Barbara Guest

Barbara Guest, 1959

"her eyes focused differently"

Barbara Guest was born in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1920. She attended college at the University of California, Los Angeles, later moving to the University of California, Berkeley, from which she graduated in 1943.

Guest said that coming to New York City from California was like reaching civilization. Guest found acceptance in the thriving New York City art scene of the 1950s. There she was introduced to other New York poets such as James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and the like. Guest was deeply moved by the abstract expressionist painters of the New York scene a la Jackson Pollack and Tony Smith. Working for Art News for most of her life gave Guest an insiders knowledge of the blooming art scene of the 50’s. She was excited by the energy of these painters but felt it would be a short lived experiment, going as far to claim a decline in painting due to the common misconception that now anything ‘radical’ was worth while. While a lover of painting, Guest’s true romance was with words. In an interview Guest claimed that poetry "is the most interesting art form right now" because of its mission to expand the "modern tradition."

Guest’s poetry has often been labeled lyrical and surrealist. Guest herself has claimed to not be a lyrical poet in any sense of the word. In Charles Bernstein’s eulogy to Guest he says, “I take Guest's aversion to the lyric to mean that her work is not an extension of herself — herself expressed — that is, not a direct expression of her feelings or subjectivity, but rather is defined by the textual composition of an aesthetic space — herself (itself) defined.”

Charles Bernstein has a lot of wonderful things to say about Guest and her work in his introduction speech for the Frost Medal, Poetry Society of America at the Celeste Bartos Forum of the New York Public Library (April 23, 1999). I felt his closing statement summed up Guest far better than I could:

As readers we have been unprepared for Guest: she has never quite fitted in to our pre-made categories, our expectations, our explanations. She has written her work as the world inscribes itself, processurally, without undue obligation to expectation, and with a constant, even serene, enfolding in which we find ourselves folded.

We are unprepared for Barbara Guest and for that we thank her, for this lifetime of work that is still unraveling before our eyes and ears, unraveling so that we may revel in it. It has taken so long to recognize Barbara Guest's work, to acknowledge it, perhaps because this work seeks neither recognition nor acknowledgement but that a fair realism may awake in us as we read, inspired not by the author but by the whirls and words and worlds that she enacts.

- Charles Bernstein
 

Structure and Sound

Barbara Guest was a poet and critic associated with the New York school of poets. Guest died of a stroke at 85. She was the only woman part of the New York school of poets.

Barbara used words as form in her poetry to create a visually stimulating poem. Her poems were written to satisfy both visual and auditory senses, like a painter uses paint or a pottery maker uses clay. This was mainly due to the fact that she, like many other members of the New York school of poets were influenced by the visual arts and the 1950’s.

When you read Barbara Guest's poetry, you don’t have to have a specific interpretation of it, you can interpret it in any way or not at all. She was known for having a musical writing style.

Take a look at this poem. Read it once without trying to interpret it. Then read it again and see what you can extract from it. (pay attention to adjectives and similes)

Sound and Structure

"Sound leads to structure." Schönberg.

On this dry prepared path walk heavy feet.

This is not "dinner music." This is a power structure,
heavy as eyelids.

Beams are laid. The master cuts music for the future.

Sound lays the structure. Sound leaks into the future.

Questions:
What do you think Guest thinks about dinner music from the way she used it in the poem?
What does Guest means about the structure of a poem? Is the structure of a poem important when analyzing it?
Look at the way the poem is structured. Using your interpretation of it, how would you arrange the words around so that it can show the feeling you got from reading it.

History
for Frank O’Hara

Old Thing

       We have escaped
       from that pale refrigerator

            you wrote about

Here

       amid the wild woodbine landscapes
       wearing a paper hat

I recollect
       the idols
       in those frozen tubs

            secluded by buttresses

       when the church of

            Our lady cried Enough

and we were banished

       Sighing

            strangers
            we are

       the last even breath

            poets

Yet the funicular
was tied by a rope

       It could only cry
     looking down

            that midnight hill

My lights are
       bright
the walk is
       irregular

       your initials
       are carved on the sill

Mon Ami!

       the funicular
       has a knife

            in its side
Ah allow these nightingales to nurse us

Questions:
Do you think this poem was written about an experience O’Hara and Guest had
together?
Do you think she is trying to mimic his style or his thoughts?
In its disjointed style, can you hear the pace and pauses of the poem when you read it? How would you perform/read his poem?
Do you see a shape in the poem’s format?

