Glossing gloss and its undertow

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes This article continues the discussion of Guest's poetry in my two previous articles: ‘“Couplings of Such Sonority”: Reading a Poem by Barbara Guest’, Textual Practice 23.3 (2009), pp. 481–502, and ‘Lost and Found in The Türler Losses’, Chicago Review 53.4 & 54.1/2 (2008), pp. 98–106. Thanks are once again due to The National Humanities Center, North Carolina, where I was Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Fellow from 2007 to 2008. Additionally, I wish to thank Nicola Masciandaro and Ryan Dobran for an invitation to the conference Glossing is a Glorious Thing: The Past, Present, and Future of Commentary at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, April 9–10, 2009, where I presented an earlier and abbreviated version of this article. ‘The Barbara Guest Memory Bank’ is at http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/bg_memorybank/bg_memory.html ‘Letter from Barbara Guest to Susan Gervitz, excerpt’, HOW(ever), vol. 4, no. 4, April 1988, http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/print_archive/0488post.html; Erika Duncan, ‘ENCOUNTERS: Hearing a Poet, but Understanding Little’, New York Times, September 25, 1994. For a discussion, see Susan Hayward, ‘Cohesive Relations and Texture in Bresson's Film L'Argent’, Sub-Stance 51 (1987), pp. 52–68, esp. pp. 60–64. C/f Theodore W. Adorno, ‘Presuppositions’ in Notes to Literature (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1992), vol. 2, esp. p. 97 and footnote. Also my essay ‘Following the Poem' in John Wilkinson, The Lyric Touch. Essays on the Poetry of Excess (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2007), esp. p. 196. For Marjorie Welish's poems, see, for instance, The Annotated ‘Here' and Selected Poems (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2000). See my account of Guest's poem ‘Saving Tallow’ in ‘Couplings of Such Sonority’. Barbara Guest, Rocks on a Platter (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1999). Reprinted in Barbara Guest, in Hadley Haden Guest (ed.), The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), pp. 425–448 [henceforward CP]. References in the text are to the first publication. Rocks on a Platter, p. 40. Rocks on a Platter, p. 35; Theodore W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 6, summarising ‘Hegel's argument against Kant'. Rocks on a Platter, p. 44. Rocks on a Platter, p. 43. Barbara Guest, If So, Tell Me (London: Reality Street Editions, 1999), p. 25. CP p. 380. Robert Kaufman, ‘A Future for Modernism: Barbara Guest's Recent Poetry’, American Poetry Review 29.4 (2000), p. 14. Kaufman also notes the allusion to Adorno in the book's subtitle. Barbara Guest, The Blue Stairs (New York, NY: Corinth Books, 1968), pp. 16–17. The poem is reprinted unaltered in Barbara Guest, Selected Poems (Los Angeles, CA: Sun & Moon Press, 1995), pp. 38–39. CP pp. 71–72. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 111. Rocks on a Platter, p. 30: ‘dissident morning! ‖ with no ulterior purpose'. At ‘The Barbara Guest Memory Bank’, http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/bg_memorybank/bg_memory.html Barbara Guest, Biography (Providence, RI: Burning Deck, 1980), np. The line occurs in part 6, CP p. 186. Guest confirms ‘that poem did come out of those trips' in ‘Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser, in conversation with Elisabeth Frost and Cynthia Hogue’, Jacket 25, February 2004, http://jacketmagazine.com/25/guest-iv.html Barbara Guest, Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984). Herself Defined, p. ix–x. Herself Defined, p. 228. Both contributing to the ‘Barbara Guest Feature’ at Jacket 10, January 2000, http://jacketmagazine.com/10/index.shtml Rocks on a Platter, pp. 8, 45. Sara Lundquist, ‘Two voices, one joking’: the Metapoetic Comedy of Barbara Guest's Poetry, Jacket 25, February 2004, http://jacketmagazine.com/25/guest-lund.html Barbara Guest, Forces of Imagination, Writing on Writing (Berkeley, CA: Kelsey St Press, 2003). It is true that Guest's writing on visual art is far more fluent, but it seems reasonable to assume that subediting had a hand. See Barbara Guest, Dürer in the Window, Reflections on Art (New York, NY: Roof Books, 2003). Barbara Guest, Seeking Air (Los Angeles, CA: Sun & Moon Press, 1997), p. 84. Seeking Air, p. 168. If So, Tell Me, p. 27. CP pp. 381–382. Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), ch. 3, pp. 65–80. Ian Patterson, The Glass Bell (London: Barque, 2009), np. The line is from the first sonnet in the sequence ‘Glossolalia’.