The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest

by Barbara Guest, Peter Gizzi (Contributor), Hadley Guest (Editor)

One of the most notable members of the New York School and its best-known woman Barbara Guest began writing poetry in the 1950s in company that included John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler. And from the beginning, her practice placed her at the vanguard of American writing. Guest's poetry, saturated in the visual arts, extended the formal experiments of modernism, and played the abstract qualities of language against its sensuousness and materiality. Now, for the first time, all of her published poems have been brought together in one volume, offering readers and scholars unprecedented access to Guest's remarkable visionary work. This Collected Poems moves from her early New York School years through her more abstract later work, including some final poems never before published. Switching effortlessly from the real to the dreamlike, the observed to the imagined, this is poetry both gentle and piercing seemingly simple, but truly and beautifully dislocating.

Genres: Poetry

600 pages, Hardcover

First published May 30, 2008

About the author

Barbara Guest, née Barbara Ann Pinson (September 6, 1920 – February 15, 2006), was an American poet and prose stylist. Guest first gained recognition as a member of the first generation New York School of poetry.[1] Guest wrote more than 15 books of poetry spanning sixty years of writing. In 1999, she was awarded the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Poetry Society of America. Guest also wrote art criticism, essays, and plays. Her collages appeared on the covers of several of her books of poetry. She was also well known for her biography of the poet H.D., Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World (1984).

Reviews

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Guest's poetry is painterly and images often hold poems together, but unlike many of other poets linked to the New York School, Guest has an attention to poetic lyrics that can often get lost in James Schuyler and Frank O'Hara. Her late works move into more and more surrealism until she read almost like a language poet. This book spans her entire career from "The Location of Things" To "Red Gaze" and a few new poems. This is an great way to get a grip on Guest's work which has been seriously underrated.

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can read my review of this book at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090323....

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest brings together all of the poet's major works, including: The Location of Things, Archaics, The Open Skies (1962); The Blue Stairs (1968); Moscow Mansions (1973); The Countess from Minneapolis (1976); Biography (1980); Musicality (1988); Fair Realism (1989); Defensive Rapture (1993); Stripped Tales (1995); Quill, Solitary APPARITION (1996); If So, Tell Me (1999); The Confetti Trees (1999); Rocks on a Platter: Notes on Literature (1999); Symbiosis (2000); Miniatures and Other Poems (2002); and The Red Gaze (2005).

In addition, the Collected Poems brings together all of the poet's minor works, including: I Ching (1969); The Türler Losses (1979); Quilts (1980); and the poems from Dürer in the Window, Reflexions on Art (2008). Along with new poems uncollected at the time of Guest's death on 15 February 2006...

 I CH'IEN

 II K'UN

 III CHEN

 IV K'AN

 V KEN

 VI SUN

 VII LI


Light strikes light father strike light stroke

Light strike father stroke light strike stroke

Father light strike light strikes light stroke


 tubetun tuntube

 tubulartunnel tunneltubular

tumescenttumtum tumtumtumescent


excite recite

incite excite

reciterincitingexcitingrteciterinciting


 wrath frigate

wombfoamwombfoam

 fjord whelm


quiet skin still top of

soother thirdly

silencer thunderless


sticking to burning glue to

shiney glue two daughter

shining laughter sticking to


joke lake

joking lake joking lake joking

lakejokelakejokelakejokelakejoke
 - I Ching (1969)



Türler patterns
 distinct as
 Palmyra ruins





Nighthawk


Peen t Pee n t
the shriek tenses when that shadow passes
"and midnight all a glimmer"


The crossed panes keep the shadow
peent is heard
in scraps against dawn
listen
 wind scraps
grass shiver
 field tree profile
 Peen t
take oath upon't
 Nighthawk gothic


The sun dropped its leaf like a sun diary
turning a page to shadow where the body lay
in the shrubbery. The body moved, but with a stilly
motion the way a wave curls over a birthday
where nothing remains except the foam streamers,
like giggles after deep laughter, like death closing in.
It should be falling, no tears. It isn't. Mournful?
Yes, the sand's ribbon overturning the shell. The mollusc
pause. Such pettiness and shell and drip of water,
later dryness lent to a shelf.