From Prof. Dodson:

Please, consider the following poems along with the aforementioned questions, as well.

The Blue Stairs

There is no fear

in taking the first step

or the second

or the third

                                 having a position

                                 between several Popes

In fact the top

can be reached

without disaster

                                 precocious

The code

consists in noticing

the particular shade

of the staircase

                                 occasionally giving way

                                 to the emotions

It has been chosen

discriminately

To graduate

the dimensions

ease them into sight

                                 republic of space

Radiant deepness

a thumb

passed over it

                                 disarming

                                 as one who executes robbers

Waving the gnats

and the small giants

aside

                                 balancing

How to surprise

a community

by excellence

somehow it occurred

                                 living a public life

The original design

was completed

no one complained

In a few years

it was forgotten

                                 floating

It was framed

like any other work of art

not too ignobly

                                 kicking the ladder away

Now I shall tell you

why it is beautiful

Design: extraordinary

color:    cobalt blue

                                 secret platforms

Heels twist it

into shape

It has a fantastic area

made for a tread

that will ascend

Being humble

i.e. productive

Its purpose

is to take you upward

On an elevator

of human fingerprints

of the most delicate

fixity

Being practical

and knowing its denominator

To push

one foot ahead of the other

Being a composite

which sneers at marble

                                 all orthodox movements

It has discovered

in the creak of a footstep

the humility of sound

Spatially selective

using this counterfeit

of height

To substantiate

a method of progress

Reading stairs

as interpolation

in the problem of gradualness

                                 with heavy and pure logic

The master builder

acknowledges this

As do the artists

in their dormer rooms

                                 eternal banishment

Who are usually grateful

to anyone who prevents them

from taking a false step

And having reached the summit

would like to stay there

even if the stairs are withdrawn

Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher

I just said I didn’t know
And now you are holding me
In your arms,
How kind.
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher.
Yet around the net I am floating
Pink and pale blue fish are caught in it,
They are beautiful,
But they are not good for eating.
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher
Than this mid-air in which we tremble,
Having exercised our arms in swimming,
Now the suspension, you say,
Is exquisite. I do not know.
There is coral below the surface,
There is sand, and berried
Like pomegranates grow.
This wide net, I am treading water
Near it, bubbles are rising and salt
Drying on my lashes, yet I am no nearer
Air than water. I am closer to you
Than land and I am in a stranger ocean
Than I wished. 

The Location of Things

Why from this window am I watching leaves?
Why do halls and steps seem narrower?
Why at this desk am I listening for the sound of the fall
of color, the pitch of the wooden floor
and feet going faster?
Am I to understand change, whether remarkable
or hidden, am I to find a lake under the table
or a mountain beside my chair
and will I know the minute water produces lilies
or a family of mountaineers sales the peak?

Recognitions

On Madison Avenue I am having a drink, someone
with dark hair balances a carton on his shoulders
and a painter enters the bar. It reminds me
of pictures in restaurants, the exchange of hunger
for thirst, art for decoration and in a hospital
love for pain suffered beside the glistening rhododendron
under the crucifix. The street, the street bears a light
and shade on its shoulders, walks without crying,
turns itself into another and continues, even
cantilevers this barroom atmosphere into a forest
and sheds its leaves on my table
carelessly as if it wanted to travel somewhere else
and would like to get rid of its luggage
which has become in this exquisite pointed rain
a bunch of umbrellas. An exchange!

The head against the window
how many times one has seen it. Afternoons
of smoke and wet nostrils,
the perilous makeup on her face and on his,
numerous corteges. The water's lace creates funerals
it makes us see someone we love in an acre of grass.

The regard of dramatic afternoons

through this floodlit window
or from a pontoon on this theatrical lake,
you demand your old clown's paint and I hand you
from my prompter's arms this shako,
wandering as I am into clouds and air
rushing into darkness as corridors
who do not fear the melancholy of the stair.