Fair Realism

by Barbara Guest

Barbara Guest's poems, 1989.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

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

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was envious of fair realism.

I desired sunrise to revise itself
as apparition, majestic in evocativeness,
two fountains traced nearby on a lawn . . . .
- An Emphasis Falls on Reality

Barbara Guest's poem for Kandinsky is apt, considering their likemindedness. Both the artist and poet believed in the transcendence of their medium. On the subject, Guest wrote, "The most important act of a poem is to reach further than the page so that we are aware of another aspect of the art. . . . What we are setting out to do it to delimit the work of art, so that it appears to have no beginning and no end, so that it overruns the boundaries of the poem on the page" ("Wounded Joy", Forces of Imagination ). The poem in this collection that best demonstrates Guest's sensibility is "The Screen of Distance"...

An over-large pot of geraniums on the ledge
the curtains part
a view from Kandinsky's window.

The park shows little concern with Kandinsky's history
these buildings are brief about his early life,
reflections of him seen from the window
busy with preparations for exile
the relevance of the geranium color.

Partings, future projects
exceptional changes are meant to occur,
he will rearrange spatial decisions
the geranium disappears, so shall a person.

His apartment looking down on a Square
the last peek of Russia
an intimate one knowing equipment vanishes.

At Union Square curtains are drawn
diagonals greet us, those curves and sharp city
verticals he taught us their residual movements.

The stroke of difficult white finds an exit
the canvas is clean, pure and violent
a rhythm of exile in its vein,

We have similar balconies, scale
degrees of ingress, door knobs, daffodils
like Kandinsky's view from his window
distance at the street end.
- The View from Kandinsky 's Window


1

On a wall shadowed by lights from the distance
is the screen. Icons come to it dressed in capes
and their eyes reflect the journeys their nomadic
eyes reach from level earth. Narratives are in
the room where the screen waits suspended like
the frame of a girder the worker will place upon
an axis and thus make a frame which he fills with
a plot or a quarter inch of poetry to encourage
nature into his building and the tree leaning
against it, the tree casting language upon the screen.


2

The telephone is Flaubert’s parrot and it flitters
from perch to perch across the city. Or someone
is holding the dead thing in her hand in a remote
hotel. A sensitive person with a disability who
speaks to the inanimate. She may even resemble
Louise Colet or the helpful niece. She hasn’t sent
her meaning and I am absent in these reminiscences
of her. The telephone is the guignol of
messages.

It may have been cold moving down from roofs,
a continental wind caught between buildings.
Leaves and pollen blowing onto fire escapes.
Windstruck hambones lying in a gutter. Equinoc-
tial changes the body knows, the hand feels, the
truck passes without notice and buildings con-
tinue their nervous commitments. The earth may
have been moaning underneath this junk. I am
caught in the wind’s draft.


3

At night viewing the screen of distance
with shadowy icons framed by light
I understood the rasping interior
was rearing other icons,

No longer gentle they flashed ripened clauses,
or images raised formidable projections of ice,
the wall was placed in a temporary position
where words glittered from a dark cover,

Narcissism lived in a silver hut.


4

In the lighter time of year words arrived
concealed in branches. Flaubert exchanged
himself for words, night became a night of
words and a journey a journey of words, and
so on.

Words became “a superior joke”, I trembled
under a revolutionary weight, a coward fleeing
from a cloud. The ego of words stretched to
the room’s borders assuming the sonorous
movement of a poem.


5

I entice this novice poem with a mineral, Beryl.
The dictionary bestows on Beryl a skittish description,

 like a sequence in which a car 
 moves over ruptured roads and slices 
 into ghost veins of color— 
 a camera follows each turn, 
 examines the exits where rock protects 
 a visionary tool that prods it:— 

 “A light greenish blue that is bluer 
 and deeper than average aqua, 
 greener than robin’s eggs blue, 
 bluer and paler than turquoise 
 blue and greener and deeper than beryl 
 blue—a light greenish blue that is bluer 
 and paler than beryl or average turquoise blue— 
 bluer and slightly paler than aqua.”

