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Overview
Winner of the SFSU Poetry Center Book Award (2010)
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819574510 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2013 |
| Series: | Wesleyan Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 600 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
BARBARA GUEST (1920–2006) published over twenty volumes of poetry, and earned awards including the Robert Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society of America. HADLEY GUEST is Barbara Guest's daughter. She lives in Berkeley, California. PETER GIZZI is the author of four books of poetry, including The Outernationale (2007). He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Barbara Guest (1920–2006) published over twenty volumes of poetry, and earned awards including the Robert Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society of America.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE LOCATION OF THINGS
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 scales 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 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!
That 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.
Piazzas
for Mary Abbot Clyde
In the golden air, the risky autumn,
leaves on the piazza, shadows by the door on your chair the red berry
after the dragonfly summer
we walk this mirroring air our feet chill and silver and golden a portrait by Pinturicchio we permanently taste the dark grapes and the seed pearls glisten
as the flight of those fresh brown birds an instant of vision that the coupling mind and heart see in their youth with thin wings attacking a real substance
as Pinturicchio fixed his air.
After all dragonflies do as much in midsummer with a necessary water there is always a heaviness of wings.
To remember now that the imagination's at its turning how to recall those Pierrots of darkness
(with the half-moon like a yellow leg of a pantaloon)
I would see you again (like the purple P of piazza).
Imagination thunder in the Alps yet we flew above it then met a confusion of weather and felt the alphabet turning over when we landed in Pekin. I read the late Empress's letters and thought they were yours,
that impeccable script followed by murders
real or divined as the youth leaning over the piazza throwing stones at his poems. He reads his effigy in the one that ricochets he weeps into the autumn air and that stone becomes golden as a tomb beware the risky imagination
that lines its piazzas with lambswool or for sheer disturbance places mirrors for Pinturicchio to draw his face at daybreak when the air is clear of shadows and no one walks the piazza.
All Grey-haired My Sisters
All grey-haired my sisters what is it in the more enduring clime of Spring that waits?
The tiger his voice once prayerful around the lax ochre sheen finally in withering sleep its calendar,
Relatives delicious plumages your scenery has a black musical depth the cardinal flies into he learns to repeat on an empty branch your distillations. Sombre mysteries the garden illumines a shape of honey hive the vigorous drones lighting up your face as fortunes pour from your cold pockets into the heat and glaze, fortresses for those memories brisk in the now doubling air,
Adventuresses guided by the form and scent of tree and flower blossoming the willow once frail now image cut of stone so to endure,
My darlings you walked into the wars with wreaths of pine cones, you lay by the sea and your sweet dresses were torn by waves as over each receded and pebbles were lifted at your feet in the foam,
Ancestress with blond boating hair as daisies drop at your wrists which flight are you making?
down the lime aisles I see your sashes disappear.
Why should I count you more equinoctal, sun?
Smoothly the oars into the bay the ultramarine fast as a castle, or rock its soul plunged to craters virginal
the rapid twist of spume to all-forgetting wrecks, intensely now that story's done.
Mermaids your hair is green. I recognize the powerful daylight heat. My savages a cooling torpor rearranges,
as at its southern margins, the oak.
From your journals He said: "In nymphic barque"
She replied: "A porcupine."
And later,
"Reason selects our otherness."
In the broad strange light,
a region of silences. The delphic clouded tree knows its decline,
if you were to forget animosities, girls,
and in the pagan grass slide heedlessly blossoms would return such songs as I've sung of you, the youthful ashes fling upward settling fragrant brightness on your dusky marquetry,
All grey-haired my sisters this afternoon's seraphicness is also fading. Linger while I pass you quickly lest the cherry's bloom changed to white fall upon my head.
Windy Afternoon
Through the wood on his motorcycle piercing the hawk, the jay the blue-coated policeman
Woods, barren woods,
as this typewriter without an object or the words that from you fall soundless
The sun lowering and the bags of paper on the stoney ledge near the waterfall
Voices down the roadway and leaves falling over there a great vacancy a huge leftover
The quality of the day that has its size in the North and in the South a low sighing that of wings
Describe that nude, audacious line most lofty, practiced street you are no longer thirsty turn or go straight.
