Typescript of two early poems by Barbara Guest

'Escape' and 'The Inhabitants'

Barbara Guest

For transcriptions of these poems, please visit “Three Poems by Barbara Guest.”

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LINEbreak: Barbara Guest in conversation with Charles Bernstein
Three poems by Barbara Guest

June 15, 2011

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Barbara Guest

About this feature

Curated by Charles Bernstein to accompany the 2011 publication of his 1995 LINEbreak interview with the poet at Jacket2, this collection brings together two early Barbara Guest poems, written around 1945, as well as “Multiplicity,” published just once previously in The Iowa Review and read by Guest during the 1995 interview.

Preface

Charles Bernstein

LINEbreak: Barbara Guest in conversation with Charles Bernstein Barbara Guest

Three poems by Barbara Guest Barbara Guest

Typescript of two early poems by Barbara Guest Barbara Guest

More Barbara Guest

Erica Kaufman discussed Guest's The Location of Things as part of the feature, “Poetry in 1960, a Symposium,” and Jacket editor John Tranter catalogued the poet’s appearances in the magazine as part of his 2012 commentary series, “Under the Horizon.” Guest’s poem “Roses” was discussed in PoemTalk podcast #24, which you can find on PennSound’s Barbara Guest author page, alongside many readings, interviews, and talks from 1977 to 2004, as well as a 2006 tribute to the poet at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and a pair of 2007 interviews with Hadley Guest about her mother.

By this author

Five pieces from 'The Confetti Trees'

To Kenneth

Homage

Barbara Guest reads from 'The Red Gaze'

Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser in conversation with Elisabeth Frost and Cynthia Hogue

LINEbreak: Barbara Guest in conversation with Charles Bernstein

Three poems by Barbara Guest

Typescript of two early poems by Barbara Guest

Sounding/listening through the fog

On Kathryn Scanlan and Friederike Mayröcker

AM Ringwalt

Reading the introductions to Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9 — Fog and Friederike Mayröcker’s from Embracing the Sparrow-Wall or 1 Schumann-Madness (trans. Jonathan Larson), I find myself charged with an imperative to listen. Mayröcker’s Embracing is a translated radio play, a Hörspiel — which literally means a “listening play.” Scanlan’s Aug 9 — Fog is a translated diary, taken from the voice of an eighty-six-year-old and recapitulated from the author’s subjectivity.

August 17, 2020

Varieties of silence, and near silence

(Jabès, Eluard, Celan, Kundera)

Raphael Rubinstein

Edmond Jabès. Photo by Bracha L. Ettinger via <a href=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edmond_Jabes.jpg>Wikimedia Commons</a>. — Edmond Jabès. Photo by Bracha L. Ettinger via Wikimedia Commons.

The aesthetic stridency of modernism was frequently accompanied by strong political stances, often with disastrous results. Among the innovative writers who managed to navigate the twentieth century without becoming entangled in its worst excesses was Francophone Egyptian poet Edmond Jabès (1912–1991). Did Jabès’s attitude toward language offer some degree of immunity from totalitarian attitudes? An inscription in a pamphlet Jabès published in Cairo in 1953 connects to a controversy that pitted Paul Celan and Milan Kundera against Paul Eluard; retracing this historic thread leads to an appreciation of writing that embraces the neutral and the ambient, a writing that courts silence.

July 22, 2020