by Cedar Sigo
the natural world spins in green.
A column chosen from distance
mounts into the sky while the font
is classical,
they will destroy the disturbed font
as it enters modernity and is rare….
The necessary idealizing of your reality
is part of the search, the journey
where two figures embrace
This house was drawn for them
it looks like a real house
perhaps they will move in today
into ephemeral dusk and
move out of that into night
selective night with trees,
The darkened copies of all trees.
Here we see the transformative strategies of poetry at work. I love that Guest immediately provides us with the cover of darkness as a backdrop. So, the outlines of the silhouettes and imaginary apparitions are allowed their full (and skating) presence.
We are made to feel the weight of the fountains and other edges encroaching upon the scene, “illuminations […] orderly as motors,” vowels replacing walls.
This is an exquisitely rendered poets’ panorama, but it almost sounds daily, as if the strangeness of being at sea in language is overly familiar, familiar enough to recount and then to comment upon.
I find that the poets who allow the details of composition to curl quickly around the poems themselves seem to date well.
“The necessary idealizing of your reality / is part of the search, the journey / where two figures embrace.”
I feel that darkness is part of the idealization here, every object in this poem is outlined against darkness, apart from the light tearing through at its borders. The couple that appears near the end is made to bear the entirety of reality as a construct, “the darkened copies of all trees.”
This is a startling description of landscape as it emerges in writing, as it is just the contours that provide sensation. I think her voice would sound almost unhinged if its pitch and tone were not so noble.
Her grand and graven tone leads me back to a time when the most transformative and liberating texts on poetics were alive in actual correspondence, that of John Keats and later Arthur Rimbaud.
Besides giving a poetry reading or sending someone flowers, the letter still seems the most human form of direct address. It assumes an immediate privacy, perfect for charting the aspects of a beautiful voyage. Sometimes the writer needs only an imagined audience of one. This may account for the haunted, transcribed quality in Forces of Imagination.
The pitch of Barbara Guest’s voice sounds much like the golden, vaulted air of belief in the letters of John Keats (written between 1817 until his death four years later at age twenty-five). When I recently reread these letters I thought immediately of Guest and her ideal of composition as hinging on a sense of the otherworldly, that the imagination creates worlds and that our poems can become offerings of further experimentation and turbulence. We are left surrounded by questions; which way to turn? An idealized state of composition in flux. Certain passages from the letters of Keats cast strategic lines; they are easily held in mind and, so, remembered.
1st. I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
2nd. Its touches of beauty should never be halfway, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of Imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him, shine over him and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight. But it is easier to think what poetry should be than to write it—and this leads me to another axiom. That if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.
I love his wedding the skill of the poet to the natural change from day to twilight. The luxury of keeping something hidden or in the abstract. “But it is easier to think what poetry should be than to write it.” Sounds very much like a line plucked from one of Guest’s essays.
Of course, we also have Keats’s infamous take on negative capability: “That is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Keats also wrote a letter detailing the chamber of maiden-thought, a space the poet enters for total enclosure, proof of a realm that exists for the duration of composition and sometimes bleeds over into the editing of a work.
We no sooner get into the second Chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-Thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there forever in delight: However among the effects this breathing is father of is that tremendous one of sharpening one’s vision into the heart and nature of Man—of convincing one’s nerves that the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness, and Oppression—whereby this Chamber of Maiden-Thought becomes gradually darkened and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open—but all dark—all leading to dark passages—We see not the balance of good and evil. We are in a Mist—We are now in that state—We feel the burden of the Mystery.
In this letter, Keats makes mention of the chamber growing dark, the darkness sets the doors open, resulting in a mist that surrounds the poet’s first steps. Keats seems to be narrating these chambers down to an alchemical science, not merely describing them, but leaving them enacted for poets of the future.
This is from a letter written by Keats to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana in the spring of 1819:
I am however young writing at random—straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness—without knowing the bearing of any one assertion of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin?
This is similar to the darkness fleshed out and personalized in Forces of Imagination. Guest’s claims leave an edifice similar to Keats’s, more of an active portal than a ruin. The narration of their poetics reads like testimony, a transcription of a report after being abducted. I suppose I am still speaking about intrigue. The lectures of Jack Spicer would fit in nicely here, though I find even more resemblance in the so-called “Seer” letters of Arthur Rimbaud, in particular his take on “a systematized disorganization of all the senses.” The following letter was written to the French poet Paul Demeny in 1871, more than fifty years after Keats’s correspondence. This letter was sent from Charleville-Mézières, France. Rimbaud was nineteen at the time:
I say you have to be a visionary, make yourself a visionary. A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed—and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!