Russians at the Beach
The long long accent
the short vowel that thing wrapped around a palm tree
is it this water, or this jetty?
The blue, in air dismal
to the face further than sand then green rolling its own powder
you will provide you stranger
The cargo intimate cargo
of lashes and backs bent like a crew the miles are vast and the isthmus
shows five-toed feet erect thunders all afternoon
You have traveled more than this shore where the long bodies
wait
their thin heads do not understand
They are bent
the breeze is light
as the step of a native is heavy you are tired
but you breathe
and you eat and you sleep where the stream is narrow
where the foam has left off
ascending
the day meets your borders
so easily
where you have discovered it.
The Hero Leaves His Ship
I wonder if this new reality is going to destroy me.
There under the leaves a loaf The brick wall on it someone has put bananas The bricks have come loose under the weight,
What a precarious architecture these apartments,
As giants once in a garden. Dear roots Your slivers repair my throat when anguish commences to heat and glow.
From the water A roar. The sea has its own strong wrist The green turf is made of shells
it is new.
I am about to use my voice Why am I afraid that salty wing Flying over a real hearth will stop me?
Yesterday the yellow Tokening clouds. I said "no" to my burden,
The shrub planted on my shoulders. When snow Falls or in rain, birds gather there In the short evergreen. They repeat their disastrous Beckoning songs as if the earth Were rich and many warriors coming out of it,
As if the calm was blue, one sky over A shore and the tide welcoming a fleet Bronzed and strong as breakers,
Their limbs in this light Fused of sand and wave are lifted once Then sunk under aquamarine, the phosphorous.
Afterwards this soundless bay,
Gulls fly over it. The dark is mixed With wings. I ask if that house is real,
If geese drink at the pond, if the goatherd takes To the mountain, if the couple love and sup,
I cross the elemental stations from windy field to still close. Good night I go to my bed.
This roof will hold me. Outside the gods survive.
Les Réalités
It's raining today and I'm reading about pharmacies
in Paris.
Yesterday I took the autumn walk, known in May
as lovers' walk.
Because I was overwhelmed by trees (the path from the playhouse leads into a grove and beyond are the gravestones),
squirrels and new mold it is a good thing today to read about second-class pharmacies where mortar and plastic goods disturb death a little and life more. It is as if perpetual rain fell on those drugstores making the mosaic brighter,
as if entering those doors one's tears were cleaner.
As if I had just left you and was looking for a new shade of powder orchidée, ambre, rosé, one very clarified and true to its owner, one that in a mirror would pass for real and yet when your hand falls upon it
(as it can) changes into a stone or flower of the will and triumphs as a natural thing,
as this pharmacy turns our desire into medicines and revokes the rain.
In the Middle of the Easel
My darling, only a cubist angle seen after produces this volume in which our hearts go
(tick tick)
I see you in a veil of velvet
then I'm quiet because you've
managed the apples, you've arranged
to sit. You are twice clothed
in my joy, my nymph.
Painters who range up and down Mont hill or Mont this, disarray in the twilight those boulevards,
make every stroke count and when one of the Saints
(in the dark apse tonal) quits,
I'm with you.
Together we'll breathe it,
you and I in the sleeve forgiving requiem,
in the priest tinted air.
In the gaslight that ridiculous plume
reminds me of hawks, I admire
their arc, I plunge
my everyday laughter into that kimono wing
what a studio soar! What rapture!
The gifted night, the billowing dark!
The heroine Paint sobs
"No one who has ever loved me
can tell me why
there are two birds at my wrist
and only one flies."
On the Way to Dumbarton Oaks
The air! The colonial air! The walls, the brick,
this November thunder! The clouds Atlanticking,
Canadianing, Alaska snowclouds,
tunnel and sleigh, urban and mountain routes!
Chinese tree your black branches and your three yellow leaves with you I traffick. My three yellow notes, my three yellow stanzas,
my three precisenesses of head and body and tail joined carrying my scroll, my tree drawing
This winter day I'm a compleat travel agency with my Australian aborigine sights, my moccasin feet padding into museums where I'll betray all my vast journeying sensibility in a tear dropped before
"The Treasure of Petersburg"
and gorgeous this forever I've a raft of you left over like so many gold flowers and so many white and the stems! the stems I have left!
