Litmus Press | Aufgabe 1 Susan Gevirtz

Rocks On A Platter, Notes On Literature
Barbara Guest
Wesleyan University Press, Hanover and London, 1999

Beginning again and again surrounding a body with story "another STORY BEGINS." (Rocks, 3) Was there ever a body to begin with? Or can a body by itself exist? In Barbara Guest's three recent books there is only surrounding -- something imagined lying across the field of the page beyond the uneven brick of type. Something in advance of meaning. Ship on fire at open sea. Scene of a crime. Scene of a find.

To read Barbara Guest's three new books, almost simultaneously, is to visit a land of elaboration. Due to the accident of their publication, all appearing in 1999 within a few months of each other, the books converse more directly than they might if they had appeared further apart in time. Instead, I, (as many readers may have) read each all the way through then saw that by their own momentum they began to shuffle - three extraordinary decks of cards - doors to worlds so rich and complex that comment is paltry, leaving only the possibility of response. Although The Confetti Trees was written long before the other two it fully participates in the orbit of this trialogue. Formally and otherwise the books are vastly different from each other and cannot be conflated. But in the land which surfaces from the orbit of the three, Guest elaborates a relation to language and writing that is more than "poetry" or a "poetics." It is an interrogation of the structures of making, of meaning, and of the conduct of the writer in writing, toward language. A realm emerges in which the book is a three dimensional proposition and the conduct of one's approach as reading writer is a phenomenology regarding the act of entering.

In this land there are only the trappings of story. Story is a decoy that never does its purported work of identifying the unmarked: "She submitted a few stories she called The Minus Ones. .... " ("The Minus Ones," Confetti Trees, 52). Like the solitary body story is always hungry. Sporagmos - ritual dismemberment -- the body by itself is ecstatic, flying to pieces, marvelous in its occupation of the place no story can fully enter. Here in this crevice, death palace, where the decay of story's function is clearly seen, the writing takes place:

The problem of making the body mean, burn, is always present in this work -- the body as the form, the outline, of the writing -- comes into being, like the blood or thought of a flesh body, as part of breathing, not prior or in opposition to breath; not as if words were mere content or subject, but letter by letter, syllable by syllable, line break by line, the body of the poem proposes itself, becomes a burning organism or not. And the subject of Guest's writing is often also the conditions of this becoming. In the above poem she suggests that the conditions of each making differ depending on who proposes them, and by what means. This time a he sits at a computer screen looking out its window into the computer Screen at the reflection of himself as her in the window Screen. In this order of looking and reflecting, the "feeble sun" - "will not burn." Throughout the three books, Guest conducts further investigation into the conditions, the various means of burning, of producing illumination - by reflection, a trick of mirrors, or by candle, computer, lamp, film projector - each from a different era and producing different effects in the hands of different operators - poets, philosophers, composers, among others - rifling through her effects - when, for example, a she has been put on a reef with a shipwrecked sailor, an investigation into telling is required, here where "The feeble sun he paws will not burn." "...will not burn" is the remains, here where "Only an outline remains" -- To make nostalgia Guest replaces the idea of happened with the proposition of told. Nostalgia -- not a longing for what happened but for how it was told -- there is no actual event, only telling: how it was told is what happened. So there is also a return throughout the three books to an investigation into the conditions of telling -- here, where there is "Only an outline" the "remains" -- story as memory of that which may never have occured: where "Nothing is alive:" We arrive at the unsurrounded body, imagination itself --where everything is animate, even things that may not appear to be

They told her they liked real fires and not those of the imagination. Imagination was harmful and always messed up the set.

"The Minus Ones," The Confetti Trees, 52

Putting burning where the props and plot were on the set. Subtracting one from one from one from one matching zero with the place of "real fires." Striking the set, replacing, stripping what appears to be intact. Writing as an act of removal - exhuming the body to tell the story to keep the furniture, the food cooking on the stove, while removing the walls of the house. Use the utensils, the elements, the structures of myth, poetry, fairytale, screenplay, narrative, to expose the beams and bolts. To require that we listen inside-out and doubly. Surround the body with subtraction since the body is always already cloaked in story as before it is born it is clothed in a history. That which is made up and can never fully reveal the origins of it's making

In all three books "openness to the mystery" is the comportment - writing as finger on the disappearing present body of writing writer, of writing writing

Technology's techne the machinations, writing finger's methods of making, chosen, as it were live on camera, while pawing a "feeble sun," or at gunpoint, that is, in the face of the urgency of "poetry of the moment" a "flame lit with nothing and nothingness stayed." ("Overboard," Confetti Trees, 9) Each moment approaching nothing because: "In whatever guise reality becomes visible, the poet withdraws from it into invisibility." (Guest, "Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious," a talk given in 1986.)

