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.

TRIPWIRE 16 : PERFORMANCE/WRITING

So much has been said that has spoken to all of us, about Kevin as a writer, about Kevin as a supporter of so many writers and artists, about Kevin’s gift for making us all feel like we were stars, about Kevin’s incredible relationship with Dodie. Kevin’s inclusion of me into the world of Poets Theater gave me laughter, lasting friendships and joyous moments of being a ham. He taught me that it is ok to laugh at what you love and to love the ridiculous in everything (including one’s self) with depth and heart. In 1994 he wrote the play Flophouse for the tenth anniversary of The Lab. In it we jumped to the future and at the end he wakes to find Dodie telling him it was all a dream. He asks her if he is “more divine than the sun and moon?” She answers that she doesn’t “have an answer to that one. Not yet.” Jump now to the future again and the answer is most clearly yes. All my love to Dodie and to everyone who was blessed to know Kevin Killian. (Michelle Rollman)

The first element of the new issue of David Buuck’s TRIPWIRE: a journal of poetics I went through was the lengthy “Kevin Killian Tribute,” titled “A Poets Theater Tribute to Kevin Killian,” around the late San Francisco writer, editor and enthusiast Kevin Killian [see my own small tribute to him here]. The feature includes tributes by Eileen Myles, Scott Hewicker, Cliff Hengst, Karla Milosevich, Craig Goodman, Michelle Rollman, Anne McGuire, Wayne Smith, Tanya Hollis, Steve Orth, Lindsey Boldt, Maxe Crandall, Arnold J. Kempt, Carla Harryman, Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn, Susan Gevirtz, Laynie Browne, Patrick Durgin, Norma Cole and Jo Giardini. “I honestly don’t know what to do with this moment in time when my peers are dying,” Eileen Myles writes, to open her “Don’t Go.” She later on writes: “There was always a youthiness about Kevin Killian. To be young is to be an unabashed fan. He had it as an elder. Kevin had a marvelous instrument for effusing, his changeable expansive reckless grand dame elegant surprising voice sourced from an endless bucket of light from somewhere that scattered love and fun and wit and bitchiness around us all and offered a lawn and a fence to hold us in.” Scott Hewicker begins his tribute writing: “The first play I saw by Kevin Killian was Life after Prince at Kiki Gallery in 1993. It was a beautifully messy spectacle in a cramped gallery full of people. What was exciting about it was its unpredictable mix of amateur flatness and high camp. I’m not sure if they were always fun to sit through, but they sure were a lot of fun to be in.” To introduce the section, editor Buuck writes:

In addition to his work as a poet, novelist, memoirist, biographer, literary organizer, and Top-100 Amazon reviewer (not to mention holding a full-time day job), Kevin Killian made time to write or co-write (and often direct) over 50 Poets Theater plays. Almost always performed as staged readings, with one or two rehearsals, minimal sets and costuming, Kevin’s Poets Theater work demonstrated a commitment to a community-based, non-professional ethos where sociality and shared laughter was as important—if not more so—than how the work may have lived on the page.

At over three hundred pages, there is an enormous amount going on in this issue worth looking at, including an absolutely fascinating interview Michelle N. Huang conducted with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Teddy Yoshikami around a writing/dance collaboration the two of them did .As Huang offers as part of her introduction: “I first encountered Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s work in graduate school, where her poem ‘Fog’ became something of a touchstone for me as I worked through my dissertation on molecular aesthetics and posthumanism in Asian American literature. When I learned the poem was part of a triptych on the transitional states of water—the poem ‘Fog’ preceded by ‘Mizu’ (water) and ‘Alakanak Break-Up’ (ice)—and that all three poems had been created as poetry/dance performances during the early 1980s in collaboration with the Basement Workshop, the foundational Asian American Movement organization in New York, I wanted desperately to see them. My search led me from the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory (where one of the 80 copies of the artist’s book containing ‘Mizu’ can be found), to uncatalogued boxes at Beinecke, and eventually to the choreographer, Theodora (Teddy) Yoshikami, of Morita Dance Company, who still lives in New York. She had given the VHS tapes to the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, where they waited in a box, for me (I felt) to find.” This is really is an interesting interview, especially on a project forty-years distant that hasn’t (it would appear) received the acknowledgement, critical or otherwise, that it deserves (should interviewer/critic Huang be considering putting a volume of this text plus a critical introduction together, say, the way Wave Books produced Lorine Niedecker’s Lake Superior?). I would even say that this interview is worth the price of admission alone (I would also say that for the Kevin Killian section, so I’m basically telling you that you would be wise to pick up a copy of this issue). The interview, also, is immediately followed by a stunning four-part poem “YOU ARE HERE” by Berssenbrugge, the first part of such reads:

We’ve powerful analytic tools to simplify an experience, so we can absorb it emotionally.

There’s joy in transmuting a supernova into science and wonder, at the same time.

World’s a net of relations in which appearance is one; to correlate the visible with the personal makes it real.

Seeing, a kind of consciousness, materializes its form.

Then everything constellates out to the farthest star.

The issue also includes numerous other features, from poetry to scripts to a whole slate of book reviews at the end.