Posted on: November 2, 2010
Guest Blogger: Robert Mueller
It is tempting to admire poets whose poetry rewards the loving attention of repeated reading. Barbara Guest provides that experience, and some readers may draw away from her results simply as if she were just trying, just trying to be difficult. It is true, the writing has a distinctly prepossessing character. Everything associated with the poetry, including the image, the style, the statement, the brilliant and tranquil charm of her spectacular, or humble, or both, words, or both in the same blizzard-cutting phrase, speaks nobility. If they step proud, if they step serene, they inveigle the rushing blame, put it fondly to rest.
That is how I see it. But what of all this delight, apparent only for the reader who likes to assume a scholar’s robe? What can you really make of tasty bits of hidden significance, these pearls of cool or streamlined and then piercing astuteness?…
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Posted on: February 16, 2009
A Line from Barbara Guest’s Roses
That air in life is important but may be less so in the arts interests me. But we are 60% water and worth $28.49 in bone, fat and chemicals so should we focus more on water and $’s and less on air. But you may respond the atmosphere that encases us is all air but this is not completely true since there is pollution and those little filaments we see when light shafts float into a room and illuminate the air. Then we see what we think is truly there. Of course this ignores the question of the further reaches of space where air may be solid and water may be a gas. Then we would have to understand plants differently since plants would have to adjust and worms and beetles too. Maybe there is some type of traveling incognito and mysterious communication that happens in the air, a space that, for all we know, is a proscenium arch theater?…
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Posted on: January 24, 2009
Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. 1912
Below, we have a new essay by Robert Mueller. He deals with two fine poets, Barbara Guest and Jill Magi, with imagination and verve.
Jill Magi’s author’s page over at Shearsman Books can be found here. Jill’s homepage can be found here.
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The topic of poetic space on the page is an interesting one. How it looks alters our reception and perception. We read it differently to ourselves depending upon topography.
Poetry is both spatial and aural. Traditionally, poetry was heard, not seen, passed down to us from bard to bard, from shaman to shaman, registering across the centuries in the ear, as we imagined the words and their referents with our inner eye.…
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