Between “Location” and “Things”: Barbara Guest, American Pragmatism, and the Construction of Subjectivity

Abstract

The article focuses mainly on poems from Guest’s first collection, The Location of Things. Many of these depict poetic personae in a state of flux, moving ceaselessly between domestic, urban, coastal, and rural environments, exchanging one idea, mood, or vocabulary for an always beckoning other. This emphasis on transition, with its implications for the construction and reconstruction of identity, is, in my view, part of a pragmatist inheritance, yet Guest distanced herself from such an association in an interview with Charles Bernstein in 1995. There are a number of potential reasons for such distancing, but her full-throated disavowal raises the question: what does Guest herself understand pragmatism to be? In taking up this question, the article will look to William James for an account of pragmatism that might have persuaded the poet to modify her stance.