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Marjorie Welish (on Barbara Guest) | |
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LET US TAKE the lyric to be non-imitative, verbal music. Let us take the language of reference in decomposition. Let us examine the residuum. In the poetry of Barbara Guest, language stains the page with language: words, material yet not literal. The poet talking to herself is not at issue, given that, in her lyrics, indirect fragment re-cognizes the direct statement of intimate self- revelation. The impersonal, not the personal, is valid. The idiom is not that of speech but that of writing. | |
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In her understanding, the lyric is truly a speculative field: that is to say it is constituted of imaginative speculations the aesthetic autonomy of which is never gratuitous sociolect, not even for a syllable. ¶
Literariness of non-imitative lyric is to be assumed, and in Guest the language of her language writing is already literary in part because it is constituted of the literature she reads, in part because it foregrounds the condition of literariness. In other words, she is not embarrassed to be found reading a book, raking a book for its themes and sensibility. With defamilarized romance made fragmentary as her decided bias, Guest supplies only nomenclature, isolated and disjunctive, or sensuous place names held in suspension and disequilibrium. Motifs straight from the manse are allowed to remain uncanny fixities in an otherwise unfixed domain of text. Meanwhile she leaves traces of lyricism so imaginatively acute that a moral rectitude is the precipitate. Literariness from book rather than nature is her domain. For Guest, literariness is the estate of language in perpetual doubling, in perpetually multiplying conjugation of images - those narratives left in scraps which, neither waste nor wasteland, condense abstract song. ¶
To the objection that at the end of the twentieth century the lyric is wasted, attenuated in its capacity to interpret, that it cannot incorporate idea but only sensibility, there is the developing body of poetry, heard first and written second, that would refute this. Very different from Guest is, for instance, Anne-Marie Albiach's lyrical voice. Indeed, in her "Vocative Figure" (1985; English translation, published by A-B, revised, second edition, 1992) the voice is marked; its subject of address - you - gives concrete expression to the voice, the utterances of which define themselves by directing attention to the other, in intimacy. "Vocative Figure" then, identifies lyric with marked address. | |
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The verbal construction is again the object in question. As for artifice in story, let us remember that auteur of cinema, Erich Rohmer, with his installation of painted flats instead of actual landscape through which Perceval rides astride an actual horse - this scenography coincident with the imaginary domain. As for Guest, medieval romance is already given as text, not history - which means, in her poetics, surface and facture, not illusion, are the protagonists to the rescue. A masterpiece of such textual facture so dense as to become a transfigured tapestry is surely "The Knight of the Swan," from Moscow Mansions (Viking, 1973). "Garment," from Quill, scored for verbal melodies and rhythms on the page, provides a recent example of the theme of haptic touch given linguistic privilege. From the same book, "Fell, Darkly" enacts its own complexity, a complexity integral with multi-register heterogeneous modernity. An epigraph from Joyce about withdrawing regard from clairvoyance shows that resisting the lyricism through tactics of difficulty is Guest's intention. It is also a practice in a poetics at which she excels.