia is a disservice not only to both poets but to the reader as well. For surely the reader would be interested to learn that, during his Second World War exile in the United States, Breton admitted but one American poet into the ranks of surrealism—let us not count Charles Duits, who wrote in French and receives ample coverage—that this poet was only 15 at the time, that he went on to become one of the major poets of a generation that includes Creeley and Duncan, O’Hara and Ashbery, and that he was still alive and living in San Francisco at the time of the bio’s original publication.

Barbara Guest, Quill, Solitary APPARITION

As a contributor to the current issue of The New Quarterly (my short story, "Opening"), I was asked to submit a little write-up for their blog on "Who's Reading What." I did a short write-up on Barbara Guest's Quill, Solitary APPARITION (The Post-Apollo Press, 1986). You can read my little write-up (as well as posts by a variety of other contributors to the same issue) here.

The Alchemist’s Mind: a book of narrative prose by poets, ed. David Miller

Come on, Graciela, Jeanie Jones whimpers.

A twig snaps, a car accelerates toward the ocean.

From somewhere in the shrubbery at the edge of the parking lot the singing of the mockingbird unfolds as in a dream continuing day and night – free of fate, since no matter how much seems to happen, nothing actually does.

Period – so there – it’s over – fini – the end – come all. (Lyn Hejinian, “Lola”)

I’m fascinated by the choices editor David Miller made to construct his new anthology, The Alchemist’s Mind: a book of narrative prose by poets (East Sussex, UK: Reality Street, 2012), including the work of twenty-eight writers from North America and the United Kingdom. His list includes Guy Birchard, Paul Buck, Vahni Capildeo, Johan de Wit, Lawrence Fixel, Giles Goodland, Barbara Guest, Paul Haines, Lee Harwood, Lyn Hejinian, Fanny Howe, Robert Lax, John Levy, Tom Lowenstein, Daphne Marlatt, Brian Marley, Bernadette Mayer, David Miller, bpNichol, Will Petersen, Kristin Prevallet, David Rattray, Ian Robinson, Robert Sheppard, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Stephen Watts and M J Weller. As Miller writes in the introduction, “This anthology is intended to highlight the contribution made by poets to narrative prose writing since 1970, emphasising the variety, scope and singularity involved, and signaling that a great deal of the most interesting, unconventional and impressive work in this field, in the UK and North America, has been written by poets.” He goes on to write:

Narrative prose in the UK and North America is, for the most part, not even haunted by the presumed ghosts of “classic” modernism (e.g. James Joyce, William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, Andrei Bely, Miguel de Unamuno), let alone informed by an awareness of the living example of those writers, and most certainly doesn’t attempt to go beyond modernism. It’s more as if modernism never existed… except perhaps as something to teach in the academy. Language is mainly seen as a transparent medium, and literature (following on from this) is a largely direct transference of happenings, ideas, emotions, etc, from one mind (the author’s) to another (the reader’s), only complicated by questions of manner, ingenuity, decoration or embellishment, and order (mostly considered in a fairly rudimentary way, if sometimes “tricky” at the same time). Mimesis hangs behind all this like a moth-eaten curtain, and Aristotle’s well-made plot (with its beginning/middle/end) largely reigns supreme, even if a little chronological reshuffling may be indulged in, together with certain other ways of complicating the basic schema. “Character” follows the certainties of conventional psychology, for the most part. We are what we know we are, however terrible that may sometimes be (as with the fictional – and cinematic – obsession with serial killers, for example), and however mistaken we may sometimes be about one another.

I’m fascinated by the selection, although frustrated by the lack of biographical information on any of the authors. If the work is so compelling, why not let the reader know what else these writers might have to offer, or even what continent they might be from? Of the authors listed here, there are three (to my knowledge) that are Canadian – the obvious bpNichol and Daphne Marlatt, as well as the late Toronto writer Paul Haines (who had a posthumous collection, Secret Carnival Workers, a few years back, co-edited by his daughter, Emily Haines of Metric). I’m intrigued at what other Canadian writers or writing he might have considered, and if he went through any of the Coach House Press anthology series “The Story So Far” to help with his choices? The bpNichol selection comes from his Selected Organs: Part of an Autobiography (Black Moss Press, 1988), which is apparently forthcoming in a new edition, and one of the finer pieces (if not the most fun) in the anthology:

