Barbara Guest in C: A journal of poetry

'Looking at Flowers Through Tears' and 'Sturm Nacht'

Laura Sims

Barbara Guest's note to Ted Berrigan — Barbara Guest's Note to Ted Berrigan, Courtesy of Fales Library Archive and Hadley Guest

“Dear Ted,” Barbara Guest writes in the note above, “Would they were writ in gold. Affection--though--Barbara.” This was the cover note Guest included with her submission of two poems, “Looking at Flowers Through Tears” and “Sturm Nacht,” for the summer 1964 issue of C: A Journal of Poetry. Guest's poems appeared alongside work by John Ashbery, John Wieners, James Schuyler, Ted Berrigan, Kenward Elmslie, Ron Padgett, and others; she was the lone woman writer in this and the other two issues in which her work appeared: Volume 1, Number 5 (October/November 1963) and Volume 2, Number 11 (Summer 1965). For a more complete catalogue of the Table of Contents for this and other issues of C, I recommend visiting the RealityStudio site, “Index to the Contents of C: A Journal of Poetry.” Below are the images of the manuscript versions of the two poems from Volume 1, Number 9 (summer 1964) as they appear in the Fales Library archive. I'm using them (as well as the handwritten note) with the permission of Hadley Guest, who said that her mother always loved Jacket magazine, and would be honored to have them reprinted here. The final image shows the printed version of the two poems in the 1964 issue of C.

Looking at Flowers through Tears

Sturm Nacht Guest's page in C

June 13, 2016

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After escorting a group of NYU students to the Fales Library in 2014 to see select materials for our class, Small Journal Production, during which students assemble and produce the McGhee Divsion Writing Program's student literary journal, Dovetail, I wanted to explore one part of their archive more fully: the Avant Garde Collection. Started in the mid-1960s by Mel Edelstein, a former director of Fales Library, the collection includes books, chapbooks, journals, and broadsides from poets writing in the 1960s and 7os. There are issues of 0 to 9, Angel Hair, Caterpillar, and Ghost Dance, as well as related papers, artwork, and correspondence. It's a fascinating archive for an editor, poet, or student of literature, so these posts will document and briefly annotate some of its treasures for the Jacket2 audience.

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Laura Sims is the author of Staying Alive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016). Her first book, Practice, Restraint, was the winner of the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize, and in 2006 she was awarded a US-Japan Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship. In 2014 she edited Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson, a book of her correspondence with the celebrated experimental novelist. Her poems have recently appeared in Black Clock, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Eleven Eleven and Gulf Coast. Sims has been a featured writer for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, and a co-editor of Instance Press since 2009. She teaches literature and creative writing at NYU-SPS.

Staying Alive cover

“How does one become okay with oblivion, or what comes after us? Does it matter? A world of ice? A world of desert people? No people? Beetles, scorpions, and snakes in the sand? The personal reflex for connection, the terror of going on, amid more suffering to come: the gamble is almost idiotic, but also tender in its conviction, its risked neck. Staying Alive assembles scenarios, tried ideas, mild cries, stranded assertions, and sends them adrift—all coming apart and seemingly possible. While the stray land, on which the formulations exist, does not know what is being said, why, nor for the benefit of whom.”
–James Wagner, Mirage Reviews

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Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Jacket2 editors here.

Laura Sims' website

Fales Library Archival Collections

Jacket feature on Angel Hair