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A Sublime Sort of Exercise: Levity and the Poetry of Barbara Guest Arielle Greenberg

Introduction

Some scholars have written on the importance of painterly light in the work of Barbara

Guest. In this essay, I discuss the importance of a different kind of light in her poetry -- light in

the sense of levity, humor. So while the paper begins by examining Guest within the framework

of the New York School poets, for whom play is understood to be a vital stylistic element, its

main argument is for new contexts in which to read Guest: as a poet possessed of great warmth

and wit, and as a poet employing feminist strategies. I argue that these two characteristics can be

seen as intrinsically linked.

The essay charts a trajectory in Guest's work from 1960 through 1980: I look at Poems

(1962), The Blue Stairs (1968), The Countess from Minneapolis (1976), and The Türler Losses

(1979) and argue that her use of wit in the poems over those two decades parallels a change in

her overall aesthetic -- from work heavily influenced by poetic tradition to a liberated voice. I

also argue that the use of levity is a feminist strategy; it serves as a sly undoing of the dominant

order in both mainstream poetics and the patriarchal culture at large. I argue that ironically, it is

levity which grounds Guest's reader in poems which are often fragmented and spare, and that

while a sense of humor is certainly present in the work of fellow New York School poets Frank

O'Hara and Kenneth Koch, Guest's work resonates more with that of contemporary avant-garde

women writers who use the subversive power of wit to locate themselves within a decidedly

female community.

Placing Guest In/Out of Context

I first read Guest's work in the context of other contemporary women experimental poets.

It was therefore news to me when I read David Lehman's (controversial)1 book on the New York

1See the archives of the online Buffalo poetics list for more on the controversy surrounding this book.

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School of poets, The Last Avant-Garde, to find Barbara Guest listed as one of the minor New

York School players. In fact, Guest was a central part of the New York School -- the New York

School had actively "recruited" her. As Guest states in a 1992 interview with The American

Poetry Review, "I had published a poem in the Partisan Review, and they [the New York School

poets and artists] all read it. Frank O'Hara and Jane Freilicher wanted to know who I was. Then

we all showed up one night at the Cedar Bar."

This is the most common way, I think, that Guest was thought about (when she was

thought of at all) by critics from the 1960s to the 1980s: as a member of the New York School,

but one who was regularly overshadowed by the men who were her peers. Certainly, O'Hara,

Ashbery, and Koch have each enjoyed moments of proportional poetic celebrity throughout their

lifetimes; their books were published by major and minor presses; they received awards and

accolades. James Schulyer less so, but his name rounds out the quartet most commonly referred

to as the New York School: The Last Avant-Garde is organized around this principle. Guest --

despite being asked by Delmore Schwartz to come meet him at the Partisan Review offices at the

age of thirty; despite the fact that the other members so admired her work that they sought her

friendship; despite publishing her first book, The Location of Things, through the same Tibor De

Nagy gallery press that published the other poets; despite the position she held as art critic for

ArtNews -- was often considered a very minor star in the New York School constellation, and

existed only in that context.

Context or no context, Guest, whose first volume of work was published when she was

forty in 1960, has been building an impressive body of work ever since. Her first book was

republished with other work by Doubleday in 1962, and she closed the 60s with The Blue Stairs

(Corinth Books, 1968). In the 70s, she published one volume through Viking, Moscow Mansions

(her last book of poetry published by a major house), and three independent press books, The

Countess from Minneapolis (Burning Deck, 1976), a novel entitled Seeking Air (Black Sparrow,

1978) and The Türler Losses (Mansfield Book Mart) in 1979. She spent the next five years

working on her biography of H.D., Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World (Doubleday,

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1984) but managed also to publish two small press books: Quilts (Vehicle, 1980) and Biography

(Burning Deck, 1981).

It is my personal theory that Guest's work took off with new energy and vitality after the

publication of Herself Defined. There is no question that in her late sixties and seventies she has

produced the work for which she is now most admired: seven volumes in ten years of innovative,

brilliant poetry. The years since 1988 have also brought Guest a new kind of attention, and with

it a new context: she is now read alongside and by poets affiliated with the Language and Post-

Language schools. Significantly, she was given a festschrift at Brown University in the early

90s, and was introduced by one of the most well-known figures in Language poetry, Charles

Bernstein, when she won the Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry

from the Poetry Society of America in 1999, an award previously conferred upon Edna St.

Vincent Millay, Wallace Stevens, and Guest's friend John Ashbery, among others.

So while it is true that Guest has begun, in her fifth decade of publishing poetry, to

receive critical praise, I want to argue that the ways in which Guest has been read still encompass

a very limited and limiting set of frameworks. As Sara Lundquist noted in her article "Reverence

and Resistance: Barbara Guest, Ekphrasis, and the Female Gaze,"

"when Guest's poetry does come under critical discussion, it is likely to be described in

such a way as to reinforce three persistent, true, but ultimately simplistic assumptions

about her work: first, that it is difficult to the point of obduracy; second, that it is refined and

cool, rather than passionate, personal or emotionally urgent; and third, that it invariably

avoids the political in favor of the aesthetic, preferring the sensualites of surface, texture

and wordplay over narrative, social commentary, and political naming." (italics mine)

Although I do not agree that these characteristics are necessarily true, I have found that

these are the ways in which Guest's work is discussed: her relationship to visual arts, her

austerity, her cool elegance, her mystery. These readings uphold a stereotype, a myth, about a

certain kind of woman poet who is neither confessional nor "hysteric": if a woman poet does not

wear her heart on her sleeve, she is considered cold and aloof. It's the ice queen fairy tale.

