[Henry Miller; Paul Ryan]

"I love everything that flows," said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentence. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gallstones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouth of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fantatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that flows from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution. The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.

--from 'Tropic of Cancer'; Henry Miller

[Henry Miller's typewriter @ The Henry Miller Library]

...the figure of Whitman, that one lone figure which America has produced in the course of her brief life. In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past and her future, her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said. The future belongs to the machine, to the robots. He was the Poet of the Body and the Soul, Whitman. The first and the last poet. He is almost undecipherable today, a monument covered with rude hieroglyphs for which there is no key. It seems strange almost to mention his name over here. There is no equivalent in the languages of Europe for the spirit which he immortalized. Europe is saturated with art and her soil is full of dead bones and her museums are bursting with plundered treasures, but what Europe has never had is a free, healthy spirit, what you might call a MAN.

--from 'Tropic of Cancer'; Henry Miller

In Tropic of Cancer, the creation and appreciation of art is not unlike the relationship that exists between the ascetic and the spiritual. Miller's self destruction finds rebirth within the New Jerusalem of writing and artistic creation. A true Dionysian who does not separate the pain from the ecstasy, the death that is necessary for the greater, larger life. A dualistic interpretation of the book's title suggesting this as well.

When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears. (253)


The legend is that when Leda was fecundated she gave birth to twins. Everybody is giving birth to something-- everybody but the Lesbian in the upper tier. Her head is uptilted, her throat wide open; she is all alert and tingling with the shower of sparks that burst from the radium symphony. Jupiter is piercing her ears. Little phrases from California, whales with big fins, Zanzibar, the Alcazar. When along the Guadalquiver there were a thousand mosques ashimmer. Deep in the icebergs and the days all lilac. The Money Street with two white hitching posts. The gargoyles...the man with the Jaworski nonsense...the river lights...the... (77)



It is only later, in the afternoon, when I find myself in the art gallery on the Rue de Seze, surrounded by the men and women of Matisse, that I am drawn back again to the proper precincts of the human world. On that threshold of that big hall whose walls are now ablaze, I pause a moment to recover from the shock which one experiences when the habitual gray of the world is rent asunder and the color of life splashes forth in song and poem.....Standing on the threshold of that world which Matisse has created I re-experienced the power of that revelation which has permitted Proust to so deform the picture of life that only those who, like himself, are sensible to the alchemy of sound and sense, are capable of transforming the negative reality of life into the substantial and significant outlines of art. Only those who can admit the light into their gizzards can translate what is there in the heart. (162-3)

[Blue Nude; Henri Matisse, 1952]

The sex is boring. It is not erotic, certainly not romantic. More along the lines of banality. Tiresome. Accidental. Anecdotal. Taken a step further, because of Miller’s overt crudeness, one can’t help but to wonder if the writing would have really been much different if he had been writing about his lavatory habits. As to why Miller then wrote so much (tediously) about sex, and doing so in a matter of fact, dead pan style, that is up for interpretation. But it does need to be confronted because of the large percentage of Tropic of Cancer concerning itself with sex.

After consideration, I can’t help but wonder if sexuality was the final restraint within civilization from which Miller needed to liberate himself. Kenneth Rexroth cites Miller as the kid who doesn’t tell, but is seeing the Emperor’s new clothes, and makes every effort to note each embarrassing inadequacy the King attempts to cover with his privileged attire. And Miller largely lived a primitive life which ignored the conventions that have established modern civilization: the State, nationality, economics, religion, marriage, community, what have you. All were up for his degrading attack. Yet, there always remained his relationships with anonymous women, this he would not give up. Perhaps by lowering sexuality to its most simplistic form, Miller would, in turn, free himself from the social constructions which surround it? To peer into the very center of the sexual act to possibly see past it all together?

