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The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest
Edited by Hadley Guest
Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series
Sales Date: 2016-05-03
The lifework of a preeminent New York School poet
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.
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
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's] 500-page Collected Poems belongs among the achievements of 20th-century modernism, a sphere overlapping almost nowhere with the mimetic, anecdotal, psychologically motivated poetry that predominated in the US for much of her career."
~Ange Mlinko, London Review of Books
"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
""The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest belongs on every poetry lover's bookshelf. This large and lovely volume, as the title suggests, contains all the poetry Guest published in her lifetime, along with a smattering of new, posthumous poems, a partial bibliography, a time line, and a fine essay by Peter Gizzi.""
~Dan Giancola, The East Hampton Star
""The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest gradually reveals and artist's growing expressive confidence and self-possession. Despite the false starts and wrong turns, Guest found a way, mastering the labyrinth of tradition and influence. Her work is a struggle to render the order of perception in language, for clarity of the observed phenomenon.""
~Robert Huddleston, Mantis
""[Barbara Guest's] 500-page Collected Poems belongs among the achievements of 20th-century modernism, a sphere overlapping almost nowhere with the mimetic, anecdotal, psychologically motivated poetry that predominated in the US for much of her career.""
~Ange Mlinko, London Review of Books
""A micro-cinepoetic border-crosser, Guest epochalized here is already well-known for her exquisite, exacting ways of connecting and weaving her way through various modernist and postmodern Avant-garde trends, visual and verbal, including objectivist poetry, Abstract Expressionism, language poetry, etc.""
~Kyoo Lee, The Brooklyn Rail
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