Guard the Mysteries Page 6

  In Joanne’s last interview, conducted in February of 2017, she is asked, “Is there such a thing as a fixed space? Can a person be ‘on time?’” “One is more in time,” she answers. “One moment after another. Like a great cascade of shuffled cards falling through the air. Time is one moment after another. Time is ‘now.’”

  And she would remain on the pulse of the present moment. Each day was a wall to break the poem against, and each time it would dare to disperse differently. Joanne was so attentive to time that I have begun to wonder if she was ever bound by its constraints. Does her literal escape constitute a form of enlightenment? I find the dream of such agency (atmosphere) surfacing in the last pages of her serial poem Joanne, published by Angel Hair in 1970:

  In the corner

  don’t you worry

  The tunes, familiar

  weeping & laughing

  I leave my love behind

  what I wanted to say

  was in the broad

  sweeping

  form of being there

  I am walking up the path

  I come home and wash my hair

  I am bereft

  I dissolve quickly

  I am everybody

  Again, we are witness to a kind of dispersal, “I leave my love behind.” This brings me to Jack Spicer’s influence on Joanne’s practice, in particular his famous letter to Robin Blaser printed in the middle of his book Admonitions. In this letter, he reaffirms his belief in the unrelenting connection and reverberation between poems:

  The trick naturally is what Duncan learned years ago and tried to teach us—not to search for the perfect poem but to let your way of writing of the moment go along its own paths, explore and retreat but never be fully realized (confined) within the boundaries of one poem. This is where we were wrong and he was right, but he complicated things for us by saying that there is no such thing as good or bad poetry. There is—but not in relation to the single poem. There is really no single poem.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Poems should echo and re-echo against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Things fit together. We knew that—it is the principle of magic. Two inconsequential things can combine together to become a consequence. This is true of poems too. A poem is never to be judged by itself alone. A poem is never by itself alone.

  This is the most important letter you have ever received.

  Love,

  Jack

  This letter was published in 1957, the very year Joanne moved from Santa Barbara to San Francisco and two years before she would begin formal sitting practice with Suzuki Roshi. Spicer’s description of ultimate dictation would appear to contain the groundwork for Joanne’s “daily” approach to poetics, “not to search for the perfect poem but to let your way of writing of the moment go along its own paths, explore and retreat.”

  In an interview from 1997 with Dale Smith, she speaks about taking Spicer’s practice to heart:

  That’s when you understand that words have their own independent existence. They say what they want to. Like Spicer saying you are just the medium, the funnel for the words to go through. They have their own lineage, returning through you. The magic syllables, seed syllables.

  I remember Joanne saying that she was attracted to the fact that there was already a semblance of community in Bolinas, that when she arrived in 1968 there was still a sense of banding together as well as an attractive isolation and intimacy with the landscape. She could allow her voice to unfold without intrusion. This is really the state of being one with the day and the poem unfolding within it, so that anything can fly into the frame (birds, friends, flowers) and will automatically be given the assignation of poetry. This is a line from a poem titled “Mocking Yourself” from her book On Time:

  For heaven’s sake learn how to take care

  of more than yourself

  And from an earlier poem dated August 1988:

  The same or less

  that’s fine. For me.

  These are lines of Joanne’s that I have unconsciously memorized. They function as drifting medallions that may aid in a poet’s actual survival. In the months immediately following her death I found myself writing poems at different intervals of grief, some built up like altars, while others seemed to be in literal conversation with her spirit. In her willingness to visit, Joanne continues to be generous. There will never be another poet like her.

  A NECESSARY DARKNESS

  BARBARA GUEST AND THE OPEN CHAMBER

  Vision is part of the poet’s spiritual life of which the poem, itself, is a résumé. The “spirit” or the “vision” of a poem arises from the contents of the poet’s unconscious. Let us say the vision of a poem has above it that “halo” you see in religious paintings when an act of special beneficence is being enacted by one of the persons within the picture and that person is given a halo. The poem is our act of special beneficence and the poet is rewarded this halo. The poet is unaware of the halo, just as in the paintings the persons are unaware of the halo, but it is there as a reward for a particular unconscious state of immanence. Now I am not speaking of a religious state of grace in regard to the poem, the poem let us say is its own religion. I am using the word “halo” because you and I can see it in the painting, and this halo has a value to us; it reflects a state of mind, or a condition that the mind has attained.

  The halo has detected the magnetic field into which the energy of the poem is being directed.

  I would like you to understand that I am using the words “spirit,” “vision,” “halo” because I wish to lift us upward away from the desk of a projected poem. I want to emphasize that the poem needs to have a spiritual or metaphysical life if it is going to engage itself with reality.