In a sense, it could be said he did because while Tropic of Cancer is largely about Miller’s sexual exploits while scraping together a meager existence on the streets of Paris, it is also a book about his development as an Artist, one who defines and creates his existence through his work; Author rather than a mere writer. The sexuality, while often directly obscene (at least, how it was viewed in the 30's when T o fC was published), is also subtly tinged with tragedy. Partly because of the lack of fulfillment from the encounters, but also notable when the writing carries over into the desolate Parisian strolls that are documented with melancholy and barren aloneness, where in the winter, fatigue is hung from the skeletal nakedness of the trees, and in the summer, nothing but a mire of moldering grotesqueness. But while withering away in a self imposed destruction, Miller heroically rebirths himself through the writing. The self reflective thoughts and musings Miller is prone to take on increasingly greater force and establish a psychological framework upon the cancerous ruins which he sees in established civilized structures.

And this is the main reason why anyone with an interest in literature should read Tropic of Cancer. Straight from the barrel out of page one, the writing projects instantly with the urgent force that is more typically found in great poetry. Even if the stories are repeatedly going nowhere, Miller’s words move with uncontainable imaginative flare, and done not so much with the intent to impress the reader but to ratify Author. If this is not initially apparent, it is when Tropic of Cancer delves into chapter long asides that blend Miller’s surreal poetic prose with his deconstructing thoughts towards assumed customs, eventual heralding the artistic imagination above all. A reader might not agree, even be offended at some of Miller’s suggestions, but can’t deny the compelling qualities of the book. Need it accomplish more?

Karl Shapiro provides a fantastic introduction to Tropic of Cancer. In which, he advises that he often reads Miller by simply picking a random page and then always finding a jewel that makes the time rewarding. Good advise. I would only add to it the need for a well filled ink pen for the copious underlining that will surely follow. As to whether Miller ever does triumph over sexuality, consider what he wrote in a later book, “The human heart cannot be broken.” Compare that with the mountain of illusions established about love and sexuality-- whether it be the sentimentality of pop music, the turgid psychology of conservative religious beliefs, or the bizarre mating rituals found on Jersey Shore-- and the real obscenity should be quite clear.

Shadow and Substance*
-- Anonymous, from late 1500's

I heard a noise and wished for a sight,
I looked for a life and did a shadow see
Whose substance was the sum of my delight,
Which came unseen, and so did go from me.
..Yet hath conceit persuaded my content
..There was a substance where the shadow went.

I did not play Narcissus in conceit,
I did not see my shadow in a spring;
I know mine eyes were dimmed with no deceit,
I saw the shadow of some worthy thing;
..For, as I saw the shadow glancing by,
..I had a glimpse of something in mine eye.

But what it was, alas, I cannot tell,
Because of it I had no perfect view;
But as it was, by guess, I wish it well
And will until I see the same anew.
..Shadow, or she, or both, or choose you whither:
..Blest be the thing that brought the shadow hither!

*During this time period, 'shadow' was understood
to not just be a casted shade, but an image or vision.

So here I am, up in the sky riding a griffin with Persian-blue aquiline
....wings,
holding a branch from the Tree of Life upon which a red starling
....perches.
In its talons my griffin grips a wriggling bear.
As a unit, we herald the commingling of all things,
or as many as one artist can atoll, in the coral amassment of a life.
I look down on mer-knight occupied lakes, flesh forts trembling in
....folds of lightning sleep.

In Bosch's era, the subconscious was more altar-definite than today,
....architecture more magical.
There is a translucent, glazed, interpenetrating liquidity here,
an image rhythm between Paradise and the foundations of being.
Orbital, iridescent variations are repeated with reassuring
....familiarity.
There is hardly a thorn that does not express its bulb, as if
....apocatastasis were the underlying magnetism.

--from Anticline, Part II, 'Tavern of the Scarlet Bagpipe'

So maybe Anticline does reach the transcendent, but does so by going deeper into the world rather than leaving it.

A quality found in Anticline's poetry that I have not mentioned yet is humor. Whether from black humor, as I sort of find in the poem posted yesterday, Dear Sign, or the swift, playful language that's reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins' sprung rhythm, or dealing with the transmogrification of Mr. Eshleman's foreskin within the first couple pages, if a reader doesn't pick up on some of the light hearted aspects, much would be lost. If not everything. From Meanother:


I lifted my "face-before-birth" out of its vaginal loan,
the back of its head rich in salamander pigtails,
cutthroat eels, tubeworms that vibrate in methane seeps.