The body no longer moved. That body is a bird
without rhythm or tied to decanters.
making informal wind notations, then love.


Wristwatches surround themselves with danger.
Signs. Worn clasps. Their time flies, stops.
Gallops. On a street. Dropped like an egg from a tree.
Expensive signals flashed in moonlight. Semi serious
stones wearing themselves out on wrists reaching
for decanters.


I like innocuous rhythms, don't you?
Less isn't so important.
When nothing lies there wearing a ring,
even the Türler loses time.


Water's blue day in the pool
the lake beyond its rim, even that temple
quoting distance an hypothesis,
tricked by fog, three columns reduced to two.
Water's depth and splash
thought margins.


Today the children lived in syllables pushing rafts
pushing themselves, the clime of heads on them the sun -
balconies, a summer stroll to odalisques. Later
a strewn room, the actors gone, disappeared
the pottery flowers. Méchant.


I miss the sparrow heads. Heads dip into the pool 
as that smaller mark of time the arrow on the Türler face.
Tone values important when pointing out the 
landscape.


I'll take you back to the station. Later
there'll be time.


Butterflies are silly, "planes of illumination"


Substantial contents alert in tombs. Presences.
At loss is absence.


 "skipping along the Roman road eating
 a tomato . . ."


Encountering the marble exactitude of things.
The precise pared from the round, the nubile.
Dawn after nightfall fog . . . heavy semblance
sheltering like that chair. Waiting for balance.

 Moving into elsewhere music moves us
 to boulders.
 These columns. Shadows secure in thunder.
 As boats move thick against water, forests
 contained by sky.
 These are contents.
 Loss gropes toward its vase. Etching the way.
 Driving horses around the Etruscan rim.


After the second Türler loss
a lessening perhaps of fastidiousness
 the Timex phase
and who says the wind blows to hurricane
escaped virtue . . . or that indeed
Timex is ripeness
the scent of potato field
[...]
 - The Türler Losses (1979)



1.

Thought nest where secrets bubble
through the tucking, knowing what it's like outside,
drafts and preying beasts, midnight plunderers
testing your camp site and the very demons,too, 
waiting to plunge their icy fingers into your craw
and you crawl under, pull the quilt on top
making progress to the interior, soul's cell.

Following the channel through shallows
where footsteps terrible on quicksand squiggly
penmanship of old ladies, worms with cottony
spears, the light pillared the way trees crowd
with swallows and then a murmur in the ear 
as deeper flows the water. The moon comes out
in old man dress thoughtfully casts an oar.

You float now tideless, secure in the rhythm 
of stuffing and tying, edging and interlining,
bordered and hemmed; no longer unacquainted 
you inhibit the house with its smooth tasks
sorted in scrap bags like kitchen nooks
the smelly cookery of cave where apples
ripen and vats flow domestic yet with schemes
of poetry sewed to educate the apron dawn.

Not exactly a hovel, not exactly a hearth;
"I think a taxi's like a little home," said
Marianne Moore,

this quilt's a virago.


2.

Initially glimpsing
an ivory Pharaoh figure
First Dynasty 3400

 quilted for warmth
 papyrus for words

stitchery sophisticated after A.D.
 tribesmanship
 later religious jaws went boning
after Renaissance windows, the straw
harshness strikes hangings rebut
 then
up went those quilts soft with their clout
I'd like a little cloud here to nestle over the straw
I'd appreciate less straw more feathers
opposite types - straw and feather -
like the moon nestling on thorns
 words you see through windows
throttled words trousled "La Lai del Desire"

 Clouet of silks


3.

