BARBARA GUEST AND LYRIC ATMOSPHERES

And there are nervous
people who cannot manufacture
enough air and must seek
for it when they don't have plants,
in pictures. There is the mysterious
traveling that one does outside
the cube and this takes place
in air.
-from "Roses"

"Roses," one of the poems in Barbara Guest's Moscow Mansions, (Viking, 1973), is an argument against Gertrude Stein's saying "painting has no air." Guest began appearing in the early '60s as a primary member of the first generation of poets who became known as the New York School and has always sought, in painting and sculpture, techniques of abstraction and methods of composition that might be applied to words and their re-invented relations inside the poem. Guest seeks to obtain multiple textures in language and uses syntax and the space of the page as a ground for re-imagining what has thus been represented to us in more traditional and recognizable modes of poetry. "Roses" plays with the meaning of air, as it is found in painting. It suggests air as: an atmosphere one has not felt before, "a unique perfume," "escape," "pleasure," "openings."

"Roses" is not simply a paraphraseable poem about air, but a set of suggestions constantly shifting, held together by tone. Its meaning keeps opening. The roses Guest elects are those of Juan Gris, the Cubist --dark roses bent into a harsh composition where they exist selflessly. Guest writes in the company of Stein, in her non-linear shifting from line to line, but she is less interested in pinning down a single situation or person. Whereas much of Stein's work is pushed forward by syntax and has a compulsive drive which gives it power and rhythm, Guest argues for a kind of poem that opens out into vistas or perceptual and lyric spaces. Gris' painting is a thing, a signpost which becomes a secret directive for Guest, both liberating and revealing her own structures of thought to herself and the reader. Throughout Moscow Mansions, the nature of visual signification is explored, on one level becoming a manual of unique modes of painterly composition. In the long poem "Knight of the Swan," lines and passages are placed and displaced, building a rich accretion of approaches to her subject, as in Cubism, where one is shown the same subject on different planes. There, she writes:

like a building surfaced in stucco,
or a white machine crossing a bridge
or air with a cloud woven into that space where
a motor threads it a short black lace thickening
the atmosphere the way a weaver does

so a chivalric mood occupied the knight
like a hand.

In Seeking Air (Black Sparrow Press, 1978), Barbara Guest's poetic novel, the air of lyric qualities, a painterly air, occurs again. Like Japanese prints, like Mary Cassat's domestic paintings, like Bonnard's interiors, Seeking Air is filled with wild fragrance and unexpected alleys; close to a Japanese diary or "pillow book" and yet much more abstract, it incorporates both intimate prose and startling lyric innovation. Her characters paint each other, they describe their perceptions of each other to each other, as if saying "look how I look at you" were the most important phrase in the world. They put themselves in a surround where even the simplest domestic detail has lyrical meaning:

You do leave behind you an extraordinary disorder. That was what I thought when I first knew you. Now I recognize your assortments. There is a lucidity in your placing of personal objects. On one table hair pins. On another the powder. Here is a half eaten pear. . . And yet there is order, clarity, lucidity. And there is a purity in your design, like a Matisse painting of "Studio." (p. 14)

Seeking Air is strung together like a series of prose poems. Each section--most are short--is a lyric unit. The writing inside the unit varies from the paragraph above, to:

Fog.Sun.Heat.Coolness.
Mountain.Sea.CanyonDesert.
Dry.Parched.Green.Watered.
Smudge pots.Aqueducts.
PorchBalconyGrill.GatesHedge.Stucco.
Tile.Wall.
Deep Shadow.Ardent light.

Somewhere beneath this radiance there ran still
a turbulent current which erupted in my dreams.
Fresh landscapes would appear and on them
posed portraits of my friends, often in threaten
ing attitudes. (p. 148)

The two main characters in Seeking Air are well developed, although along non-traditional lines. They seek both each other and the world, realizing that all is invention. The book ends with the narrator, Morgan, trying to come to grips with "Dark," a presence or principle that has dogged him. "Dark" is Illyrian dark, Shakespearian mummenscbanz dark, depression, death, isolation and, at the same time, familiar, even homey.

The equation of travel with self-travel, the love of domestic interiors and the ease with which Morgan describes himself (as if he were always talking to an intimate) are all important micro-structures. Morgan says, at the beginning of the novel:

"How often I have been enchanted with the work of a painter when it was shown at the studio, brushes in hand, the cup of cold coffee on the table and here and there evidence of a struggle in the crumpled sketchpaper or the postcard tacked on the wall or the notebook opened to the three scrawled lines, written no doubt in the morning." (p. 11)

Guest's consideration of domesticity and obliquely considered detail shows us how little about a person is unknown if one watches. To witness how one sees and how others see us can be more telling than deliberately constructing ideas--as such--into poems.

-Honor Johnson

Honor Johnson is a poet and printmaker originally from Louisiana, currently residing in California. Her most recent book of poems: Small As A Resurrecion, Lost Roads, 1983.