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.

The Chicago Review 56:2/3 (autumn 2011)

Pulse

That with which a new and selected shelf lets, permits, entreats:

Sand and saw blade—she has bow to blade to breeze and

within a cross-generational miscellany

to alter the perimeters of the object, she, the one and the many.

Recent and raided, opera doing elected battle with itself

while you slow oxen turn the furrowed plain

knowing now, not known then, did know, known and not fallow

known then, but fallow since anomalous. (Marjorie Welish, “An Anthology Called Pegasus”)

After a sequence of theme issues, including magnificent issues on the work of Louis Zukofsky (winter 2005), Lisa Robertson (spring 2006), Barbara Guest (summer 2008), Seven Poets from Berlin (winter 2010) and New Italian Writing (spring 2011), it’s also good to see The Chicago Review feature a more general issue, with new poetry, fiction and critical writing by Trevor Joyce, Keston Sutherland, Stephanie Strickland, Tom Pickard, Marjorie Welish, Nathanaël, Forrest Gander, Dustin Simpson, Charles Altieri and various others, as well as a small feature of three essays by the late Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-75), introduced by Michael Hansen and Gareth Farmer. As Hansen and Farmer write in their introduction to Forrest-Thomson’s essays—“from His True Penelope was Flaubert: Ezra Pound and Nineteenth-Century Poetry,” “from Lilies from the Acorn” and “Pastoral and Elegy in the Early Poems of Tennyson”:

By the time of her death at the age of twenty-seven, Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-75) had produced a remarkable body of poetry and criticism. Her most influential work, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry, published posthumously in 1978, turned sharply against critics of the previous generation, notably William Empson, and against emergent strains of historicism. The book is an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) defense of “all the rhythmic, phonetic, verbal, and logical devices which make poetry different than prose.” […] The essays exist only in single versions, and are clearly drafts. They have been edited for clarity. Edits are primarily orthographic and grammatical; in some instances, sentences have been slightly adjusted on a case-by-case assessment of Forrest-Thomson’s intentions. Readers interested in locating other work by Forrest-Thomson should consult Alison Mark’s excellent biography in Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Language Poetry (2001).

For a number of years now, The Chicago Review has been one of the rare American trade journals both mainstream and interested in more experimental works, a merging that doesn’t always mesh, especially on the north side of the American-Canadian border. Given that it includes reviews and review-essays, The Chicago Review’s essential rarity as a large-scale trade journal is pretty much confirmed. Brian M. Reed’s enlightened review of Cole Swensen’s greensward [something I reviewed as well, here] provides a series of long perspectives from a reader of Swensen’s work for some time, and Charles Altieri’s attention in “The Place of Rhetoric in Contemporary American Poetics: Jennifer Moxley and Juliana Spahr” seems long overdue.

But I limit my discussion here to Juliana Spahr and Jennifer Moxley, poets whose recent work is in many respects distant from the experimental tradition (Language writing) with which they are most commonly associated. These poets do not so much renounce that tradition as put the spirit of experiment to new use in exploring how poetry might take on more overt social responsibilities. In the process, they redefine received opinions of what rhetoric entails. Spahr offers what I will call a “thin” subjectivity that reduces boundaries among agents and elicits direct participation in the political situations she dramatizes. Moxley calls on rhetoric to establish a poetry with the directness of prose. She explores strategies for reducing the self-defensive postures of obscurity and tests the possibilities of what we might call “sincerity effects.” Neither Spahr nor Moxley offers a theory of rhetoric or engages classical texts on the subject. Yet an understanding of rhetoric that can accommodate resistance to the effects of well-madeness or artifactuality offers powerful insight into their poetic strategies.

I wonder what Altieri might think of, say, the work of poets Stephen Collis, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Peter Culley, nikki reimer or Jeff Derksen? But still, one comes to a journal such as this to see the new writing, I’d suspect, first; to read the poems that might otherwise have been lost, set aside, or discovered after much more effort, and the efforts here are worth it, including an intriguing sequence by Jason Harmon, the 6-part “Cento Encephalogram,” that includes:

3.

What you have doesn’t help, less is more, feathers pulled out, gradual improvement.

“A feather in the hat of indeterminacy”

I had a long pole with a chicken feather, and I would move it and then

with a feather—that circle is reminiscent of Chinese or Japanese calligraphy,

…two featherS behind Just befOre theY disappear beuys touching his forEhead with both feathers.

and trace its outline on the page with a feather dipped in watercolor

(toothpicks, matches, slinkies, piano wires, feathers, etc….

I’m always shocked at the lack of recognition for the work of Chicago-based Canadian writer Nathanaël, the poet formerly known as nathalie stephens, despite title after title of incredible work over the past two decades. Perhaps her work is so difficult to categorize, it becomes easier to overlook? I’m still struggling to articulate anything useful on her two most recent books—Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book) (2009) and We Press Ourselves Plainly (2010)—both published by American publisher Nightboat Books. With each of Nathanaël’s trade titles, the book-length fluidity of essay, philosophy, poem and fiction merged into a new, unnameable form become so much clearer, and thusly, more shocking for their brilliance. In this issue is a lengthy selection, “from THE MIDDLE NOTEBOOKES,” that begins:

[…]

*

Please forgive me, it’s raining.

*

I would like to write you the letter of that duration, but I am so stunned that I can only imagine the letter, tossed about as I am by these sorrows sometimes a strange euphoria. Tonight it is a sorrow that is as vast as this city and installed at my center. I can only look around me at these boxes and crawl across this floor before surrendering to the day ending. // I look at the horizon and I cannot distinguish the sky from the ground.

*

The tear is in stead, but I won’t make an equation out of it.

*

Today I am unspeakable, that’s not right, but I’ll say it anyway, language has no need for me.