Cape Canaveral
Fixed in my new wig the green grass side
hanging down I impart to my silences
operas.
Climate cannot impair
neither the grey clouds nor the black waters the change in my hair.
Covered with straw or alabaster I'm inured against weather.
The vixen's glare, the tear on the flesh covered continent where the snake withers happily and the nude deer antler glitters, neither shares my rifled ocean growth
polar and spare.
Eyes open
spinning pockets for the glass harpoons
lying under my lids
icy as summers
Nose ridges
where the glaciers melt into my autumnal winter-fed cheek hiding its shudder in this kelp
glued
cracked as the air.
Sunday Evening
I am telling you a number of half-conditioned ideas Am repeating myself,
The room has four sides; it is a rectangle,
From the window the bridge, the water, the leaves,
Her hat is made of feathers,
My fortune is produced from glass And I drink to my extinction.
Barges on the river carry apples wrapped in bales,
This morning there was a sombre sunrise,
In the red, in the air, in what is falling through us We quote several things.
I am talking to you With what is left of me written off,
On the cuff, ancestral and vague,
As a monkey walks through the many fires Of the jungle while a village breathes in its sleep.
Someone stops in the alcove,
It is a risk we will later make,
While I talk and you bring your eyes to the fibre
(as the blade to the brown root)
And the room is slumberous and slow
(as a pulse after the first September earthquake).
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 berries 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 Crisis
Not to be able to carry mice to your room when you have walked the boulevards with rain at your tail and umbrellas opened an edifice of dragoons preparing to ascend when the park was hungrier,
its bursting branches were loaves under the yellow sky. Alas the great days of desire have passed.
Prepare for bulbs and minor grasses; seize on imported mauves, ivory cutlasses prepared in Switzerland for sailors whose white eyelashes will curtain the whim of captains and make graceful the long Cape trip. You will sail upon mats of periwinkles, if you prefer.
Why tramp now the marshes where the expert mice rest on borders and sit with their pierced hearts? They have grown fat under the discipline of raiders who need in the night corridor a lawful pillow, in the black watches a slim straw purchased for a mouse, a hat to cover the dark marches and the small confidences laid on cushions before daybreak when fountains plash and mirrors reflect the thick mud where armies have passed.
Upside Down
Old slugger-the-bat
don't try to control me I've a cold in my head and a pain in one side
it's the cautious climate
of birds.
Where the bitter night shows fat as an owl the skeleton
not counting the skin.
This species can't bite,
but it has a hurt. We've all got birds
flying at us
little ones over the toes.
The hand that holds is webbed no knuckles
but the bone grows.
Seeing You Off
Bracketed in my own barn
where ignorant as those armies I flash my light upon the Hudson
and shout continental factories take fire! Send navies out from Jersey
let there be more edens
of soap and fats
Such splendors make rigid a democracy
define its skeleton permit the night to cleanse its air
with moving vans
olympic as dawn
Upon the big liner
moored at last by little landscape poems
frail as lifeboats settling down to rest
While we kiss in the saloon
far above the cries from plows and auto parts
sending up goodbyes
as ugly as those waifs of paper
on the pier or that truck profiled into gloom
his whole insides protest
Departures make disgust into a cartoon
of rose Nabiscos and I digest the sinking afternoon in a fleet
of taxicabs dead sure as you
and Carthage after?
we'll float on that wine-dark sea
Excerpted from "The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Estate of Barbara Guest.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Fair Realist - Peter Gizzi
Timeline
Works by Barbara Guest
Notes and Acknowledgments
THE LOCATION OF THINGS
The Location of Things
Piazzas
All Grey-Haired My Sisters
Windy Afternoon
Russians at the Beach
The Hero Leaves His Ship
Les Réalités
In the Middle of the Easel
On the Way to Dumbarton Oaks
Cape Canaveral
Sunday Evening
Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher
The Crisis
Upside Down
Seeing You Off
Safe Flights
Sadness
Jaffa Juce
In Dock
People in Wartime
Landing
History
Oriental Movie
The Crisis
West Sixty-Fourth Street
The Time of Day
Heroic Stages
In America, the Seasons
Belgravia
In the Alps
The Past of a Poem
ARCHAICS
Atalanta in Arcadia
"From Eyes Blue and Cold"
Dido to Aeneas
Green Awnings
Palm Trees
In the Campagna
"Who will accept our offering at this end of autumn?"