Egotistical minutiae of STITCH

 Gamberson
 Hamberton MEDIEVAL
 Pourpoint
 Habergon

Worn simultaneously for protection
quilted medieval circuits

useless against fire
bu charming and tender
as the wispy fingers
that stitched them

I like your hearth fire
it warms my fingers on
your useless currents

weaving obsolete war garments


4.

 ON THE BRINK

IT WAS DISCOVERED THAT HERETOFORE UNCLASSIFIED
(WORN) ATTIRE MIGHT BE USED WITH MERIT, GRACE
WITH THE HOUSEHOLD ACCOMMODATING
 THUS USHERED IN
A NEW ERA FOR PETTICOATS

cold in their flimsy put them on the wall!

 WALL QUILTS
not so gaudy as Eyetalian velvet, but nevertheless . . .

 NOW A BIG SECRET

Sicily invented the first BED QUILTS!

 From then on
 it was into our beds

India China British Isles

Calico ancestors
snuggling under quilts
 "lozened over with silver twiste"
Calico ancestors
Calico Appalachians
Snuggled like Barney Google
Like Louisey
 "Mutts Sneeze"

take 3 across 4 under 5 over 6 down
multiply
once use blue
twice red
third time white like autumn squash


5.

"Tomorrow is another day"
let the lawnmower grab those threads

"A porch is a place for sitting"
do this in cauliflower colours, not too elaborate

"My heart's in the Highlands"
let yourself go with calico

"The darkest hour precedes the dawn"
use father's overalls

"Will O" the Wisp
use your own gears
 (None of that Paisley
 spooking with gaudy thread)


6.

Old time seas of quilts

 coverings

in the gull dawn
 like picking up a sardine
on the beach I see those tickling threads

minnows on mulin


7.

 QUILT NIGHTS

September equinox . . . people walking home
from the Pisan prisons . . . a luxurious shadow
quenching the star I wished on . . . "looney in me
loneliness," James Joyce. Goldenrod is bad for
hay fever. Is that all? Take the single 
hollyhock. Kilt mosquitoes. "Green, abhorrent
slippery city," D.H. Lawrence. Socialist
creatures inhabiting moth skins. Insectophobia.
Pulling up to Reality's little northern curb.
Where reading - illustrated by - deposits one.

So sleepy.
[...]
 - Quilts (1980)



I wake up
 what was I dreaming about?
"Mountains & Sea" a cloud
a hand over the cloud. It is China
that arranges itself thus?
 Early China
before envelopes?

 There is a figure in the landscape
no not at al the sea
on which an old man embarks in a canoe,
what is this? a picnic in the canoe?
It isn't a man in that boat the kimono
is wrapped, how does one say it is a woman!
It's Helen! her face with its arbor of thunder
and laurel starts to drift over the mountain

 Helen!
we're having lunch!
 Return
in your snow boots,
 here's the thermos
I've poured out so many words, and the sandwiches
prepared with watercress. Blissful
sentence begins with "Do you remember . . ."
and "After August," and "I saw you in a red cloak."

 Helen!
don't jump into that pillar of statues!

 without you there is no lunch.
 - Lunch at Helen Frankenthaler's from Dürer in the Window, Reflexions on Art (2008)



Where is the sky?
Here.
And the unknowingness
Of shadows?
There.

Bracken, furze, field,
The picture bending over
To describe itself
As who, not always a
There.

The leaf treads, skies
Throng into themselves;
Water is not far off,
A blessing made of the music
Of turf.

Skimmed as frost
Forms a place on the inner
Scale, becomes easier
When it is learned
Winter begins.

The harvest
Is there in the branches
And whatever says,
"My goodness, I've thunder
In my boughs."

That person who framed 
The fair weather clouds
Bestowed wisdom
To the tips of leaves,
Saying, "a chance of showers."
While you paint
The picture's skin.