  ■ ■ ■

  I am almost certain that I never met the poet Barbara Guest. I know her only through the ghosts and possibilities that cling to her writing. She has always been otherworldly to me.

  The excerpt above is from a talk delivered in 1992 that was eventually titled “Poetry the True Fiction.” The occult-sounding element of her poetics cannot be avoided. There is so much belief suspended behind the arc of her reading voice.

  When I finally found Guest’s book of essays, Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing, in 2013, I was thrilled that the book seemed to contain nothing but these barricades of ever-shifting, godhead type of lines. And now I seem to remember the book in a permanently jumbled and idealized way. I seem to have fashioned my own essential set of weaponry from her text but almost unconsciously. Her thoughts prove useful beyond the usual surface of discourse. It was a highly particular form of poetic mind control that I fell under after reading and teaching this book in 2015, and even now the text is never as I remember it.

  Barbara Guest is acknowledged as one the greatest poets to have emerged from the first-generation New York School, the other valorized members being Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. Of course, she was also the only woman to (sometimes) be included among this exclusive and so-called generation. Her work goes through a huge stylistic transformation in the late 1980s following the completion of her biography on H.D. and her eventual move from New York back to Berkeley.

  Here is her charming biographical note at the end of an anthology titled The Postmoderns:

  Barbara Guest was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1920, she grew up in California, attending UCLA and graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, before moving to New York. “I continue to live in New York City, and although my interest in painting has not diminished, I have been less concerned with the work of the ’70s. The past several years I have been engaged on a biography of the poet H.D., perhaps the most difficult task with which
I have presented myself.”

  One could say her poetics are as passionate-sounding as any poetry. So it feels imperative to read a classic Barbara Guest poem in my own voice at this point, if only as proof of the architecture she details throughout Forces of Imagination. Here is the title poem of her 1993 collection, Defensive Rapture:

  Width of a cube spans defensive rapture

  cube from blocks of liquid theme

  phantom of lily stark

  in running rooms.

  adoration of hut performs a clear function

  illusive column extending dust

  protective screen the red

  objects pavilion.

  deep layered in tradition moonlight

  folkloric pleads the rakish

  sooted idiom

  supernatural diadem.

  stilled grain of equinox

  turbulence the domicile

  host robed arm white

  crackled motives.

  sensitive timbre with complex

  astral sign open tent hermetic

  toss of sand swan reeds

  torrents of unevenness.

  surround a lusted fabric

  hut sequence modal shy

  as verdigris hallow force

  massive intimacy.

  slant fuse the wived

  mosaic a chamber astrakhan

  amorous welding

  the sober descant.

  turns in the mind bathes

  the rapture bone a guardian

  ploy indolent lighted

  strew of doubt.

  commends internal habitude

  bush the roof

  day stare gliding

  double measures.

  qualms the weights of night

  medusæ raft clothed sky

  radiant strike the oars

  skim cirrus.

  evolve a fable husk

  aged silkiness the roan

  planet mowed like ears

  beaded grip.

  suppose the hooded grass

  numb moat alum trench a solemn

  glaze the sexual estuary

  floats an edge.

  This is the type of poem one has to stay a few paces ahead of, as it threatens to collapse behind or upon you. It is a deluge, to be sure, but also mechanized. Its measure of relentless stitch and pastiche calls to mind a remark by the great Edwin Denby on meaning in poetry:

  Meaning is a peculiar thing in poetry—as peculiar as meaning in politics or loving. In writing poetry, a poet can hardly say that he knows what he means. In writing he is more intimately concerned with holding together a poem, and that is for him its meaning.

  It is the dissolution of her imagery that I find so addictive throughout “Defensive Rapture”; the images are not set to sequence with any promise of narrative, and that is the turbulence Guest so often searches out and seems to deem necessary within the field or occasion of a poem.

  There are single periods at the end of each short stanza. It runs on in this manner, seemingly draped in a porous, metallic gown and intending to squeeze us out of the room! Its charm is in the extremely literal title, “Defensive Rapture.” Achieving the impossible through opposites, the title simply makes clear the aim of its style, like Gertrude Stein’s immortal book Useful Knowledge. The words are thrown down as boulders to fill an empty doorway. There is a sense that the poet is being pursued. Intrigue but without a plot, it’s the cut of the language that holds us breathless. Not all of Guest’s poems sound this way, and this is part of the fun of reading her books: they feel utopian in the sense that the poet (at this point) has an armory of styles to draw upon.

  The talks and essays contained in Forces of Imagination intone a still, reflective surface in order to entice the reader (most likely a fellow poet) to dive straight through the mirror. I believe it is true, as Robert Duncan once stated, that as poets “we need permission for what we do.” I cling to these talks and essays because they sound as though they are addressed to me personally.