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There is no question that Barbara Guest's work is finely crafted, but it also possesses

great heart and depth of feeling. I will go further: I will argue that Barbara Guest -- a poet whose

work is described as "gathered matters of fact," "deftly allusive," and "erudite" -- has that most

forgiving and welcoming kind of warmth, the kind which is manifested in a sense of humor, a

quality of levity, in her work, which carries a political power. It is this quality -- a light-hearted

wit -- that I will choose to read as a feminist strategy. Relying on some literary theory done by

women scholars around the issues of wit and feminism, I will argue that the levity in Guest's

work is a gendered levity, one informed by femininity (read: the qualities that allow a person to

be understood as a woman) and the structural forces which affect a woman's identity.

Furthermore, I want to offer a reading of Guest's work which could place her in a context

of other American women who employ a sense of humor in their innovative poetics. The New

York School is marked by its chatty, breezy wit, but I will attempt to illustrate that Guest's

exploration of a chancy, personal kind of language-based levity is shared by some of the most

exciting women poets writing in America in the last few decades.

What Does It Mean to Do a Feminist Reading?

What, exactly, such a reading entails is something of an unresolved question, and the

term "feminist reading" is suspect, even for many feminists. My feminist reading will manifest

itself in two ways: it will require me to be a feminist reader, and to imagine that the texts

themselves are imbued with a feminist ideology.

I want to be clear that I do not consider my identity as a feminist reader to be a fixed or

known quantity. Even though, on any given day, I would self-identify as a feminist, and, by

nature of my vocation, a feminist who reads, I do not always read as a feminist, nor can my acts

of reading as a feminist be clearly defined. Performing a feminist reading on a text requires me

to employ a certain set of lenses which I construct and can apply or remove at will. These lenses

emphasize various understandings: that women and men have historically occupied different

spheres in this society, and that these separate spaces inform our contemporary culture; that as a

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woman, I live in a world which is institutionally patriarchal and that this power structure affects

my efforts, desires, and body; that, despite acts of individual rebellion, resistance and/or

achievement, women can be said to suffer from specific forms of oppression and sublimation.

Yet my claim is neither that this is the best way of reading nor the only way of reading a

text. I certainly do not read poetry with only political ideologies in mind or at stake. I merely

propose that such a reading should be offered as one reading lens, a lens crucial in the struggle

for critical awareness and social change.

What of the text itself? I am not proposing that women poets should be read with only

gender in mind; I believe that limiting the self -- or the text -- to such a reading would diminish

the individual value of the poet and serve as an effacement of her aesthetic concerns. In reading

Barbara Guest for feminist meaning, I do not claim to know anything about what Barbara Guest

the woman, the person, the poet, believes. Rather, I imagine myself serving as an informant to

the words on the page, giving and receiving knowledge from a gendered perspective.

Why Do a Feminist Reading?

The kind of feminist reading I've described is of no greater or lesser value than the other

ways I have seen Barbara Guest read: as a member of the New York School, as a Language poet,

as a poet with strong ties to the work of contemporary visual artists. But I question why the

current readings either ignore or dismiss gender as a way to look at Guest's work. In Sara

Lundquist's article, she notes that Guest is "not embraced by feminist readers" (with a few

exceptions). I'm not sure this is entirely true, but it has been the case in the scholarly work

published on Guest thus far. Why? Is it because, as a New York School poet, she has been

placed in the company of men, or that no model for a feminist reading exists for that generation

of poets? Many poetry movements of the mid-twentieth century have been viewed as male only,

but recent work has revisited the importance of women poets in, for example, the Beats. Linda

Russo has suggested that, rather than think of women as existing on the margins of the major

poetry movements of the 20th century, we might regard them as "ignored centers" -- vital to and

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central in the growth of these influential aesthetic schools, but discounted in scholarship for far

too long.2 If the men of the New York School "recruited" Guest, as it were, to their group, is she

not, in fact, a key figure whose gender has stood in the way of wider recognition? What about

her role outside of the New York School, as a woman writing experimental poetry which is

published in avant-garde journals, whose work is seen as a poetic role model for emerging

women writers? What, exactly, is to be gained by casting Guest in an anti-feminist, asexual or

gender-neutral light? In undertaking this project, I hope to reveal that Guest is thinking about

her womanhood in her work, and that the reader would benefit from doing likewise.

I have also chosen to write about gender as a way of exploring my own poetics.

Although I do not consider my poetry to be overtly political or feminist, I am highly conscious of

gender when I write, and my gender -- a constructed "fact" I experience through my physical and

emotional being -- courses in the veins of my poems. It is both in and beyond my control.3 The

medium I use in my work, the American English language, is a gendered medium, historically

determined by the patriarchy, owned by the patriarchy and favoring the patriarchy. Many

women poets -- Guest included, I think -- recognize this context in order to move through it, with

it, and past it.

At the same time, I do not want to imply that gender determines Guest's poetry. As

Charles Bernstein said in his introduction of her at the Frost Medal ceremony, her work "has

never quite fit into our pre-made categories, our expectation, our explanations." I do not aim to

make it fit with this essay. I believe that the way in which Guest's work defies categorization is

one of its strengths: hers is an original, distinctive and somewhat elusive voice. And it's a

2Linda Russo discussed this idea as part of reading she gave at the Northeast Modern Languages Association conference in Buffalo, NY in April 2000. She was reading from a poem/essay on the poetics of production and the poetics of domestic space (although I'm not sure if this is the way she would describe her work) and talking specifically about Hettie Jones. 3 By which I mean to say, I can't help writing as a woman, but also, I love to write as a woman. I do not always intend for my poetry to bear the marks of my gender, but there it is, on the page, in the flesh and hair and appetites described on the page, and I embrace these elements as part of my body, part of my gender, and part of my poetics. At the NEMLA conference, I heard a male poet on the same panel with Linda Russo describe how his (non-narrative, non-linear) poetry doesn't happen in the "real world" -- it happens, he said, in his head. Afterwards, I talked to Linda about how I think that many men might describe their experimental poetry as happening in their heads, while many women (myself included), might describe it as happening in their bodies.