So it will be robust,
Yet ambiguous like autumn
Whose thoughts tangling
With spectrum
Never recognize
Their green pronouncing,

Pampered as visionary wind
Deciding whatever burden
It will tote away
Into that space
The picture elects
To purify
 - On a Painting by Haydn Stubbing from Dürer in the Window, Reflexions on Art (2008)



The world 
is going upstairs
and some people
of whom Kiesler 
doesn't approve
are sitting in the basement

 Galaxies Galaxies

You are our last jewel,
and we preserved you
in our ateliers.


A morning
was on day to open
over the roof tops,

and we see dawn
as a galaxy,

having in sleep
experienced original dreams,
now become an environment.


We climb into the night suit,
no longer traditional,
or isolated, the future
in another scale,

Galaxy! Galaxies!
entering from the moon.
 - Homage from Dürer in the Window, Reflexions on Art (2008)


Whatever is whitening the curtsied. Whatever is mildew, the whitest
green I knew. The disarray. They may be honourable attendants of sorrow
of happiness. In my hands, in light, they crimson.

With happiness? The highway stretches before me. Wind lather? I heard
elf in tree and lo! he was near and reverential.

SLOWLY HE STEPS INTO THE TREE IN KNITTED ELF COSTUME.
HE LIVES ON THE BOTTOM BRANCH AND WAS ACCUSTOMED TO
BREAKFAST BEFORE HE WENT AWAY.
 - Elf from new poems


You follow me into the shadowed room.
 A toy bird calls "green tea green tea green tea,"
a spot on the sofa of liquid brown.

Someone stumbles in with a kettle,
bringing snow and a lighted candle.

 A book is near the tables,
 a hussar leaps from the wall.
 If there were a firefly
 I would write a summer idyl, but winter is on the table,
 on the samovar. A magazine rests beside the violin.

 Someone is in the courtyard, snow on his moustache.
 In the dim lighted courtyard
 wet hay underfoot . . .

 In summer ribbons of tiles are laid out of doors,
 nasturtiums and roses climb the rose tree . . .

 "green tea green tea green tea"

 by the lakeside, where the crane flies

 longing develops now and, melancholy . . .
 - Storytelling from new poems


Calm day.

Sudden commencement of rain brightening the bridge.
Sound of water continually falling like a waterfall
carved from the trunks of trees, fastidious as a garment
of silk, and we are disengaged from our revels.

 The Universe explains this.

As far as the eye sees little garments of rain, and if it
were autumn, we would behold many trunks of trees
becoming messages over green leaves.
Night descending frequently from its map of trees,
halting and again halting this reverie.
Walking into the garden, tying one's damp
handkerchief to a tree.

More formidable last Thursday when I spoke to
the gardener, busy learning habits of trees.
The condition of sky is secret, weaving a ring
of brown weeds like a gambler.

Further into rain there were visionary carriages.
You could see them when the plain opened. And
decided to hollow out the elegance
of the forthcoming painting.

Calm night.

(Not to the painter: "To reveal the mask. This could become a small drawing discovered in the night, and it was retained by his brother").

Notations writ in paint, fluvial theme out of
a corner of rain. Flight of waters. Constable traced
over all the plain, heaven also, establishing a dignity
of waters, as if they rippled unendingly.
He traced with his brushes music. There is no song
in Constable, but there is the music, even underground,
when the waters have washed the musical keys
and paint is waiting.

These are the strings of masters, as if it were music
as well as painting. We hear them in the waters,
as if a large brush shifted the momentum, and 
the brush used is green, water green.

We have found the bridge engulfed by history.
Four bridged tying a knot.
And he demanded this be true, holding the giant's hammer,
who was brought out of rain into the parrot-like
bridge over the raindrops he noted, not for the first time.
(He began "the rain notes" when he was young and
there was no denominator, merely a cessation of rain. 
This took place on a hill, and it would become a habit
to loiter in the rain, Speechless).
 - Constable's Method, Brightening Near the Bridge from new poems


Calm night.

He had found an orientation of rain that carved notes
he made on the bridge. Formerly, it was a green
alphabet of water.