Calling practices of deception which exist in order to create encounter which can only be "vanish and return" - what appears to be the light of day is "sun, cloak..." Revealing and concealing meaning Guest requires that we listen doubly to mystery, day's ambition, the light of night, illuminating "This elaborate structure around the text..." ("Doubleness," If So, 13) Thus the three books confound distinctions, particularly that between poetry and poetics, making comportment more useful than poetics..* A comportment toward language, the mystery. A practice of approach, that is, of writing, "...which expresses 'yes' and at the same time 'no,' [named] by an old word, releasement toward things." (Heidegger, 54) The release of meaning to it's own life beyond what is meant "Moves outside the text into the dark under text..." ("In Slow Motion," If So, 11) Meaning that disregards genre or answer except where useful as toy takes instead "repercussions, soundings..." - music of thinking or conversations across time, replace explanation or telling, though the vehicles, demonstrations and sounds of it differ. "We once took a ship" - listen "royal traveler" - is your name "dissonance"? Is it Schoenberg? Nietzsche? Walser? Richardson? Spenser? Husserl, H.D., Hegel, Chaucer, Heidegger, Adorno, Coleridge, Holderlin? To whom and with who else is address? This is decay's deportment: place of story without story begging for and repelling story

Conjuring an ethnographically "real" - Hollywood of World War II in The Confetti Trees Guest uses the film camera to demonstrate exactly the ways in which "practices of deception" can illuminate more than "realistic" documentation or plot ever can:

Rather than imitating reality, artworks demonstrate this displacement to reality. Ultimately, the doctrine of imitation should be reversed; in a sublimated sense, reality should imitate the artworks. (Adorno, 132)

As they do in the desire to enter an ideal world of the made, displaced by the entrance into the motion of motion picture,

The action begins in doubleness that is likeness. The sublimated "physical" of the physical world. "...heavy mechanical studio rain," and "Puddles!" - "lit" and "unlit cigarettes" requiring further investigation into the nature of semblance:

Just like what you believe, is a world of proposed beliefs, but the poem is not itself what you believe - . And likeness not where you would expect: Rocks On a Platter the "poetics" book is poetry about poetry, philosophy, reading, etc, no more or less than the other two are "Notes on Literature." In this land there can be no ideal platonic form of poetics or the poem "outside" the poem that occupies the realm of true belief. It is something in advance of meaning, and just behind it - the acts of this particular comportment that one can believe and the poem is belief's afterimage. "Yet this demise..." of belief? of the poem? "...shows itself in fragments, just as the poet slowly dies in his or her poem making sure there are fragments remaining of the empire which created the poem, the empire of the poet's soul." (Guest, "Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious")

Sparagmos - Should be written in the Greek but I do not have the keyboard for that. The Dionysian rite of dismemberment performed outside the walls of the polis, usually by women (not citizens) as a holy act. That is, outside of the civil order of the Appollonian governance of the Greek pantheon. Dictionary definition: The tearing to pieces of a live victim, as a bull or a calf, by a band of bacchantes in a Dionysian orgy.

Adorno, Theodor W, Aesthetic Theory, Robert Hullot-Kentor, Translator and Editor, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997.

Guest, Barbara, "Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious: Byzantine Proposals of Poetry," (excerpts from a talk given by Barbara Guest at St. Mark's Poetry Project, New York City, June, 1986. Published in HOW(ever), Vol III, No. 3, October 1986.

Heidegger, Martin, Discourse On Thinking, John Anderson and E. Hans Freund Translators, Harper and Row, New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London, 1966.

*In her talk "Laboratory and Industry: The Speculative Poem," given in January 1999 at Small Press Traffic in San Francisco, Myung Mi Kim uses the notion of comportment in a way which is also useful in thinking about Barbara Guest's work:

The appearance of a new kind of prosody involves a creative jump or synthesis.
A new line comes into being and with it, a new pattern of relationships and connections — a "particularizable" prosody of one's living perplexity that occurs through gradations — experimental procedures -- an experimental comportment

A time of the poem, a line's motion that sounds the activity of lived life — the multiphasic, living instant

—Thanks to Myung Mi Kim, Norma Cole and John Tranter who asked me to write about Guest's work for his online magazine Jacket. An earlier version of this piece is in Jacket No. 10.