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woman's voice, and I believe that there is value in having a way to read it as such, if only to

expand upon the ways in which Guest's body of work can be viewed as important, as interesting,

and as evolving.

Levity: A Feminist Strategy

How can the display of a sense of humor in women's writing be considered political (i.e.,

feminist) work? Before one begins to discuss any written rhetorical strategy as feminist, one

must first understand the very nature of women writing as feminist. From an ideological

standpoint, the act of a woman writing is itself a subversive and resistant act, because language is

power, and power is male-dominated. If women claim and use that power, we are working in

opposition to the structural oppressions which seek to keep us subservient.

Also, humor carries its own subversive weight. Humor often seeks to disrupt the order of

things, and the order of things is determined in our culture by the patriarchy. Humor turns

expectations on their heads, resists the norm, celebrates chaos and confusion; it relies on

difference, on otherness, to exist. This difference is compounded when it is instigated by a

woman. As Regina Barreca notes, "to play with language...seems to be to play with the

authority of the symbolic/masculine view," because language itself is imagined to be equivalent

to this view, and this authority.4 Barreca goes on to state "women are not meant to give

utterance: when they do, they step out of their function...When they create comedy, they are

stepping out of their destined communication and are deviating from it in order to transform their

position." From a feminist perspective, a woman with a sense of humor is proving her

intelligence, indicating her confidence, taking action, initiating ideas. By employing wit, a

woman has entered the men's game, and that means that she is asking to be taken seriously.

Women who are writers, who seek to enter the historically and ideologically male world

of authors and poets, face a challenge. What means do we have to be taken seriously? We can

4This section of the paper owes a great deal to Regina Barreca's work. Dr. Barreca has tirelessly documented, anthologized and studied humor as a feminist strategy, and her scholarship in this area has been ground-breaking. It is still a relatively uncharted territory, but Dr. Barreca is leading the expedition.

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either "write like men," and try, through demeaning or effacing our female identities, to become

"one of the boys," or we can attempt other strategies which resist the notion that only men are

writers. But resistance is complicated, since many of the ways in which women perform our

gender are coded as trivial, crazy or melodramatic. If women writers strike certain emotional

chords or bring up certain kinds of oppression or injustice, we are seen as hysterical or whiny or

bitchy, and thus our voices are ignored. Making a joke out of a complaint is a strategy for being

heard. By keeping an issue "light," we seem like less of a burden, and our ideas are easier to

digest.

In psychological and sociological studies, the ways in which women use humor have

been shown to be different than the ways men use humor. Women tend to ridicule only the

things that people can change -- hypocrisies, the mindless following of etiquette or rules -- while

men scapegoat other people, degrading them for what they cannot change (like ethnicity, ability,

or physical appearance). In this way, women laugh as a means of subverting the power structure

or gaining control over their own lives, whereas men laugh at that which strays from the same

structure. Women also tend to be more self-deprecating in our humor than men, as a means of

being ingratiating rather than aggressive.5 Despite a woman's desire to please, her humor serves

to transform her frustration into action, through vocalization and awareness. Men's humor, on

the other hand, works to maintain the status quo, and shows solidarity with the system in place.

To do so, the male comedian must degrade those who are marked by difference (including

himself). A woman who laughs at herself, on the other hand, is belying expectations and beating

to the punch those who seek to degrade her.

Furthermore, a woman who jokes is by definition forming a community with other

women, since the humor in a joke relies on someone understanding, or feeling included, inside

the meaning of the joke. If the joker is an outsider, then a woman joker is doubly so, and seeks

to engage with other women to share her sense of things.

5 See Sandra Bernhard, Mae West, Janeane Garafalo, Fanny Brice, Roseanne Barr, Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Dorothy Parker, Bette Midler.

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There are many kinds of humor, of course: slapstick, grotesque, sarcasm, parody, puns.

The humor I have found at work in Barbara Guest's poetry is one I want to characterize as levity.

Levity, as I will be using it here, connotes an airy, light-hearted humor; levity is the off-hand,

casual remark, rather than a joke which demands a belly laugh. But it isn't smirky or mean-

spirited: levity is a breezy use of irony which doesn't betray femininity. The lack of closure

often noted in Guest's work is an extension of this breeziness, and is linked to gender in that

women are understood to be process-, rather than result-oriented. Levity implies that the user

has a secret which she does not wish to entirely reveal, but she wants people to know that she

does not take her circumstances all that seriously. When employed by women, levity points to

the absurdity in the notion that women traffic in the mundane; levity shows how the feminine

sphere of the "domestic" is actually where life's most elemental and essential experiences take

place -- birth, love, sex, death. As Guest uses it, levity allows a person to make fun of herself

while still retaining her dignity. It also signifies a certain confidence; Sara Lundquist notes that

"Guest's poems seem singularly free of that fear of being silenced." As I will show in the

following sections, Guest's use of levity is inextricably tied to her relationship with gender and

her sense of womanhood, and its development can be tracked along a path from control -- of self,

of line, of syntax -- to liberation -- of objects, of identity, and of language.

A Sublime Sort of Exercise: the Arc of Guest's Poetry, 1960-1980

In the following sections, I will trace an arc that I see in the work of Barbara Guest from

1960 to 1980. I have chosen that period of time for two reasons: because the 60s and 70s

constitute the first two decades of her work was regularly published, and because her recent work

has received more critical attention.6 By investigating her use of levity in four books -- Poems,

6 Although it is not an argument I wish to present in depth in this paper, I'd argue that following the publication of her definitive biography of H.D. (Herself Defined) by Doubleday in 1984, her work begins to obtain more attention from the literary avant-garde of its time -- the Language and post-Language poetic community. These poets, critics and scholars -- among them Susan Gevirtz and Marjorie Welish -- are part of the same community which recognizes Guest today; the presses that published her work in the late 80s and 90s -- Sun & Moon, Kelsey Street, Post-Apollo -- are the leading contemporary experimental presses. I would argue that Barbara Guest has finally found her place. More on this in the "Call for a New Context" section.