  This is from a piece entitled A Reason for Poetics:

  The conflict between a poet and the poem creates an atmosphere of mystery. When this mystery is penetrated, when the dark reaches of the poem succumb and shine with a clarity projected by the mental lamp of the reader, then an experience called illumination takes place. This is the most beautiful experience literature can present us with, and more precious for being extremely rare, arrived at through concentration, through meditation of the poem, through those faculties we often associate with a religious experience, as indeed it is. The reader is converted to the poem….Poet and reader perform together on a highwire strung on a platform between their separated selves. Now an applause for the shared vigilance.

  Guest seems to be offering up her own shaded, compositional space for us to enter into as well as acknowledging the presence of her readers, upon whom she so depends. As if to remind us that the best direction is always indirect. She allows for younger writers to step into an outline she has already fashioned toward transformation. That’s what the best writing about poetry attempts to do. Apart from the flattering sounds of these sentences flowing together, the symbols themselves make a music as simply imagery. It is good to remember that it is possible for poetry to play out effectively in silence.

  As a poet you are endlessly asked to redescribe your process. As I grow older I seem to take more pleasure in this aspect. It’s as if you are issuing periodic weather reports on your process, and this goes on your entire career as a writer. This is also a useful way to read Forces of Imagination. On one day, what is hidden seems clear, or vice versa. The element of poetry can often liberate prose syntax from drudgery and go veering off to hand the audience new and raw forms, assignments, or just incisive, breathless musical note-taking. This is only to say that within the hands of a poet the “essay” may unknowingly begin to take the form of an autobiography, certain parts may get repeated, and eventually this overlapping becomes helpful. It has betrayed a wear pattern, a petrified, circular grain to the wood.

  In order to try and give you a sense of being in the presence of the poet, I quote from Garrett Caples’s essay from 2008, “Barbara Guest in the Shadow of Surrealism”:

  She seemed like a person from a different era, which I suppose she was, given the 52 years that separated us in age. She was stamped, I think, with a sense of glamour born of the expatriate-infused Hollywood she inhabited in the early 1940s. The experiences she drew on were commensurately glamorous. She might tell you about staying in a château in Zurich or attending an embassy party in Fez. “Have you been to Fez?” she would ask, unconscious of how improbable such an adventure is to most of us. To me, she was la grande dame par excellence, queenly, her presence commanding deference, yet too courtly and ladylike to come across as a diva. This probably sounds like sexist terminology but it’s hard to convey the exact mixture in her personality between an old-fashioned conception of gender roles and an insistence on the equality of art, where gender determined nothing, especially mastery. Her conversation was very much like her poems, consisting of oblique observations and unpredictable leaps, isolated from each other by periods of silence. She could be extremely difficult to follow.

  The majority of the talks, lectures, and discursive poetry that make up Forces of Imagination were written and delivered after Guest completed the biography Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World, published in 1984. I mention this as I suspect that it became easier for Guest to focus on her own poetics after this continually recreating someone else’s life. She no longer had this overarching reason to be objective. She published twenty volumes from 1989 to 2008. There had been an eight-year gap between volumes of poetry during the writing of Herself Defined.

  I often experience poetry in the same manner as I do so-called “experimental” cinema. The films of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Kenneth Anger were never intent on capturing a static scene, but showcased the breakup and overlapping of imagery. These films were (of course) never as I
remembered them either. The series of images were never meant to be fixed. In the work of Stan Brakhage the print itself is sometimes drawn on, scraped, torn, colored, painted, attempting to make new through testing the literal strength and mettle of a strip of film. I find a similar solarized and creased, cinematic effect in Guest’s later books. I want to play a favorite recording dating from 1995 when she was a guest on Line Break with Charles Bernstein hosting. This is a poem from Fair Realism (1989):

  AN EMPHASIS FALLS ON REALITY

  Cloud fields change into furniture

  furniture metamorphizes into fields

  an emphasis falls on reality.

  “It snowed toward morning,” a barcarole

  the words stretched severely

  silhouettes they arrived in trenchant cut

  the face of lilies…

  I was envious of fair realism.

  I desired sunrise to revise itself

  as apparition, majestic in evocativeness,

  two fountains traced nearby on a lawn….

  you recall treatments

  of “being” and “nothingness”

  illuminations apt

  to appear from variable directions—

  they are orderly as motors

  floating on the waterway,

  so silence is pictorial

  when silence is real.

  The wall is more real than shadow

  or that letter composed of calligraphy

  each vowel replaces a wall

  a costume taken from space

  donated by walls….

  These metaphors may be apprehended after

  they have brought their dogs and cats

  born on roads near willows,

  willows are not real trees

  they entangle us in looseness,