Title: ‘Couplings of such sonority’: reading a poem by Barbara Guest
Abstract: Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes This paper emerged out of a commission from Chicago Review to write a short piece for a special issue on Barbara Guest, as well as fulfilling an ambition to write on Guest declared in the Introduction to my book, The Lyric Touch: Essays on the Poetry of Excess (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2007). It would have been impossible to stray so far from the commission without the time and facilities made available by a year at The National Humanities Center, North Carolina, where I was Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Fellow from 2007–8. I am grateful to Joshua Kotin of Chicago Review and to the NHC, its library staff especially. My thanks also to Roger Gilbert for reading a draft. Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice: A theory of twentieth-century poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978); Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). C/f Robert Kaufman's important essay, ‘A Future for Modernism: Barbara Guest's Recent Poetry’, American Poetry Review 29.4 (July/August 2000), pp. 11–16. ‘Guest's evident interests in painting and the visual has led to hasty pronouncements that she is – with all the traditionally gendered connotations the term implicitly carries in modern poetics – merely a pictorialist’ (p. 12). This is manifestly true in references to Guest in period surveys. For instance, Elizabeth A. Frost's study The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003) refers to Guest once, as having been excluded from ‘a major anthology’, and Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller's survey ‘Feminism and the Female Poet’ in Stephen Fredman's A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) refers to Guest only as a token inclusion in Donald Allen's 1960 anthology New American Poetry. The enormous essay collection The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry in Our Time (ed. Edward Foster and Joseph Donahue, Jersey City: Talisman House, 2002) mentions Guest a dozen times, but only within maddeningly undifferentiated lists of female poets. An exception, although very brief, is Geoffrey Ward's elegant treatment of Guest's poem ‘Heavy Violets’ in the second edition of his pioneering study Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2001, pp. 196–7). But Guest does not so much as appear in the index to the first edition (1993). Barbara Guest, Poems. The Location of Things; Archaics; The Open Skies (New York: Doubleday, 1962). The poem is reprinted in Barbara Guest, The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest ed. Hadley Haden Guest (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), pp. 9–10. This edition is cited henceforward as CP. Barbara Guest, The Location of Things (New York: Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1960). The text of ‘The Hero Leaves His Ship’ is identical in the Tibor de Nagy and Doubleday printings. The Doubleday volume rearranges the poems published in The Location of Things and drops a poem titled ‘The Time of Day’, subsequently restored in CP (p. 26). Barbara Guest, Quill, Solitary APPARITION (Sausalito, CA: The Post-Apollo Press, 1996). Compare for instance the opening of ‘“How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher…”.’ in John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1962), p. 25. John Ashbery, ‘“They Dream Only of America”’, The Tennis Court Oath, p. 13; Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice, pp. 154–8. Barbara Guest, Dürer in the Window: Reflexions on Art (New York: Roof Books, 2003), item p. 13. Hartigan's comment is to be found at http://library.syr.edu/digital/exhibits/i/imagine/section8.htm. Another lithograph from the four is reproduced on this webpage. It is disappointing that the reproductions on this website and in Dürer in the Window are so small. The four lithographs, approximately 30x22’ in size (first two in portrait, with the later two of the same dimensions in landscape) are reproduced more satisfactorily alongside the poem in Terrence Diggory, Grace Hartigan and The Poets: Paintings and Prints, the catalogue of an exhibition at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs NY, 1993, pp. 42–47. The first two lithographs seem to represent window spaces in ruins overlooking a mediterranean scene, and are reminiscent of Dufy. Theodore W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 89. See Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘Guest, Surrealism and Feminism’ in ed. Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller, The Scene of My Selves: New work on New York School poets (Orono, ME: The National Poetry Foundation, 2001), p. 190. This volume contains essays on Guest by DuPlessis, Lynn Keller, Linda A. Kinnahan and Sara Lundquist, all providing specifically gendered readings. The 18 essays comprising the whole volume imply, with one exception, that men must write about male poets, and women about female poets. ‘Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser, in conversation with Elisabeth Frost and Cynthia Hogue’, Jacket 25. http://jacketmagazine.com/25/guest-iv.html See Jennifer Ashton, ‘The Numbers Trouble with “Numbers Trouble”’, Chicago Review 53.2/3 (Autumn 2007), pp. 112–120. Geoffrey Ward, Statutes of Liberty (2nd edn), p. 197. Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice, p. 156. Barbara Guest, The Blue Stairs (New York: Corinth Books, 1968), pp. 32–33. Also in Barbara Guest, Selected Poems (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995), pp. 35–36. (The British edition of Selected Poems published in 1996 by Carcanet Press, Manchester, is a photo-reduced reprint of the Sun & Moon volume, with the same pagination.) CP, pp. 81–82. CP, pp. 71–72. Barbara Guest, ‘The Shadow of Surrealism’ in Forces of Imagination, Writing on Writing (Berkeley: Kelsey St. Press, 2003), pp. 51–54. DuPlessis, ‘Guest, Surrealism and Feminism’, p. 195. Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words. Blasing, Lyric Poetry, p. 81. Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice, p. 59. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice, pp. 126–127. Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice, p. 47. Blasing, Lyric Poetry, ch.3, pt.1 ‘The Erato-genic “I”’, pp. 78–83. Blasing, Lyric Poetry, p. 78. Blasing, Lyric Poetry, p. 82. CP, pp. 85–91. See my essay ‘Lost and Found in The Türler Losses’, Chicago Review 53.4 & 54.1/2 (Summer 2008), pp. 98–106.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 57
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