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The Blue Stairs, The Countess from Minneapolis, and The Türler Losses -- I will illustrate how

her use of humor paralleled her use of language and form.7

The change in Guest's work over these two decades is significant, and it is most simply

characterized as a move from control to liberation. The earliest poems are written in keeping

with the formal conventions of the period: enjambments follow a narrative pattern with

occasional breaks for emphasis, and the line rarely leaves the left-hand margin. In these poems,

Guest often uses an almost confessional first-person narrative voice; the narrator never

completely reveals herself, but she is present and accounted for. In the beginning of the 60s,

Guest's work often made allusions to European Italian landscapes, personified nature, mythic

figures, and other markers of Romanticism and classical Western poetries. Imbued in these

poems is a sense of yearning for freedom; many of the poems I will be discussing refer to a lack

of control or authority over one's own life. From this highly regulated aesthetic, a more

distinctive voice emerges in the late 60s and the 1970s: a voice with agency, which embraces the

domestic and loosens its hold on the self. Similarly, the page gets more air to breathe, as the

lines begin to fracture and settle more intuitively, showing a greater pleasure in language

experimentation, in the strange. By 1979, Guest's poems show an ability to let everything --

even time -- go free, with no need for resolution.

The change in the use of humor is likewise one from desire for control to release of

control. In Guest's earliest work, the poems are mostly grave and self-conscious, with occasional

sharp and witty remarks. By the late 60s, however, this tone becomes more spare and light, with

occasionally giddy and exuberant moments. Published in the 70s, The Countess from

Minneapolis and The Türler Losses are full of absurdist juxtapositions, wordplay, and an amused

attention to life's more ridiculous details.

Levity in Poems 7 Chronologically speaking, I'm skipping a couple books written during that time: Moscow Mansions (Viking, 1973) and Seeking Air (Black Sparrow, 1978). I am not considering Moscow Mansions because I feel that The Countess from Minneapolis and The Turler Losses better demonstrate Guest's shift in her use of humor; Seeking Air is a novel, and therefore not germane to this essay.

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Ironically, while the early 60s were the heyday of the so-called New York School of

Poets,8 Guest's first major book, Poems, finds the poet straddling a number of poetic

movements. In the use of language, one can perceive a lyrical, Romantic aesthetic at work, with

metaphoric references to nature and allusions to the Western tradition in the forms of Italian

landscape, personified seasons and times of day, and an epigraph from Verlaine. There is also

the influence of the narrative confessional present, with a strong use of the first-person voice and

intimate, personal moments like "I would like to go to a hotel/with you" ("The First of May"). I

see little in this book which is deeply resonant with the poems of O'Hara or Koch: the voice

rarely gets chatty or witty, and feels rather restrained. The connection with the New York

School, if one needs to be made, would probably hinge on Ashbery's more elusive and elegant

writing.

On the page, Guest's work looks strikingly similar to Ashbery's poems in The Tennis

Court Oath, published the same year, though Guest's work does not take quite so many risks.

Both books feature poems which stay relatively close to the left-hand margin and proceed half-

way across the page, with occasional indentations and shorter, fragmented lines. But where

Ashbery plays with typographic symbols, prose poem forms, and numbered and titled sequences,

Guest stays in stanzas. While Ashbery is fond of the ellipsis (which Guest uses in her poem

"Dardanella"), Guest uses italics to indicate the presence of another voice.

What the two poets share in 1962 is a lyrical cadence and formal tone, evidenced in the

following lines:

Where then shall hope and fear their objects find? The harbor cold to the mating ships, And you have lost as you stand by the balcony With the forest of the sea calm and gray beneath. ("An Additional Poem," Ashbery)

All grey-haired my sisters what is it in the more enduring clime of Spring that waits? 8 By which I simply mean that these were the years that the original "members" were all in New York and seeing each other frequently, meeting as friends to share their work.

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The tiger his voice once prayerful around the lax ochre sheen ("All Grey-haired My Sisters," Guest)

A far cry from the loose, jumpy, downtown rhythms and vernacular of an O'Hara poem from the

same era:

He allows as how some have copped out but others are always terrific, hmmmmmm? Then he goes out to buy a pair of jeans, moccasins and some holeless socks. It is very hot... ("Bill's School of New York," O'Hara)

In the excerpt from Guest, one can see a shadow of her later love for the fragment in the

line "The tiger his voice once prayerful," in which she uses no punctuation to indicate a pause or

dependent clause. But the fragmentation is never extreme, and she is certainly not being laugh-

out-loud funny here, nor is her use of language particularly playful. It is a refined voice, that

sheen of cool elegance for which Guest is mostly noted.

And yet I also find evidence here of a strain of feminism, of a sense of being controlled

and of a desire for freedom. Although these poems do not celebrate the mundane or earthy

details of a woman's life in the same ways that I will demonstrate in her later work, Guest does

address the woman as subject, and many of the poems in this first collection refer to gender.

"All Grey-haired My Sisters" is a case in point. The poem is addressed from a devoted

speaker (one can assume a female speaker) to a group of mythic women. The words the speaker

uses to address these women refer to classical Western roles for women -- sisters, relatives,

adventuresses, darlings, ancestresses, mermaids, girls; each term cements the speaker's respect

for and community with these (somewhat abstract) figures. The women here are in concert with

nature ("guided by the form and scent/of tree and flower blossoming") and have endured

hardships throughout history ("you walked into the wars," "...you lay/by the sea and your sweet

dresses/were torn by waves as over each receded"). These hardships may have included

marriage, as indicated in the lines "as daises drop at your wrists/which flight are you

making?/down the lime aisles."