THE OPEN SKIES (1962)
The Voice Tree
Lights of My Eyes
Snow Angel
Santa Fe Trail
Nocturne
The First of May
Dardanella
The Brown Studio
All Elegies are Black and White
The Open Skies
Hurricane
His Jungle
Timor Mortis, Florida
Sand
Wave
Geography
THE BLUE STAIRS (1968)
The Blue Stairs
Turkey Villas
Walking Buddha
Colonial Hours
Saving Tallow
The Return of the Muses
A Reason
Direction
Barrels
East of Omsk
Parade's End
Clouds Near the Windmill
Fan Poems
A Way of Being
Four Moroccan Studies
A Handbook of Surfing
I CHING (1969)
I Ching
MOSCOW MANSIONS (1973)
Red Lilies
Illyria
Egypt
Nebraska
On Mt. Snowdon
Rosy
Ensconcements
Even Ovid
The Interruptions
Moscow Mansions 1
Moscow Mansions 2
Knight of the Swan
Carmen
Museum
Byron's Signatories
The Poetess
Losing People
The Poem Lying Down
Sassafras
Circassians
Another July
Drawing a Blank
Stupid
Physical Pain
Roses
Lights of My Eyes
Passage
Hohenzollern
The Stragglers
Olivetti ode
On the verge of the path
Gravel
Bicycling
Shifting the Iris
Green Revolutions
Poem
Evening
The Old Silk Road
Now
THE COUNTESS FROM MINNEAPOLIS (1976)
1
2
3: 50 Floors
4: Thinking of you Prokofief
5: River Road Studio
6: Portrait of Mary Rood
7: Eating Lake Superior Cisco Smoked Fish
8: Musings on the Mississippi
9: Legends
10
11
12: Prairie Houses
13
14
15: At the Guthrie Theatre
16
17: Persians in Minneapolis
18:
19: (Scop – A Poet) Widsith
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35: Crocus Hill
36
37: Activities
38
39: June
40
41
42: Amaryllis
THE TÜRLER LOSSES (1979)
BIOGRAPHY (1980)
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
QUILTS (1980)
Quilts
MUSICALITY (1988)
Originally with drawings by June Felter
FAIR REALISM (1989)
Wild Gardens Overlooked by Night Lights
La Noche Entra en Calor
The View from Kandinsky's Window
The Thread
Ilex
Spring Vine
Dora Maar
An Emphasis Falls on Reality
Valuable Mörike
The Rose Marble Table
Shuffling Light
The Screen of Distance
Heavy Violets
The Farewell Stairway (after Balla)
Words
Twilight Polka Dots
The Nude
Western Additives
In Medieval Hollow
Bleat
Ropes Sway/Country Cousins
Savannahs
The Cradle of Culture
Lawn Bumps
Tessera
DEFENSIVE RAPTURE (1993)
Paulownia
Dove
Expectation
Geese Blood
Fleet of White
Atmospheres
The Surface as Object
II.
Defensive Rapture
Beautiful/Evil
Borrowed Mirror, Filmic Rise
Restlessness
Chalk
III.
Borderlands
Dissonance Royal Traveller
The Advance of the Grizzly
The Glass Mountain
Otranto
Winter Horses
IV.