Rimbaud is not seeking any sort of assimilation of these visions, but insisting that a poet must bear witness to them, that even after visions evaporate, at least we have seen them. I assume that this letter is also speaking to the measure of poetry itself, a register or vehicle that is always moving slightly ahead of our reach, so much so that the poet is caught in a state of impressionism, a cleaving after, as in Keats’s description, “We are in a Mist.” Ultimately Rimbaud seems to be advocating for the release of the “cultivated” soul from its body in order to begin its dream of astral projection. The spirit has been liberated and is now soaring, disembodied, through sp
ace.
Some of my favorite writing on Rimbaud is by the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth. This is taken from his wonderfully readable crash course of a volume Classics Revisited. In this passage, Rexroth discusses the impact of the Seer letters, or “The Letters of a Visionary,” as he refers to them:
They are the most extreme statement of the prophetic, shamanistic, vatic role of the poet in the literature of any language to that date…They are not only aesthetic programs, they are apocalyptic visions and calls to action. Rimbaud attacks with all the fury of the visionary who sees an on-rushing apocalypse that his contemporaries refuse to even notice. “Judgement, and after the Judgement, the Fire.”
Rimbaud’s letter to Paul Demeny also contains the exhilarating statement, “I is another”:
For I is an other. If brass wakes as a bugle, it is not its fault at all. That is quite clear to me: I am a spectator at the flowering of my thought: I watch it, I listen to it: I draw a bow across a string: a symphony stirs in the depths, or surges onto the stage.
This mode of self-separation within the act reminds me of Guest’s tactile approach to poetics throughout Forces of Imagination. This claim of being a spectator at the flowering of thought allows for the amount of distance that Guest strikes between herself and the reader, distance enough to begin to cast shadows.
In an interview with Cynthia Hogue, Kathleen Fraser, and Elisabeth Frost from 1999, Guest ruminates on the importance of keeping a studio apart from her home.
BG: I was fortunate in that I was able to rent an apartment away from my home as a writing studio, where I could really go inside. A friend rented it for me, and I think that the separation was crucial, that I was able to get away to write. Because I never wrote at home.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It looked out over the East River. It was nice, and I had it for quite a while. And I was able to write so much there. I wrote the H.D. book there. I was pretty worn-out by that book. I really was. I just broke down. The place that I was in had a little walk around it and I would walk out there on the terrace.
KF: That terrace appears in Seeking Air, doesn’t it?
BG: Yes, that particular place made me want to write prose. I do think you have to get away. I think it’s the real solution. The way a painter goes into the studio to work.
Clearly her studio stands as an intermediary space, wherein poetry is given the assignation of a satellite reality rather than an earthbound venture. It’s the carving out of the space, finding the new planet, then its footholds, and then to open one’s eyes.
I feel that the grain of poetry is meant to be illusive. It must eventually take on different forms to survive. I try and keep it hovering and ready to invade. Guest herself would allow the element of poetry to splinter off into biography, art writing, and many collaborations with visual artists.
I also think it’s important for us to hear how she sometimes allows for statements on poetics within the poetry itself. Poetry can sometimes be more exact than an essay because it is bound inextricably to music, the rise and fall of which may lock a meaning into place with sudden passion or surprise. This poem is from her final collection, The Red Gaze (2005):
IMAGINED ROOM
Do not forget the sky has other zones.
Let it rest on the embankment, close the eyes,
Lay it in the little bed made of maplewood.
Wash its sleeve in sky drops.
Let there be no formal potions.
A subject and a predicate made of glass.
You have entered the narrow zone
your portrait etched in glass.
Becoming less and less until the future faces you
like the magpie you hid,
exchanging feathers for other feathers.
In the tower you flew without wings
speaking in other tongues to the imagined room.
There is a greater accuracy here as Guest allows her musings to become the paneled music box itself. What is at risk in cueing the formation of a room? To make clear its shimmering fragility? Our outright devotion to the poem makes manifest the halo that Guest insists upon, that “particular unconscious state of immanence.” The effects we achieve in our poems are only revealed after withstanding a ruthless wave of syntax. The element of collage is not always imposed after the fact, but often arises as we are facing language and attempting to chart it in the moment. Sometimes as poets we are sifting through ruins and letters and lines and charting our findings piece by piece. These fragments may become fused, bottlenecked or explosive, but still recorded in the order received.