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This poem also contains lines which I would like to posit as one of Guest's first gendered

jokes. In another italicized section, an unidentified second-person emerges -- "From your

journals" -- and then a moment of dialogue is quoted from an unknown "he" and "she":

He said: "In nymphic barque" She replied: "A porcupine". And later, "Reason selects our otherness."

As I read this, a man is describing a woman in terms of nature and of a feminized, legendary

creature of sweetness and innocence, the nymph. The response from a woman is a pointed, sharp

animal with no mysticism about it. The woman follows up by pointing to the rationality of

women, and that this rationality indicates the difference between the sexes.

In another poem, "Upside Down," the speaker is again looking to assert her difference in

the first lines: "Old slugger-the-bat/don't try to control me." The poem seems to be addressing

the mammal bat, but the reference to "slugger" indicates also the baseball bat, and therefore

violence and masculinity. This plea for liberty is picked up again in the poem "The First of

May," in which the speaker begins: "My eye cannot turn toward you/Night/because it has Day

watching." Throughout the poem, the speaker -- references to a nightdress indicate she is a

woman -- yearns for autonomy and freedom:

I would like to go for a walk in the dark without moonbeams down that path of mushrooms in my nightdress without shoes.

Her desire is manifested in a desire for sexual pleasure and rebellion: "I would like to steal...," "I

would like to go to a hotel/with you." Day, the controller, blinds the speaker; Day gives the

speaker a bird which the speaker must feed carefully and protect. And yet the speaker is

reluctant to leave Day's power, because if she does disobey and "give you up Day forever," she

will be forced to join "the guerrillas" who will "roast my bird/and eat it." So freedom is seen as

coming with treacherous consequences.

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Overall, the poems in this first book are not light -- nor do they reveal much reliance on

the characteristics we usually associate with the New York School -- but they are indicators of

the poetry which follows, and they do show hints of the levity to come in sharp asides and a

quest for independence.

Levity in The Blue Stairs

Published six years after Poems, The Blue Stairs opens with a line which immediately

indicates a declaration of daring: "There is no fear/in taking the first step." These first lines are

a good introduction to the liberation of language, line and spirit -- the "quiet authority of...tone,"

in Wendy Mulford's words -- which runs throughout Guest's second collection. In The Blue

Stairs, the reader first finds the aesthetic typically associated with Barbara Guest. Fragmentation

begins to occur more often and in greater extremes: the average line in the book is no more than

five words. Furthermore, the lines begin to move away from the left margin, with indentations

which bring lines halfway across the page, and stanza breaks, in some cases, after single lines.

The page looks airy, with each idea given its own room to breathe.

And although the first-person speaker does make appearances here, the first poem in the

book, significantly, has hardly any "I" voice. In its place is a voice of declarative authority

which seems to be calling for courage, ambition and dignity -- a climb up a flight of

metaphorical stairs: "In fact the top/can be reached/without disaster." In my reading, this is a

gendered quest. In the lines "occasionally giving way/to the emotions," there is evidence that a

feminine reaction does not keep one from climbing higher. The speaker is an authority; she

reports "Now I shall tell you/why it [the staircase] is beautiful." She knows her own mind, and

furthermore, she knows the purpose of her ambition: "Its purpose/is to take you upward." Once

she has finished her journey to the pinnacle, she does not want to relinquish her position: "And

having reached the summit/would like to stay there/even if the stairs are withdrawn."

However important this journey, it is not made solemnly; throughout, there are jokes

here, jokes which question and provoke notions of power. Early in the poem, there is a reference

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to popes, who line the bottom stairs, and a note that "Being humble" equals being "productive,"

which I take to be slightly sarcastic, considering the rest of the poem's energy for great heights.

In other poems in The Blue Stairs, we can see a chatty, light-hearted humor which seems

more related to the New York School mode than any of the poems in the previous collection. In

the second poem, "Turkey Villas," the voice becomes whimsical and intimate:

Or to make a shorter story and relate in truth to my life as if it were San Francisco 1937

Here, Guest offers an alternate reading of her own poem, providing insight into her personal

vocabulary and frame of reference. The language usage also becomes looser here, with

repetition -- "It is a shade/a window shade also" -- and allusions to domestic details which belie a

womanly space: curtains and houses. The speaker takes on a self-effacing tone, laughing at

herself for being so personal. "Now to be a proper historian/of my dreams," she begins, talking

of her real and dreamlives, she describes

...a ship seen from A Hotel Hilton balcony Think of that Balcon Hilton!

And then, as if sensing her own foray into O'Hara-ish exuberance, she pulls in the reigns on

herself: "Enough of this dizziness/let us apply the oars."

But the speaker cannot help herself -- she is happy and free and thinking for herself,

"fevered with ideas" -- and so she quickly starts up again:

I am spinning with ideas to the top of the Mosque I am an ice cream cone Muezzin

To all those critics who have called Guest's work cold and aloof, I call on them to look at

this poem, which radiates energy and vitality and a quick sense of humor. A critique of gender

roles is here, too; in the midst of a list of wishful thinking -- "I shall go on collecting pottery/yet

16

it shall be blue" -- the speaker laughs "I shall be medieval and slim/at once!," a reference to her

own body, and a joke on what is expected of it. Revealing this insecurity only adds to the

humanity of this poem, and towards its end, the speaker is once again self-effacing: "My

dreams/are stupidly turbulent," she claims, and yet as readers, we do not quite believe her. Her

dreams have proven to be delightful in their wildness.