Metal covers in-between the storm latch.
He discovered in this valise his brother carved at night,
going around the barn with a night light.
He would have it printed,
as long as there was rain luster.

Calm day.

On the bridge he saw "Elf Creatures."
He had known their names when he was a child making
"Elf Creatures" in the drizzle. And yet he made a 
notation to be reminded of their pedigrees,
as his mother wished.

 Spray of "Elf Creature."

He had noted there was something child-like about the rain.
Only when the bridge was drawn did sensibility
in his drawing show.

Just to sit and draw something like a Magna Carta.
He would draw on it, unaware of destabilization,
brought on by rain.

Before he knew about amber, holding 
three threads in rain. He crossed the bridge in rain.
Short-haired cat of silver independently crossed 
the plank. He found another cat-like creature lying
between raindrops.
 - Beginning of Rain Notes from new poems


I sit so close to him, our minds entwine.
I assume his stewardship through the cold and mist.

There is no other beauty with which he is equipped.
The pain, the exclamation!

Early morning when the tide lowers
and we manipulate our choices.
To see, to feel, to engender memory
of this place where Shelley walked.

He is near.
He breathes into the alphabet I found upon my chair.

A dissertation they brought me, exclaiming why
he failed to ride the unswept sea, and like
a nautilus drowned in heavy seas, windswept
like the alphabet he enriched.
Each day a chamber

[Karen Lepri]

How did it take me so long to get to Barbara Guest? I think she has been in me long before I found this collection. Her poems do not need my review, only for me to recommend them to anyone wanting to see what happens when a poet's imagination and brilliance are set free into a poem, and made totally palpable for the reader.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

It doesn't get better than this.

[Camille Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The following is an appreciation and close reading of a poem in this collection:
Barbara Guest’s Musicalities

[H]

"I shall be medieval and slim/ at once! / Blue canopy/ unmodernized/ and empty/ Blue windows/ to let in the grey/ Blue metaphysics/ of the ultra refined center" (66)

"My dreams/ are stupidly turbulent/ I am in a boat/ and the tourist guide/ says/ Regard those grey houses" (67)

"An amulet that is a beetle/ to be fed by palmetto and cane... Magnified world/ my education/ my craft/ My fruit my oranges" (70)

"The earth is old, no longer fragrant/ those planets are promising,/ Goodbye, hello" (73)

[Robert Walkley · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me several attempts to get into this book. But I finally did and was immensely rewarded for my efforts. Why had I not heard much about Guest before. Her work his equal to anyone of her generation or any of her peers that were published in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry. (Guest is only one of a handful of women represented in the anthology.) Kudos to Wesleyan University Press for publishing this fine collection. Artwork by Guest adorns the book’s cover.

[Emma Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

read “fair realism” “the location of things” and “durer in the window” for class, three of the collections included in this collation so i’m counting it lol. love barbara. The Nude, Words, and History are probably my favorites from this selection

[Jason Zuzga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guest seeks a language that forbids the history of gendering the lyric "I." Her poems snap and crisp to gether like the most intricate of origami.

[Cooch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me months

Took me months to plough through this monster. I read a lot of poetry. This was the low point. Perhaps I'm not on its wavelength. Perhaps it's pish.

[Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came to Barbara Guest in a roundabout way. I went to an exhibit called "Robert Blackburn & Modern American Printmaking" at the Detroit Institute of Arts. There I saw prints made by Grace Hartigan inspired by a poem by Barbara Guest titled "The Hero Leaves His Ship." I was unfamiliar with the poem and the poet and a Google search for Barbara Guest and "The Hero Leaves His Ship" only lead me back to the Grace Hartigan prints. I finally found a the collected poems of Barbara Guest in my library collective. I'm glad I did because I was able to discover a new voice that writes in a poetry style that is less about rhyming and more about observation of the world around us.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jupiter no longer so invisibly pulling so many contemporary moons.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 G936c 2008