The speculative use of mineral prevents an
attachment to words from overflowing, inserts
a vein of jazz, emblems of color and overcomes
the persecuting stretch of racetrack where words
race their mounts ....


6

Beryl became a distraction as one speaks of color
field or someone as a colorist or of color pre-
dominant, so the paper on which the poem would
rest was grainy with color flashing lights
and the depth, the deepness of the country lane
on which shadows found repose was a wilderness of
color, ditches and trees lost their contours. I
created a planned randomness in which color
behaved like a star.


7

To introduce color to form
I must darken the window where shrubs
grazed the delicate words
the room would behave
like everything else in nature,

Experience and emotion performed
as they did within the zone of distance
words ending in fluid passages
created a phenomenal blush
dispersing illusion ....


8

A difficult poem intrudes like hardware
decorating a quiet building, a tic taking
over the facade, a shrug exaggerated by a
column—

Shelley sailing into the loose wind,
the storm of neurosis hindering the formal plan,
a suggested dwelling left on the drawing board
with clumps of shrubs indicating hysteria or,

Daylight gleams on the rough street where a
blameless career sighs, the poet beak dips
in air, his little wings cause a mild stir,
as someone comes down the stair
he pleads with infancy,

A woman speaks to a dish, old forks, amid her
preparations she smiles touched by history.
Chipped, sundry evidences of temporal life
hiding in a bush. In formal dress domestic
remarks reel into a corpus known as stanzas.


9

The Bride raised the cloud settled on her
aspen head and stepping away from her bachelors
she seized like wands the poem I handed her:

 “A life glitters under leaves 
 piled for anonymity ...” 

She would lead us through glass to view the
enigmatic hill where a castle slung a shadow.


10

There was a dream within a dream and inside
the outer dream lay a rounded piece of white
marble of perfect circular dimension.
The dreamer called this marble that resembled
a grain of Grecian marble, “Eva Knachte,”
who was blown into the dream by the considerate
rage of night.

Her name evoking night became a marble pebble,
the land on which she rested was the shore
of the sea that washed over her and changed
her lineaments into classic marble, a miniature
being, yet perfect in this dream, her size
determined by the summer storm with which
I struggled and seized the marble.

The marble was a relic, as were the movements
of nature on the poem. The sea had lent
a frieze, waves a shoulder when the investitures
of a symbolic life feuded. In that dimness
with bristles, straw, armor plate, grotty
Alexandrines there appeared a mobile fiction ....


11

A man who calls himself a Baron yet strays from
his estate into the cadmium yellow
of a bewildering sunset rendered by apprehension
where a broad approach to a narrow tunnel
is fanned by leaves is faced with a decision—
at the stylized ominous entrance he wonders
if reality will maintain him or empathic snow
subdue his quest ....


12

I sifted through these fictive ambiguities
until there was a plain moment
something like a black table where

Dialogue set in motion urged a search
in memory for that tonal light
illuminating the screen,

The Baron faded as distance gleamed
a clear jar multiplied by frost.

- The Screen of Distance

[Samira Abed · Rating 5 out of 5]

incredible book.

A real pastiche to life and thoughts. Words float overhead and grasp me. There's intimacy in science finally thanks to Barbara Guest. I've been having such an on and off week. Some days feeling really joyful and alight in God's power, other days feeling restless and abandoned lolz. I want new people, which is a sign for me I think of extreme dissatisfaction. I went to the coop and ate a mango and drank a hibiscus tea. I felt such an intense sugar rush, I really need to watch my sugar consumption. I felt like I could jump off of trash cans and I couldn't sit still during the reading at Prairie Lights. I kept impeding the space of my neighbor and flexing my little hand all over their chair's arm.

I met Simone White and was taken by how small she is in real life. OMG. I was so unprepared. I have a reading in Chicago this weekend with my friend Isaac and I'm excited and nervous for how our weekend alone together will go. What if he leaves me at the bus-stop or whatever, what if we don't scrape past irony into the real. That's also what I find truly admirable about this book, it's ability to get into the real.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

a haptic intelligence furling our codes