Probably there are all sorts of stories. Probably my mouth figures in all sorts of stories when I was little but I don’t remember any of them. I don’t remember any stories about my mouth but I remember it was there. I remember it was there and I talked and sang and ate and used it all the time. I don’t remember anything about it but the mouth remembers. The mouth remembers what the brain can’t quite wrap its tongue around and that’s what my life’s become. My life’s become my mouth’s remembering, telling stories with the brain’s tongue. (bpNichol, “The Mouth”)

This really is a fantastic anthology, and part of the pleasure from going through such a volume is not only in discovering works, but the possibility for re-discovery, moving through a range of the familiar and the unfamiliar, including some writing that could very easily have been otherwise overlooked. For anyone interested in the idea of “poet’s prose” (something I discussed recently through reviews of new works by Roger Farr and Lisa Robertson), it seems important to work through a collection of what has already been produced, to help understand just where it is we should possibly go next.

Physical Description of Sexual Intercourse

The explorer travels over the beloved body, but nowhere does he find an end or edge.

When Columbus set foot on the Bahamas, the two worlds which God had cast asunder were reunited and began to become alike.

The moon unusually large and near. At times, the sea rises into the light and become incomprehensible.

The contract is definite when the man steps into the woman’s shoe. As long as the foot still hovers above the shoe, his body may still turn on its own axis, which takes about twenty-four hours.

What does my body want? (Rosmarie Waldrop, “A Form of Memory [abridged]”)

A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area, Sarah Rosenthal

The Bay Area, along with New York City, is one of the two major centers of experimental writing in the United States. The Bay Area’s long and vibrant history as a literary center (and one where unconventional activity is accepted and even encouraged), along with its large number of creative writing programs and its bounty of small presses and reading series, make it a magnet for experimental writers. This collection of interviews with Bay Area experimentalists allows us to have our cake and eat it too: We learn more about some of the most compelling experimental work being produced today, and we immerse ourselves in a community which is only the most recent incarnation of a history of experiment dating back a couple of centuries.

I’ve always been taken with any version of literary local histories and archival projects, so Sarah Rosenthal’s recent A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010) is certainly a revelation, compiling interviews she’s conducted with writers Michael Palmer, Nathaniel Mackey, Leslie Scalapino, Brenda Hillman, Kathleen Fraser, Stephen Ratcliffe, Robert Glück, Barbara Guest, Truong Tran, Camille Roy, Juliana Spahr and Elizabeth Robinson. As her lengthy introduction reminds, this is an area that once gave us the Berkeley Renaissance (Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan) as well as Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth and numerous others, information she not only provides as length but gives such a wonderful context to, to open up her series of interviews, conducted over more than a couple of years. Just what is it about the Bay Area that brings out such strong writers, such fierce experimentation?

Brenda Hillman: It's a questions that is so upsetting right now. I was talking to Kathleen Fraser a while ago about the opening up of form in the last twenty years, almost to the point of destroying the boundaries of the poem. It is the artist's job to make form. Not even to make it, but to allow it. Allow form. And all artists have a different relationship to it, and a different philosophy of it. I worked on this poem [“Cascadia,” from Cascadia, Wesleyan University Press, 2001] for eight months; it's very carefully structured. But I wanted it to be boundaryless in a way: It's not punctuated, and I wanted it to go back and forth within itself and within time. I thought, “Well, you can have both things: structure and boundarylessness.” And in fact I think that when you are trying to open up a territory—in this case I was working with a desire to open the lyric—you have to be greedy, in that you want more than you can do. And you're always bound to fail.

SR: You're trying to let error in, but you don't want error to take over the poem.

BH: I wanted every line to be memorable. Also, I wanted to get at and challenge the idea—not a central idea, because the poem doesn't really have a center—Aristotle's idea of change: that you can tell where something is going because of where it ends up. Final cause, or something like that—which is really kind of an anti-divine notion, and which I love as a philosophy of living. It's sort of like, “I'm not sure where I am going, but I can tell it was my fate to be there because that's where I ended up.”