The Altos
STRIPPED TALES (1995) WITH ARTIST ANNE DUNN
structured / immediacy
/ lottery can guess
the moment / a noun / settles into space
/ germination begins
undermining /
opposing ides /
/ which-away
philosophy / in Norway
moody / adjectivalness
need / to identify
odd / pagination
property / mix-up
/ selfdom
a venetian / pallor
ice / buttons
history / ambushed
klebnikov lootage /
useful / techniques
loose grams / of nutmeg
typestry /
ghost / aboard
the French woman / beckoned
moment / of ingenuity
antiquity /
what we say /
empathetic / chimes
law / of the ether
Bergson's Law /
magicked /
the position / anarchical
photo / mirage
QUILL, SOLITARY APPARITION (1996)
Finally, to the Italian Girl
Garment
Fell, Darkly
Pallor
Leaving Modernity
Cold and its Demeanour
Quill, Solitary Apparition
IF SO, TELL ME (1999)
Valorous Vine
Storytelling
Outside of This, That Is
In Slow Motion
Doubleness
Dora Films
Lily
The poetry Meter
The Lull
Russet Flame
Unusual Figures
If So, Tell me
The Luminous
Strings
Deception
Athletic Writing
Faery Land
The Paris Lectures
The Green Fly
Confession of My Images
Effervescence
The Strum
Music History
Sideways
THE CONFETTI TREES (1999)
Overboard
The Tear
The Cough
Trousers for Extras
Nostalgia
The Guerilla Reporters
Confucious
Color
Nuns
Corelli
The Vanished Library
"Lonely Mess"
Lubitsch
Noise
Preparedness
"Moments Before…"
The Dream Motion Picture; A Proposal for Animation
Nemesia
The Aromas
Falling in Love
Details
The Confetti Trees
Romance
No Words
Screening Room Notes
The Minus Ones
Scenario-iste
Celluloid
Ars, Longa
Metropolis
Enchantment
Simultaneity
The Spell of Beauty
The Utmost Unreality
Disappearance
ROCKS ON A PLATTER (1999)
"Ideas. As they find themselves…"
"And the words linger, deciding which direction to take…"
"Intimacy of tone…"
"Without shyness or formality…"
SYMBIOSIS (2000)
Symbiosis
Originally appeared with artwork by Laurie Reid
MINATURES AND OTHER POEMS (2002)
Miniatures
Shabby Boot
Bird of Art
Spirit Tree
Turret
Negative Possibility
Camisole
Tiny Foreign Tears
Transcription
Lost Speech
First Prints
Yesterday
Pilgrimage
Finnish Opera
Photographs
Petticoat
Blue
Arthur
Autobiography
Noisetone
Fourteenth of July
Chekhovania
Coal
Colonial Hours
Sound and Structure
Musicianship
Pathos
Blurred Edge
DURER IN THE WINDOW, REFLEXIONS ON ART (2003)
Poetry
Lunch at Helen Frankenthaler's
On a Painting by Hayden Stubbing
Homage
THE RED GAZE (2005)
1
Nostalgia
An Afternoon in Jeopardy
Imagined Room
Loneliness
A Different Honey
A Short Narrative
Freedom
Alteration
A Burst of Leaves
The Next Floor
Roman Stripes
The Trickster
The Hungry Knight
The Past
Modernism
Green Numbers
Stair of Our Youth
A Noise of Return
Freed Color
The Gold Tap
Minimal Sound
The Brown Vest
2
The Red Gaze
A Dawn Walk
No Longer Strangers
Hans Hofmann
Vignettes
Echoes
Instructions
Composition
Supposition
LAST POEMS
In the Hotel
Constable's Method Brightening Near the Bridge
Beginning of Rain Notes
Shelley in the Navy-Colored Chair
Storytelling
Elf
Hotel Comfort
What People are Saying About This
"Barbara Guest has created a textually saturated poetry that embodies the transient, the ephemeral, and the flickering in translucent surfaces of contingent connections. These poems unravel before us so that we may revel in them, find for ourselves, if we go unprepared, the dwelling that they beckon us to inhabit."
“Reading Barbara Guest’s Collected Poems is like sitting on the very edge of time, as each poem, each book, seems to surpass its own expectations, foraging and inventing in a ceaseless renovation of poetic energies. Barbara Guest envisioned, for generations to come, a future for lyric poetry.”
"Barbara Guest has created a textually saturated poetry that embodies the transient, the ephemeral, and the flickering in translucent surfaces of contingent connections. These poems unravel before us so that we may revel in them, find for ourselves, if we go unprepared, the dwelling that they beckon us to inhabit."—Charles Bernstein
"Reading Barbara Guest's Collected Poems is like sitting on the very edge of time, as each poem, each book, seems to surpass its own expectations, foraging and inventing in a ceaseless renovation of poetic energies. Barbara Guest envisioned, for generations to come, a future for lyric poetry.""—Ann Lauterbach