"Wildness," is, in fact, a word which gets used quite often in The Blue Stairs. In "A

Reason," the speaker, who seems to have been walking in a city, comments, "Well wild wild

whatever/in wild more silent blue." The combination of off-handedness and intensity here is

charming, and is picked up again in "20," in which the speaker compares herself to wild flowers

which repeat themselves "as I do."

A sense of wild abandon permeates this book, from the lines which swing back and forth

on the page to the use of exclamatory remarks like "Brilliant decision!" in "Walking Buddha."

Similarly, a sense of womanhood is also much in evidence, from the allusions to traditionally

feminine motifs such as flowers and pottery to a careful observation of the "Moorish girl" in a

Delacroix painting. "[C]omment you delight the painter," the speaker notices, "...Keep your head

in profile/Beliah and your feet wide apart/so I can draw your heavy sexy legs." In another poem,

"The Return of the Muses" (the very title of which suggests the importance of gender), the

speaker again refers specifically to the problems and particulars of the female body. When the

Muses leave the speaker, she is forced to alter herself:

And I went on a diet I stopped eating regularly, I changed my ways several times "strict discipline, continuous devotion, receptiveness" were mine.

In these lines, the speaker refers to dieting as a kind of religious ritual which she happily

abandons when the Muses return: "Here you are back again. Welcome./Farewell, 'strict,

continuous, repetitive--'". With the return of these women, everything comes alive again; for the

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speaker, "there's a ringing in my ears/as if a poem were beating on a stone" and she "..want[s] to

stop whatever I am doing/and listen to their marvelous hello."

The Blue Stairs concludes with one of Guest's most noted poems, a long, eight-part piece

entitled "A Handbook of Surfing." The tone here is more serious than in previous poems -- in an

interview, Guest stated, "That poem is really an anti-Vietnam poem. No one knows this unless I

tell them," -- but the use of language is lively and very playful, and foreshadows the kind of

fragmentation used in her more recent work. Lines are often broken in unexpected places; there

is a lack of punctuation which makes phrases feel rushed together, quick; some of the lines seem

generated at a level of surface and sound rather than sense.

In the wave wilderness wily wild cuckoo strength bearers as rapists knee songs and thigh grippers foam slashers bone knockers surf kindlers in the riddle splash t wit ter woo

This kind of bold usage and heightened, excited language, which at times approximate free-

association, are interspersed with an almost prosaic, pseudo-handbook tone, which is then

deconstructed by the speaker and made metaphoric, so that a passage which reads "we

would/like to tell here about paddling, standing and turning" receives the response,

...Everyone knows how to turn or turn about or make a reverse these are daily decisions both politic and poetic and they have historic sequences in the surf they are known as Changing Directions

The Blue Stairs, I believe, marks a rather dramatic change in direction for Guest, one which is

followed through in the book-length poem, The Countess from Minneapolis.

Levity in The Countess from Minneapolis

The Countess from Minneapolis is in some ways a unique work. In it, a woman of

European royalty is displaced in the American Midwest, where she observes the culture through

the eyes -- the "unreasonable lenses" -- of an outsider. As Sara Lundquist notes, it "reads

something like a fragmented novella" which describes "the middling Midwest of provincial

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values" as well as "the Midwest of...straightforwardness...and attractive plainness." The book

alternates between poems which carry through the lyric fragment and prose pieces which tend to

be more down-to-earth -- and humorous. It is these pieces which I am considering here.

The tone of these prose pieces is extremely playful, and much of that play is rooted in

language-play: syntactic misuse, lists, parodies of formality, and surrealist juxtapositions. I find

this kind of levity to be, again, a feminist levity. There is something subversive about the voice

in these poems, in part because they are prose poems: one is immediately struck by the fact that

they do not follow the "rules" of poetic form. Also, Minneapolis is not ridiculed for its perceived

shortcomings; rather, in Lundquist's words, it is "put forward as significant matter, worthy of

attention, capable of rewarding study." The Countess seeks to understand and join in her new

community, despite feeling very much the foreigner. She appreciates its "historical

reconstruction of early earthworks/and admiration"; her contempt is reserved for the

cosmopolitan pretension she herself uses to describe her surroundings.

This is well illustrated in the poem numbered eight, "MUSINGS ON THE

MISSISSIPPI," in which the speaker -- the Countess -- describes the course of the river Seine in

terms of the "verve one use to associate with the beret." She then begins a little riff in which she

uses French and pseudo-French references to indicate an awareness of the ridiculousness of

comparing Minneapolis to Paris: "A manner thus is maintained by the Seine which we define as

raison d'être or Steak Diane or the French way of looking at things, sometimes it is true through a

pigeonhole." By using this kind of explanatory, lecture-like tone, the speaker is poking fun at the

seriousness with which Parisian culture is usually treated in poetry. The last clause --

"sometimes it is true through a pigeonhole" -- is a whimsical touch, a surprisingly parenthetical

and personal moment at the end of a more or less straightforward statement.

Laughing at pretension, at the pretensions of European and aristocratic culture, is a

refrain throughout the prose poems in Countess. Poem fourteen begins with a line of dialogue

from Signor Reboneri, a visiting lecturer: "'The refinement of what's special takes place between

the meat and the bun. N'est-ce-pas?'" The professor proceeds to compare the Midwestern locals

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in a bar to Viking "'sauvages'," but he "like[s] what he saw," a room full of "hefty maidens" and

"god-like men." In the end, the joke is on the Signor, who falls into a beer-induced reverie about

the "hairy arms" of "these tribes."

