Guest Chain

by Bill Lavender

Although the word is known only in the WGer. langs. (in all of which it is found with substantially identical meaning), it appears to be of pre-Teut. formation. The sense of the pre-Teut. ghoizdo-z, if the ordinary view of its etymological relations be correct, should be ‘fury, anger’: cf. Skr. hedas neut. anger, Zend zoizda- ugly; the root gheis- ghoisappears with cognate sense in ON geisa to rage, Goth. usgaisjan to terrify (see Gast v.); outside Teut. the derivatives seem to point to a primary sense ‘to wound,
tear, pull to pieces.’
—OED, Ghost

Forms: … —OTeut. gasti-z: —WAryan ghosti-s, represented also by L. hostis, orig. ‘stranger’, in classical use ‘enemy’ (whence the compound hosti-pot-, contracted hospit-, hospes guest, host)…
—OED, Guest

The third corollary can also be political: it is what would make us pass, in spirit, from the hostage to the host/guest and from the host/guest to the ghost. (This is the series constituted by the hostage, host, guest, ghost, holy ghost, and Geist.)
—Jacques Derrida, Aporias

24 pages, Paperback

First published December 20, 1999

About the author

Bill Lavender is a poet, novelist, musician, carpenter and publisher living in New Orleans. He is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and a novel trilogy, Three Letters. He is also a publisher. He founded Lavender Ink, a small press devoted mainly to poetry, in 1995, and he founded Diálogos, an imprint devoted to cross-cultural literatures (mostly in translation) in 2011. His poems, stories and essays have appeared in dozens of print and web journals and anthologies, with theoretical writings appearing in Contemporary Literature and Poetics Today, among others.

His ground-breaking verse memoir, Memory Wing, dubbed by Rodger Kamentetz "a contemporary autobiographical masterpiece," was published by Black Widow in 2011. His novel, Q, a neo-picaresque view of the surreal world of the future, appeared from Trembling Pillow in 2013. A chapbook, surrealism, was published in 2016 by Lavender Ink. His Amazon author page lists most of his books.

Read an interview with Bill about his poetics and about the press at Jacket2.

He is the co-founder, with Megan Burns of Trembling Pillow Press, of the New Orleans Poetry Festival.