SHADOWS CROSSING
TONES OF VOICE CONTINUED
All I know is that I’m in love with you
Even though you say that we are through
I know without your love I just can’t go on
I wonder where our love has gone
Always thought you’d love me more and more
Never dreamed you’d ever let me go
I know without your love I just can’t go on
I wonder where our love has gone
That was a live recording of Billie Holiday from 1948, “I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone” (Music and Lyrics by Buddy Johnson, 1947).
■ ■ ■
This lecture begins with a quote by the poet Audre Lorde, taken from an interview in 1992:
What I leave behind has a life of its own—I’ve said this about poetry, I’ve said it about children. Well, in a sense I’m saying it about the very artifact of who I have been.
I’m not sure what compels me to attempt this breakdown of my own poetic voice. It’s the first clue I have had toward any sense of autobiography or how one becomes mixed up with and eventually possessed by poetry.
It seemed easiest to separate this venture out into three sections: Music, Image, and ending finally with History. Recent history as well as being placed back in “First Nation Time.” These are all components of the overall voyage, the knocking together of ships in their harbors at night. Sometimes all three of these components come sailing into the poem to shadow one another and sometimes they visit separately as crystalline starting points.
When I find myself slipping into writing poetry, a certain tonality seems present and beckoning as a portal, a handful of dead, silver tinsel is tacked above the rusted doorframe, waving in a slight wind. The stray isolation chamber would be another apt description, but it can start in such a hurry, dependent on reaching toward scraps of paper when dead ink pens and broken pencils surround you, scribbling frantically on the backs of bills, or speaking jumbled notes into your nearly dead phone, hoping that later on these notes will trigger a certain manner of address that might carry you through to the end of a new piece.
I do not read music nor do I play an instrument of any kind. Though I have been accused more than once of “singing” my poems. At first, I was slightly put off by this description, thinking my accents, silences, or pauses within a line to be fairly subtle, but now I think I know what it was they meant by this. I never let the music of the line dissolve completely, and those edges (though always fading fast) will attach themselves to the next island of words, but without ever dying away completely. Every utterance is overlaid and connected acoustically in performance. “No matter the mists and miles across them,” as John Wieners once wrote, “what we would traverse to be together…”
I fell in love with Billie Holiday’s music because it was something I was allowed to discover for myself. I remember that my mother and stepfather had gone to Nashville in 1993 to record an album. I was fifteen years old. At some point during the two weeks they were away I bought a cassette tape of Holiday’s famous 1930s Columbia recordings backed by Teddy Wilson and His Orchestra, with Lester Young often alongside Holiday to mirror a few phrases and to elongate and drift behind others. What jazz musicians of that period liked to call “filling up the windows.” By the time my parents
had returned from Nashville I had memorized every inflection on that Billie Holiday cassette. I was hypnotized by her laid-back phrasing as well as the drastic change of tone in Holiday’s voice with each passing decade, plus the fact that in every setting the band seemed to be following the singer, not the other way around.
But there was, of course, an enormous amount of struggle to Holiday’s life story: her on-and-off dependence upon drugs and alcohol, the rebellion of performing and recording the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” in 1939. Her 1947 imprisonment at Alderson Federal Prison Camp following years of extensive surveillance and harassment by Harry J. Anslinger, then director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Upon her release from prison in 1948 she was essentially robbed of her livelihood through the blatant withholding of her cabaret card. An artist needed this card to sing in the clubs of New York City. It was tantamount to a form of exile, as she was forced to leave home in order to make a living. I can’t help but think of Keats, of the old, die-hard pairing forced upon us as poets: Truth and Beauty. If in fact we are interested in truth as a backdrop we should be teaching the life of Billie Holiday in order to get at the true nature of subjugation in this country. So often the lens we are offered is that of our forefathers. Why must we constantly recast history within the myth of the American dream?
The story of Billie Holiday has been told many times and in many forms. I think I have read almost all of them. A few that stand out include two books aimed at young adults, one by poet and publisher Hettie Jones, titled Big Star Fallin’ Mama: Five Women in Black Music, as well as Don’t Explain, a biography written in the form of a long poem by Alexis De Veaux. Lady Sings the Blues is the ghostwritten memoir Holiday completed with journalist William Dufty in 1956. My personal favorite of the Holiday biographies was written by Donald Clarke, titled Wishing on the Moon. It was published in the fall of 1994, less than a year after my obsession with Holiday’s music began. I had collected huge amounts of Billie Holiday records by this point, from every period, and I once went so far as to write Donald Clarke in order to date one particular live set that had offered no recording information. He actually wrote back and identified the set as stemming from an engagement at Miss Olivia Davis’s Patio Lounge in Washington, DC, 1956.