Surrealism is found in this text through the juxtaposition of everyday objects out of place;

we find it funny when the unexpected makes a brief appearance. This is the case in poem

twenty-five, which begins by pointing out "The further exoticism of reading a British novel

while visiting Duluth," and in poem eleven:

...There was such an anachronism lurking in the snakelike room that Pedersen frequently mistook the potatoes in his soup for boulders and searched beneath them for hidden reptiles.9

Most strikingly surrealist (and lovely, and funny) is the list of "ACTIVITIES" which make up

poem thirty-seven:

Grain Belt Beer, He Who Gets Slapped, Vikings vs Dolphins, ice skating, fishing, Japanese food, meat, square dancing, collage, Rimbaud, New York Painting, Showboats, Baskin-Robbins ice cream, La Strada, Basement Studios

I find this list extremely enjoyable: it feels both intimate and universal; it points to the

strangeness of cultural landscape; it mixes high and low culture in a manner reminiscent of the

New York School (which itself is referenced here). In fact, despite the Countess' ancestry, her

own tone is often extremely casual and "New Yorky," as in the letter she composes when an

unnamed friend suggests, "'What you need is a sophisticated cat'" in poem twenty-four. The

Countess writes a "note to self:" "'Contact nearest available feline breeding -- kennel -- was it

kennel -- was it shed? Whatever. The sooner the better.'"

Elsewhere Guest seems to delight in the surfaces of language, in sound and in sense, in a

light-hearted way, as in the list which begins poem thirty-six -- "Heliogobalus, Heliograph,

Heliology, Helium, Heliotrope, Haiti" -- and in the list of names the Countess reels off in poem

fifteen, "AT THE GUTHRIE THEATER": "...Helm Wulfings and his assistants: Hnaef Hocings,

9 I have more or less used my own line breaks here, following the way the lines break on the page in the edition of Countess I own. These linebreaks should not mislead the reader; these are prose poems.

20

Wald Woings, Wod Thurings, Seaferth Seggs, 'Swede' Ogentheow, Shafthere Ymbers, Shaefa

Longbeards, Hun Hetwards, Holen Wrosns, Ringwald Raider." These subversions of meaning

show a deviancy, a mocking of the social order and of meaning, which can be read as a feminist

strategy, a disruption (by the Countess) of the power structure.

Levity in The Türler Losses

To conclude this portion of the essay, I would like to look briefly at the last book Guest

published in the 70s, a slim volume entitled The Türler Losses.10 This is not one of her better

known books; between the publication of her novel, Seeking Air, in 1978, and her biography of

H.D. in 1984, Guest wrote three small books which were put out by independent presses. The

Türler Losses is the first of these,11 and I feel it is mostly useful to talk about as a means to chart

the development of her use of levity and as an indicator of the kind of work for which she is

currently best known.

The Türler Losses is a book about lacking closure. The speaker, who one is safe to

assume is Barbara Guest, has lost several expensive Türler watches, and the poems recount the

losses. The poems lack closure, feeling disjunctive and scattered -- a look towards some of her

most recent work. While the poems overall are too abstract and complex to utilize the kind of

levity which is present in Countess, they nonetheless share a certain breeziness and warmth in

the recounting of personal detail and the celebration of the mundane.

Some sections of The Türler Losses are elegant and obtuse, such as these from early in

the book: "listen/wind scraps of shine/all that grass ashiver/field tree the profile." But other

places find Guest reverting to a New York School chattiness, a warm welcome to the reader

inside a difficult text, as in this section, just one page later:

I like innocuous rhythms, don't you? Loss isn't so important. When nothing lies there wearing its ring.

10 The Turler Losses was reprinted in an altered version in Fair Realism (Sun & Moon, 1989), but I will be using the original for my reading. 11 The others are Quilts (Vehicle, 1980)and Biography (Burning Deck, 1981).

21

Here, by addressing the second person, Guest seems to be comforting her reader, acknowledging

her investment in abstract sound and reassuring us that we do not need to treat any of this all that

seriously. In this way, Guest takes herself lightly, and urges us to do the same, joking even about

the importance of her watches and her carelessness in losing the costly objects: "After the

second Türler loss/a lessening perhaps of fastidiousness/the Timex phase."

I'd argue that by focusing on such a personal theme -- the loss of a piece of jewelry -- for

a sustained experimental work, Guest is again using a feminist strategy: elevating the "woman's

sphere" to the plane of high art. Of course, the book is also about metaphoric losses, about space

and time, but it often reads, between sections of dense imagery and assonant sound-play, more

like an ethereal diary than anything else:

Whisked to hotel. Sleepy hotel morning. Enjoyment of eider- down. Waiter wheels in lunch. Step outside onto balcony. Clouds. Descend to gardens. Pool where there is wave-making machine, much discomfiture. Decision to take trolley to grave of James Joyce. Return to trolley. Downhill trip by taxi to Zurich. Lengthy promenade of Strasse. Decision to make first Türler timepiece purchase.

Certainly, this kind of reportage voice seems to be making fun of the very nature of such

a personal book: a female voice masquerading as male news anchor. The use of the diary form

feels womanly, as she herself remarks in a later section: "Safely home she duly recorded this

event in her DIARY, JOURNAL, LETTERS, and the Sunday shopping lists later discovered

nestling in the shrubbery outside her workroom." When Guest uses the academic, scientific --

i.e., masculine -- mode of the footnote with no corresponding notation in the text, she is clearly

making fun of it: SEE: INDEX, CROSS-FILING, UNIVERSITY, CORRESPONDENCE, ac-Va Yu, post, previous, subsequent, intervening, chronological, summary, additional material, foreign-native, biographical, birth, post-humous, parents, marital, geographical, domestic, friendships with, income, persuasions, disasters, reports, rumors, endeavors, travel, quarrels, divorces, demises. N.B. All private papers withheld. Possible prohibition publication. cf. (Libel Laws)

22

In these moments, Guest is recognizing the silliness in her own medium, language, as she

states in one of the last sections, "What an absurd tone is put to our shadows/pistachio-mint."

