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

(Un)Disciplining the ethnographer's body

The poetics of opacity in Renee Gladman's Ravicka series

Angelica Maria Barraza

Detail from ‘Couriers reporting to the emperor,’ via <a href=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:COM_V1_D319_Couriers_reporting_to_the_emperor.png>Wikimedia Commons</a>. — Detail from ‘Couriers reporting to the emperor,’ via Wikimedia Commons.

The racialization — and weaponization — of “sociology,” “social,” and “social science” as descriptors for poetry by people of color is particularly crude; at its foundation it suggests that their/our poems are merely collections of empirical observations, that they are self-referential expressions of social particularity largely devoid of stylistic elements such as rhythm, metaphor, etc. Stripped of poetic markers the poems cease to be poems; they become a sort of personal testimony, autoethnographies, that elicit from critics further reductive descriptors such as “cultural” and “identitarian.”

Renee Gladman’s Ravicka series almost didn’t get published. Dalkey Archive Press planned to publish the first two installations, Event Factory and The Ravickians, but then didn’t. Danielle Dutton, a consultant for Dalkey, couldn’t understand why not.

January 7, 2021

'I make these collages and write'

Alice Notley's visual art

Nick Sturm

Alice Notley reading from ‘When I Was Alive’ at her MoMA PS1 show. Photo by/courtesy of Monica Claire Antonie.

Alice Notley’s one and only exhibition of her visual art in the United States was in 1980 at MoMA PS1. The press release, written by Notley, notes that her collages are made “of paper (potential trash) from the poet/artist’s life, pieces of illustrations from favorite cheap books, sidewalk discoveries, and things she could see on the floor, from her chair, and was too lazy to throw away.”

December 22, 2020