Reader VI. (With Robin Blaser and Lee Harwood.) South Devonshire, England: Etruscan Books, 1998.
Strings. (With artist Ann Slacik.) St. Denis, France: 1999: Limited, handmade copies by Ann Slacik.
The Luminous. (With artist Jane Moorman—see also Barbara Guest’s poem “The Luminous” in If So, Tell Me.) Palo Alto, Calif.: 1999. One copy, handmade.
Often. (With Kevin Killian.) Produced in San Francisco by Poets Theater, California College of the Arts and Crafts, 2000.
Symbiosis. (With artist Laurie Reid.) Berkeley: Kelsey St. Press, 2000.
Art Criticism:
Dürer in the Window, Reflexions on Art. New York: Roof Books, 2003.
Essays:
Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing. Berkeley: Kelsey St. Press, 2003.
Plays:
The Ladies’ Choice, produced in New York at Artists Theater, 1953.
The Office, produced in New York at Café Cino, 1963.
Port, produced in New York at American Theater for Poets, 1965.
Port, produced in San Francisco by Poets Theater, California College of the Arts and Crafts, 2000.
Collages:
Ninth Street, New York (1950). On cover of Barbara Guest’s Selected Poems. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995. Note: in 1950 Barbara Guest was living in a rental apartment on East Ninth Street, Manhattan, New York.
East Ninth Street, New York (1950). On cover of Barbara Guest’s Miniatures and Other Poems. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
Awakening (1951). On cover of Barbara Guest’s Rocks on a Platter: Notes on Literature. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1999.
Wheel (1951). Following page (page 97) to Barbara Guest poem “Leaning Structures,” in American Letters & Commentary, Winter 2007; Anna Rabinowitz, Executive Editor; Catherine Kasper and David Ray Vance, Co-Editors.
The Red Gaze (2003). On cover of Barbara Guest’s The Red Gaze. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2005.
Notes and Acknowledgments
The poems collected here include all of the work that Barbara Guest had elected to publish in book form, along with the handful of poems she completed after her final book, The Red Gaze (Wesleyan, 2005). It was her stated wish not to include in this book any poems published in magazines or journals but not subsequently collected in one of her books. Because certain discrepancies in the published versions of some of these poems have not been resolved, minor changes have been made, without comment, in punctuation, spelling, and line spacing. This book is organized chronologically by collection. Given the nature of a collection of this size, some spacing issues have needed to be resolved. For instance, in texts like Symbiosis—a continuous poem that, in the original, prints only a few lines per page—page breaks in the original are indicated by a bullet. Please note that the poem “The Time of Day” appears only in the 1960 edition of The Location of Things (Tibor de Nagy, 1960). The final poems are arranged chronologically—insofar as this can be established—according to the date they were completed.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publishers of the original editions of Barbara Guest’s books. Special thanks go to Mae Klinger, the editorial intern at Wesleyan University Press who prepared the manuscript for production.
—Suzanna Tamminen
Wesleyan University Press
Poems THE LOCATION OF THINGSARCHAICSTHE OPEN SKIES
THE LOCATION OF THINGS
The Location of Things
Why from this window am I watching leaves?
Why do halls and steps seem narrower?
Why at this desk am I listening for the sound of the fall
of color, the pitch of the wooden floor
and feet going faster?
Am I to understand change, whether remarkable
or hidden, am I to find a lake under the table
or a mountain beside my chair
and will I know the minute water produces lilies
or a family of mountaineers scales the peak?
Recognitions
On Madison Avenue I am having a drink, someone
with dark hair balances a carton on his shoulders
and a painter enters the bar. It reminds me
of pictures in restaurants, the exchange of hunger
for thirst, art for decoration and in a hospital
love for pain suffered beside the glistening rhododendron
under the crucifix. The street, the street bears light
and shade on its shoulders, walks without crying,
turns itself into another and continues, even
cantilevers this barroom atmosphere into a forest
and sheds its leaves on my table
carelessly as if it wanted to travel somewhere else
and would like to get rid of its luggage
which has become in this exquisite pointed rain
a bunch of umbrellas. An exchange!
That head against the window
how many times one has seen it. Afternoons
of smoke and wet nostrils,
the perilous makeup on her face and on his,
numerous corteges. The water’s lace creates funerals
it makes us see someone we love in an acre of grass.
The regard of dramatic afternoons
through this floodlit window
or from a pontoon on this theatrical lake,
you demand your old clown’s paint and I hand you