By offering up the humor inherent even in a serious piece of art, she reaches out to the reader.

The Türler Losses feels confident, content; the voice is uniquely Guest's. Throughout the

sixties and seventies, Guest utilized various techniques, experimenting with line, with wit, with

formality, borrowing and inventing new ways of writing with each book. The Türler Losses

represents her commitment to this blend of the everyday and the spiritual, the philosophical and

the capricious, a commitment which is evident in the poetry which has come since.

Conclusion: A Call for a New Context

The periods I have examined -- the sixties and seventies -- were prolific, exciting times

for American poetry, and many movements were underway as Guest was writing the books I

have studied. But far from being able to label her as part of any one school, I think my reading

has led me instead to discover the making of a singular voice: neither New York School poet nor

confessional feminist, neither Language poet nor lyrical Romanticist. Barbara Guest draws from

all these wells, but her sensibility is utterly her own.

Nonetheless, by positing her use of levity as a feminist strategy, I would like to call for a

reexamination of Guest's work in light of a more abstract community of writers, one bound

together not by history but by gender. I would like to see Guest read alongside other American

women poets who have been writing in an experimental -- Beat, New York School, Language,

post-Language, etc. -- vein over the last half-century.

As I have previously stated, the majority of scholarship on Guest's work has focused on

her relationship to visual art or to her "coolness." In an interview with Guest, Mark

Hillringhouse remarked, in reference to her collaboration with the artist Richard Tuttle, The

Altos, "there are graceful gestures." Guest replied, "They are graceful, because it's hard for me to

be as violent as I'd like to be in poetry. I think that I would like more violence in my poetry." To

which Hillringhouse responds, obviously surprised, "Really, that's interesting." Guest continues,

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"I think that when you mention the serenity or something of the sort, I think that it can be

controlled violence." She later states, "I think [managed violence] comes into certain people's

poetry whom I admire. Leslie Scalapino has a lot of that managed violence in her poetry..." And

then, "...poetry should have more tension. That's an even better word than violence. That's

something that's missing from Wallace Stevens. I think it is coming into contemporary poetry

more and I admire that."

I ask, then, that a feminist reading of Guest be predicated on the notion that she is not a

"cool" read; rather, that her use of wit, her invocation of domestic detail, and her subversion of

literary traditions be seen as evidence of not only warmth and power, but of tension and managed

violence. Guest herself stated, "there's no possible way of writing without passion," and I would

ask that her poetry be read as the work of a passionate woman artist, aware of her position in the

world, and in concert with other women poets. Indeed, when Hillringhouse asks Guest who she

feels is succeeding at using tension in their poetry, she replies, "Well, I think a good many

younger women poets are working very hard at it..."12

How can a work be one of both levity and tension? The answer, I believe, lies in gender.

As I posited earlier, when a woman chooses to laugh, she does so in the face of oppression, and

against the patriarchal systems of power which oppress her. Therefore, the decision to make fun,

as Guest does, of academic pretension, of her own body, of the sounds of words, of domestic life,

are all means of critiquing the male system in which we live. By necessity, a woman who makes

light of our world is addressing the political implications of a sexist culture.

I do not ask that we read Guest only in this light. Rather, I see this essay as part of an

exciting new effort -- evidenced by this journal and by the panels on her work at the two most

recent National Poetry Foundation conferences -- to place her in a new context. Guest is not

limited to one time period or artistic movement: her work proves that. By reading Guest with

12 Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to closely read the work of young women poets with Guest's ideas about tension and violence -- or with my own ideas about how these qualities intersect with levity -- in mind. However, I have done some work of the work towards compiling a list of women who have written experimental poetry from 1960 through the present and whose work could be examined towards these ends: Maxine Chernoff, Lori Lubeski, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Kristen Prevallet, and Elizabeth Treadwell, to name a few.

24

other women experimentalists, we would see how far Guest's work has come, how much she has

taught us, how much she has learned from us, and how much we can give back, all of us, as

women who have learned to laugh through -- to breathe air into -- our gender and our language.

25

Bibliography

Allen, Donald, ed. The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Ashbery, John. The Tennis Court Oath, Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1962. Barreca, Regina. They Used to Call Me Snow White...But I Drifted: Women's Strategic Use of Humor, New York: Viking, 1991. Barreca, Regina, ed. Untamed and Unabashed, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994. Bernstein, Charles. "Introducing Barbara Guest," Jacket #10: online, October 1999. www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket10/bernstein-on-guest.html Guest, Barbara. The Blue Stairs, New York: Corinth Books, 1968. Guest, Barbara. The Countess from Minneapolis, Providence: Burning Deck, 1976. Guest, Barbara. Poems The Location of Things, Archaics, The Open Skies, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1962. Guest, Barbara. The Türler Losses, Montréal: Mansfield Book Mart Ltd., 1979. Hillringhouse, Mark. "Barbara Guest: An Interview by Mark Hillringhouse," The American Poetry Review July/August 1992: 23-30. Lundquist, Sara. "The Midwestern New York Poet: Barbara Guest's 'The Countess From Minneapolis,'" Jacket #10: online, October 1999. www.jacket.zip.com.au/ jacket10/mulford-on-guest.html Lundquist, Sara. "Reverence and Resistance: Barbara Guest, Ekphrasis, and the Female Gaze," Contemporary Literature 38.2 (1997): 260-286. Mulford, Wendy. "The Architecture of Dream: Barbara Guest's 'The Blue Stairs,' Corinth, 1968," Jacket #10: online, October 1999. www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket10/mulford-on-guest.html Poetry Society of America. "About Barbara Guest." Online, http://poetrysociety.org/bguest. html Welish, Marjorie. "The Lyric Lately," Jacket #10: online, October 1999. www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket10/welish-on-guest.html