I moved into a soul pouch as if into a uniform of water--
Sweet Pea appeared, Veronica and Archie,
a flood of Toons wiggling like liquid termites.

To wear oneself as other, to hybridize

a single destiny into one that is multifoliate.....

[...

...]

Yaw in roll with yaw,
the poem now tintannabulates into auto-yabyum,
happy in its vulvic cap, a six-eyed imp,
madre succulent, Sweet Pea nosy, pater free.

Dear Sign
--Clayton Eshleman

April, 1979, patio of Marwan's house in mountains north of Alassio.
Rain--sunshine--snow the same afternoon.
Out to view the possibly-seeable ocean, some 10 miles away
(Caryl had just told me about Goethe's color theory).

....A cloud the size of a large, wispy shark
....zoomed down, away from its companion clouds,
....circled around us once,
....shot back up

vanishing in roily cloud wash...

According to Gary Snyder,
"Dōgen says: 'When the ten thousand things...advance and confirm
you, that is enlightenment. When you advance and confirm the ten
thousand things, that is delusion.'"

What is the distinction between acts of violence and the natural conditions of death and decay? What distinguishes the Bush administration from a farmer? Or for that matter, Al Qaeda from a farmer? What qualities distinguish what might anthropologically be termed 'masculine consciousness' versus 'feminine consciousness'? Control and force rather than acceptance and gratitude. From Eshleman's Abyssand:

IX

The transformation of mother into imagination versus her evasion
..in a quest for personal immortality.

Where death is in the hands of males, it is violent.

In the bay of the mother, it is integral.

Without ugliness and horror at the base of poetics, form and beauty
..are a sham.

Kali comes up the spinal holy dread of the poem as the sacred duality
..inherent in creation.

Without an appreciation of Her serpent power, the poem salutes
..the evasion of its freedom.

Traditional Western poetry is quite often associated with ascent in terms of its objective. The poem as a means to rise through the spheres towards the heavens, to acquire the transcendent vision, to live within the micro while connecting with the macro when in hand with a beautiful muse, etc. Even the myth of Orpheus somewhat involves the concept of ascension as it was necessary to raise Eurydice back up to the world of the living. Of course, Eurydice, upon the backward gaze of Orpheus, was only to fall back into the abyss of the unknown. And on occasion there have been a few poets that have dared such a nose dive back into the apocalypse of Hades in search of Eurydice. One for our times being Clayton Eshleman.

To contrast lofty exultation, in his newest publication, Anticline– a geologic term referring to a convex ‘bubble’ of bedrock where the oldest strata is cored around the center- Eshleman dare goes opposite and plunges into the base matter and energies of mankind, ultimately physical reality itself; “Descent intensifies consciousness”. What results is a poetry that evolved and is understood through the mythologic and artistic traditions that place emphasis upon balancing the simultaneity of death and creation, the integrative aspects of feminine consciousness rather than the compartmentalization found in masculine consciousness.

From a personal viewpoint, this is observed in the first poem where Eshleman advised of his need to deconstruct the mid-west, Indiana-born notion of "self" and replace it with a decentered self, one composed from poetic influences, César Vallejo being major, and a lifetime study of early human culture, most notably shamanistic traditions and Hinduism (often cited as mankind’s oldest religion). And Eshleman’s poetic style appropriately reflects. The self proclamation of lyrical “I” modes are not utilized. Instead Eshleman’s poetry has more in common with language poetry as the compositions typically result from an assembly of verbal fragments which stem from life experience and specific areas of study. One could say that the “I” has been dismembered but then reformed into the shapes and content of the poetry, “I” being a quality understood by what it is not. From ‘Inner Parliaments’:

I

is an arm with a hand.

In the Upper Paleolithic, it placed its hand on a cave wall,
spat red ochre around the hand, withdrew the hand,
leaving an I-negative on the wall.

