Barbara Guest: New York School of poetry member and Hilda Doolittle biographer

• The Past
• The form of the poem subsided, it enters another poem.
• A witness was found for the markings inscribed upside-down.
• It might have been a celebration, so strong the presence
• of the poem. The sky sinks slowly inside the past. 

• A Reason
• That is why I am here
• not among the ibises. Why
• the permanent city parasol
• covers even me.

• It was the rains
• in the occult season. It was the snows
• on the lower slopes. It was water
• and cold in my mouth.

• A lack of shoes
• on what appeared to be cobbles
• which were still antique

• Well wild wild whatever
• in wild more silent blue

• the vase grips the stems
• petals fall the chrysanthemum darkens

• Sometimes this mustard feeling
• clutches me also. My sleep is reckoned
• in straws

• Yet I wake up
• and am followed into the street.

• Words
• The simple contact with a wooden spoon and the word  
• recovered itself, began to spread as grass, forced  
• as it lay sprawling to consider the monument where  
• patience looked at grief, where warfare ceased  
• eyes curled outside themes to search the paper  
• now gleaming and potent, wise and resilient, word  
• entered its continent eager to find another as  
• capable as a thorn. The nearest possession would  
• house them both, they being then two might glide  
• into this house and presently create a rather larger  
• mansion filled with spoons and condiments, gracious
• as a newly laid table where related objects might gather  
• to enjoy the interplay of gravity upon facetious hints,  
• the chocolate dish presuming an endowment, the ladle  
• of galactic rhythm primed as a relish dish, curved  
• knives, finger bowls, morsel carriages words might  
• choose and savor before swallowing so much was the  
• sumptuousness and substance of a rented house where words  
• placed dressing gowns as rosemary entered their scent  
• percipient as elder branches in the night where words  
• gathered, warped, then straightened, marking new wands.

• Echoes
• Once more riding down to Venice on borrowed horses:

• the air free of misdemeanor, at rest in the inns of our fathers.

• Once again whiteness like the white chandelier.

• Echoes of other poems... 

Barbara Guest (1920-2006) was an American poet and a member of the New York School of poetry – part of the larger New York School of arts and literature that emerged in the early 1950s and continued to promote an avant-garde and surreal approach to the arts throughout the 1960s. Having written 15 books of poetry, she was awarded the 1999 Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Poetry Society of America. She also wrote a critically acclaimed biography of the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World (1984). Guest was also an artist and worked as an editor for ARTnews from 1951-1959, during her time of association with the New York School. Guest’s poetry is marked by an abstract approach to her subject matter playing against her use of vivid language. She saw composition as a matter of spontaneous interplay between imagination and the act of writing.