Wesleyan University Press has just released the Collected Poems of Barbara Guest after months (years?) of anticipation. It was listed as a great “summer read” by UCLA Magazine back in June, and Publisher’s Weekly gave it a plug in May, but no matter. It’s here now and hopefully it will be for a long time.
Guest’s work has remained on the outside looking out over the years, even as her peers have risen higher and higher in critical estimation, cult status, and Amazon sales rankings (in the past two years Knopf has put out a new selection of Frank O’Hara’s poetry to general clamor, the Library of America has released its collection of Ashbery poems, and FSG has re-released their selected Schuyler).
While there are many reasons for the delay and separation, I’m sure, I’m happy to see Guest arrive.
She is a beguiling and bewildering poet, and I’m hoping this publication gets some of the more astute readers of poetry talking about her work, as Maggie Nelson has done in her excellent Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions, which introduces a long meditation on the poet thusly:
“The four poems of Guest’s that appeared in Allen’s 1960 The New American Poetry anthology may have borne many similarities to those of her New York School comrades also appearing there (Schulyer, Edward Field, Koch, O’Hara and Ashbery), but her repeated mantra ‘I go separately’ from one of her included poems (’Santa Fe Trail’) announced–perhaps inadvertently-her difference, or her difference to come. Though Guest and O’Hara were good friends, and though their work most certainly overlaps–specifically in their adaptation of a Surrealist sensibility to an American idiom–in a sense Guest’s unironic investment in aesthetic theory and philosophy couldn’t stand further apart from O’Hara’s ‘there’s nothing metaphysical about it’ attitude as performed in ‘Personism.’ And while Ashbery certainly gets metaphysical, none of the New York School men really holds a candle to the degree of abstraction of Guest’s writing, which approaches (and even occasionally surpasses) Mallarmé in its commitment to lyrical opacity. As Guest said in a 1986 talk appropriately titled ‘Mysteriously Defiining the Mysterious’: ‘In whatever guise reality becomes visible, the poet withdraws from it into invisibility.’”
Guest’s later poems definitely seemed to withdraw into invisibility, becoming more and more minimal, leaving only “spaced-out” words surrounded by an almost mystical aura of white, but I’m hoping that the same critics and readers who love to wrestle with Ashbery (and have loved to wrestle with Guest in the past) will do the same with Guest again, and publicly, so we can all learn as we go.
Strange but true: Barbara Guest was at one time Poetry Editor at Partisan Review, as were such unlikely folks as Delmore Schwartz, Rosanna Warren, and… me!
Posted By: Don Share on November 25, 2008 at 8:47 pmWe’d be remiss in not drawing attention to the special triple issue of Chicago Review actually pictured above – devoted to her work; click here for more about that.
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