But only about a third of the poems in Anticline involve Eshleman’s personal experiences and developments, and thankfully because otherwise I would not have read some of the best poems available that place the atrocities of the Bush administration into a non-political perspective. Continuing with the anticline metaphor, these geologic formations are often searched for by oil prospectors as the inner bubble is a rich storage arena for natural hydrocarbons (oil and gas). As both a metaphoric example and an aspect of physical reality, that is the septic holding tank for the dark energies of death and destruction. Maybe what can account for George Bush being a conduit for the massive loss of human life and dignity? Or the necessary Judas for this particular era of existence? Let us hope that Eshleman never has to write a book about volcanoes.

The rest of the collection is then devoted to visual artists that are congruous with Eshleman’s poetry. References include well known artists like Dali, Picasso, Munch, Henri Rousseau and Jackson Pollack, as well as some lesser known artists, such as Unica Zürn. But most significant is the entire middle section’s poetic analysis of one of the more impressive and equally confounding pieces of Western art, Hieronymus Bosch’s 'The Garden of Earthly Delight'.


While typically seen as a straight visual accompaniment for the biblical story of the fall from Eden, Eshleman provides a convincing argument that the painting should not be understood as a linear progression of punishment, but an example for a more ancient, cyclic understanding of creation (Birth, Life, Death). And as with the entire book, this section is filled with annotated references and allows the poems to be appreciated for their aesthetical qualities as well as for being vehicles of knowledge and further study.

Anticline was just published last month by Black Widow press and is available for purchase through their website directly as well as all online retailers and many bookstores.

[drawing by Unica Zürn]

Element by Amy Greenfield. A living body sculpture representing birth and death through the image of a primal female body.

..............................................Sappho's sparrows are always

telling us that love will save us, some other will arrive to draw

us cool water, lie down with us in our private darkness and make

us well. I think not. What a fabulous lie. We've disposed of sparrows

and god, the death of color, those who are dominated by noon and

the vision of night flowing in your ears and eyes down your

throat. But we didn't arrive at any conclusions.............

......................................................................................In whatever

we do, we do damage to ourselves; and in those first images there

were always cowboys or cossacks fighting at night, murdered animals

and girls never to be touched; dozing with head on your dog's chest

you understand breath and believe in golden cities where you will

live forever. And that fatal expectancy-- not comprehending that we

like our poems are flowers for the void. In those last days you

wondered why they turned their faces. Any common soul knew you

had consented to death, the only possible blasphemy. I write to

you like some half-witted, less courageous brother, unwilling to tease

those ghosts you slept with faithfully until they cast you out.

--from Letters to Yesenin, Jim Harrison

Back in my early twenties I remember reading a New York Times Book Review article on Jim Harrison's poetry and it made mention of his "deeply questioning attitude toward life." It was an idea that I had not yet thought of before in my personal growth. Not just questioning how to live-- I was doing that plenty back then-- but taken to the next step of questioning the whole notion of life (where through the negative one can begin a construction towards the postive). It was a concept Flaubert was on to back when he was 18:

And doubt comes afterwards; it is... something that cannot be said but can be felt. Man then is like that traveller lost amid the sands searching everywhere for a route to lead him to the oasis but seeing only the desert.

Doubt is life-- action, words, nature, death. Doubt is in it all.

Doubt is death for souls; it is a leprosy that seizes on worn-out races; it is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.

Madness is the doubt of reason.

Perhaps it is reason.

Who can prove it one way or the other?

In the most recent edition of Memoirs of Madman, notable feminist scholar, Germaine Greer, provides the book's introduction. Its probably appropriate that a feminst was chosen as the book squarely falls into the replete mode of 'artistic male objectifies female' found within Western Art. And maybe it shouldn't be surprising that Greer provides the most forceful paragraph I have ever read in an opening introdution:

As Flaubert says, everyone would rather be a madman than a fool. Every day young men set up 'madman' personal websites on the internet where other madmen may visit them and swap rants against conformism, bourgeois society and pop culture. There are diaries of madmen on video, film and vinyl. Their disgust, like the disgust that Flaubert cultivated from his childhood, is an artefact. Flaubert lived his revulsion; he elborated it into the habit of mind that we now call 'bovarism' and wrote a sublime novel about its female victim. The pose is still compelling; most of the young people who adopt it will abandon it, accept bourgeosification and join the consumer culture. For those who don't-- few or none of whom will have Flaubert's obsessive devotion to his craft-- misery, illhealth and ultimate self-destruction are more likely outcomes than the creation of a masterpiece.

