The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest: a marathon reading, 2/11-2/12

YU & Spare Room present

a marathon reading of

The Collected Poems of

Barbara Guest

in the kitchen at YU

808 SE 10th Ave., Portland

Saturday & Sunday

February 11 & 12

3-8 p.m. each day

come and go freely

Yearbook (11.2)

Open up your opera. “How does one kiss on the edge of a park, near a carrefour, in the middle of life, after a misunderstanding, watched by a South American General and fortified by several thousand novels?” Merely open up your opera: aperture of song, flecked indigo, red, saffron, silt-grey, sandusky: a live raw unintention. That’ll do, sifted. I rode from 14th and Pettygrove to 11th and Stark carrying 2 sleeves of white #3 to-go boxes strapped under the shoulder straps of my backpack, which was slung by the chest clip over my left shoulder and cut off the circulation a bit, and I could only steer with the right hand. We speak as part of a massive system of shunts and ravels, oxidizing faster than we can learn how, in the sun and salt air, churning its rickety shadow against the great harbor wall—and so we must speak directly through whatever channels clear, sparing no distinction, making the botched equations disclose through their black grillwork a square stab of sky. I’m perfecting my nervous laugh.

Sleep Is Critical

The one lucid thought I had last night: Poetry-as-landscape is perhaps always poetry teasing landscape, or being teased by it.

*

Poetry, then, remains a defined enough activity that we can play with the conceit of its being something else. This is impossible, and thus endlessly fascinating. Take Clark Coolidge's, or anybody's, poetry-as-music. Then take the strangeness of the moments in Nathaniel Mackey's poetry where poetry-as-music becomes poetry-as-description-of poetry-as-music. From "Andoumboulouous Brush":

                 . . ."Mouth that
           moved my mouth,"
                                              he
     soughed, hummed it,
        made it buzz . . . Hummed,
  hoped glass would break,
walls fall. Sang thru
                                     the
            cracks a croaking
                                            song
        to end all song . . .

*

Or the way a brief passage by Barbara Guest can, in a complex and gorgeous irony, all at once tease and be teased by the terms of (abstract-expressionist) art, art-criticism, and music. From "Musicality":

                                    two trees leaning forward
the thick new-made emptiness



                      Naturalism.


              Hanging apples               half-notes
in the rhythmic        ceiling        red flagged
rag clefs

                     notational margins

Where it is the very "notational margins" that emphasize and bind together "notational margins" and "Naturalism"; where anything is Naturalism if and where you say it is—as though a painter daubed on a patch of naturalism near the middle of the canvas; where the notational spacing of poetry gets wilfully mixed up with the literalness of musical notes which are also apples; where words require, like paintings, the material quality of their material: "the thick new-made emptiness," "red flagged / rag clefs."

*

Maybe this is all obvious and only seems worth repeating because it came in through half sleep. A little later towards morning I became interested in the phenomenon of the descriptive poem-title, as in: "Poem Described by Its Title." "Poem Anxious to Begin." "Poem with Some Dogshit on It." "Exit, Pursued by Words."

Now I'm awake, it looks like spring, and the last thing I'm going to have is another idea.