on Art (2003)
Lunch at Helen Frankenthaler’s 485
On a Painting by Hayden Stubbing 486
Constable’s Method, Brightening Near the Bridge 512
Shelley in the Navy-Colored Chair 515
Introduction: Fair Realist
When Barbara Guest passed away in the winter of 2006, America lost one of its most fiercely independent and original artists. She had been writing poetry for sixty years. One might call her commitment to the art “heroic” but her primary task was rather, in her words, “to invoke the unseen, to unmask it.” Hers is a poetry of revelation and of mystery. When Guest arrived on the scene in the mid-1950s, her work was characterized by an advanced lyricism that must have seemed already full-blown to her contemporaries. Yet as this volume attests, over the decades that followed, her poetry kept pushing the limits of the art with astonishing urgency, complexity, and daring. With only sporadic recognition along the way, most of it late, her work remained at the vanguard of the genre throughout her career.
Guest’s poetry, like all great art, makes us reconsider tradition—not as a fixed canonical body that exists behind us or bears us up but as something we move toward. We find it reading back through those very works that were ahead of their own time, their readers, and even their authors—in the poems of Emily Dickinson or William Carlos Williams, for instance. If this model of discovery teaches us anything, it is that tradition is, in fact, always just ahead of us. It is an occasion we rise to.
In her essay “Wounded Joy,” Guest writes: “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 is 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” (Forces of Imagination, 100). “The Türler Losses,” one of her most adumbrated and yet literal poems, about the loss of a wristwatch, suggests the double bind of keeping and losing time, and the wonder of poems as timepieces. It is only, it seems, in reiterating temporal markers that one feels time expand within the poem, extending forward and looping back, incorporating and re-imagining the relation of future and past—and the difficult role of the poem in negotiating between them.
This desire to “delimit” the poem spatially and temporally has characterized Guest’s work from the very beginning. Strictly speaking, her poems are not abstract; rather, they locate us always exactly where we already are, at the edge of meaning in an already impacted, developing world. Her poems begin in the midst of action but their angle of perception is oblique. In this way, the poem, like the world, exists phenomenally; it is grasped as it is coming into being, and she records the outer edges of the context of this movement, placing the poem at the horizon of our understanding.
Her early poem “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher” is a classic example of Guest’s facility with paradox in the context of a complex emotional clarity. Suspension is the chief conceit of the poem: the suspension of disbelief, the suspension