Articulated Lair

by Camille Guthrie

In her third collection of poetry, Camille Guthrie engages with Louise Bourgeois's deeply personal sculptures, paintings, and drawings in her own taut, emotive abstractions, carving new meaning out of a body of work central to twentieth-century art. The poet converses with the artist's preoccupations with love, alienation, sex, death, and identity. These poems offer a formally precise, playfully intense perspective—an essential vocabulary for monumental works. As Susan Wheeler observes, "Like Louise Bourgeois, Camille Guthrie makes great art from great discomfort. [...] The rigor of Bourgeois's inner life and studio practice supports these beautiful improvisations like an armature over which a billowing fabric drapes."

Genres: Poetry

56 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're familiar with even a bit of Louise Bourgeois' work, these poems will add another dimension to her art. And if you haven't encountered Bourgeois' work before, this book will make you want to seek some out.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Review forthcoming)

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over 20 years the poems in Camille Guthrie's Articulated Lair made themselves a practice, the practice of being, as every single poet is, under the shadow of this extraordinary extenuation of the unsaid into physical space that is Louise Bourgeois' sculpture, drawing, and pensees. When Bourgeois died in 2010, Guthrie thought to bring out a book of such practices, studies, ekphrasis, so-called.

Talk about the anti-pastoral! "This operation forbids | Nostalgia's pink landscape || Forfeits characters caught | unaware executing sentimental | scenery under graphic pressure || Echoes of | familiar rivers | echoes of imperfect form." This is terrifying, the terror staked in Bourgeois' own survival [from childhood, of her father's brutality], evident, e.g., in the fil of skepticism thrown out (as in a fil d'araignée) toward the poetic materials: "You can stand anything if you write it down," Guthrie quotes Bourgeois, "My complaint about language is that it is perfect, indispensable, and not enough. It doesn't say anything." So this "Cell (Choisy)" -- the Guthrie title adopted from Bourgeois' French hometown -- is an installation, depicting an architectural miniature of a grand estate, set behind an iron-mesh cage, with -- overhead -- a guillotine drawn high for execution. This is what I mean by the shadow of the unsaid Bourgeois would have us live beneath.

My complaint about using ekphrasis to describe Guthrie's project is that in our poetry, ekphrasis so frequently categorizes a set of craft strategies, that it becomes stained by that word, crafty, and I'm so frequently under the spell of Guthrie's impersonation, I recall Bourgeois said, "Your art is not about your materials, never about your materials, it's 'crafted' only for commerce, and with commerce I have no concern." Here is how Guthrie views these things, evident in her practice, "Fillette" (French for little girl, but notice the pun on fil ): "Reality I want | not rigid like a grid | and not limp, but | accurate as the entrails of a rabbit | mischievous as a monkey coat | Round & pricked! || To stroke Fillette | guarantees ingress || To assemble skeins | suggests forgiveness."