Memoirs of a Madman has been my first Gustave Flaubert book and I think it was a good choice for an introduction into his work. It was originally written by Flaubert when he was 18 years old, but then not published until about 20 years after his death. Reason being because of its autobiographical text. However, because I’m new to Flaubert and know next to little about his personal life, I’ve read it as a piece of fiction with respect to factual details. But when applied to Flaubert’s artistic development– the reasoning behind the fastidious attention Flaubert devoted to his novels and writing– yes, autobiographical, if not a self fulfilling prophecy as well.

The narrative is an account of an older man whose relation to life seems to be embodied in two divergent areas of thought. One would be a cantankerous outlook on civilization, man as a ‘social being’, the ultimate pointlessness of reproduction, and just about any other mode of living mankind has developed during the course of its existence to ‘better’ itself. That is, accept for the pointlessness of art. Or to apply that more directly to Memoirs of a Madman, Maria.

When not proceeding with a diatribe on the delusional efforts which typically composes a man’s life, the narrator accounts of a childhood memory of a family vacation where he fell in love with an older woman, the first site of whom involved the finding of a dress which needed to be placed further up on shore and away from an encroaching tide.

The love that was born was not of the typical sort which inflicts any healthy teenager when first seeing a naked woman, where the mystery becomes channeled into a year's worth of besotted infatuation, but an all consuming love that places Venus into the oceanic of the spiritual. With man on dry shore and the goddess unattainable in the churning waters of the sea. The narrative then accounts for an attempt later in life to return the adoration of young woman who actually is attainable, but with a final result which destroys the possibility of mutual affection and increases the narrator's self-destructive longing for Maria.

It is easy to see what ended up replacing Maria. While Flaubert flaunted his cynicism, he did so with a stylistic artistry that become influential to many other writers for years to come. The first that came to my mind would be J. M. Coetzee, his Diary of a Bad Year with many parallels to Memoirs of a Madman but with the central metaphor expanded into the political as well. Although, we could also look backwards into literature for further understanding Memoirs of a Madman. Simply put, Maria being Flaubert’s lifelong muse? A pdf copy of the book is available here.

[Blue Dancers; Edward Degas, 1898]

"My theory now is that there’s always something behind a poem, and it haunts the poem. Poems, if they have any soul, are very haunted, and if they don’t have a soul, then they’re just straightforward commerce, commercial art. There is a mysterious thing—Coleridge talked about it, and he said that a poem should be both clear and obscure—clair et obscure—and I agree with that. As you write more and more, as one does, you become aware more and more of what you haven’t said. And you know that you’re circumscribed. But there’s something that you leave off saying and there’s something that still remains of that left-off thought."

Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher
--Barbara Guest

I just said I didn’t know
And now you are holding me
In your arms,
How kind.
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher.
Yet around the net I am floating
Pink and pale blue fish are caught in it,
They are beautiful,
But they are not good for eating.
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher
Than this mid-air in which we tremble,
Having exercised our arms in swimming,
Now the suspension, you say,
Is exquisite. I do not know.
There is coral below the surface,
There is sand, and berries
Like pomegranates grow.
This wide net, I am treading water
Near it, bubbles are rising and salt
Drying on my lashes, yet I am no nearer
Air than water. I am closer to you
Than land and I am in a stranger ocean
Than I wished.

April 2006, Jacket 29, Charles a Bernstein, on Guest's processuality:

No ideas only surfaces, no surfaces only words, no words only textures, no textures only contingent connections . . . In a period of American poetry in which the most visible and indeed much of the very best poetry has been written with hooks galore—whether outrageous or flamboyant or hip or morally uplifting, the arrogant or agonized or transcendent—Guest used no hooks. This allowed her to create a textually saturated poetry that embodies the transient, the ephemeral, the flickering in translucent surfaces that we call painterly for lack of a term to chart the refusal of a pseudo-depth of field. It would be easy to dwell on the exquisite surface refraction in Guest’s work while eliding the significance of this insistently modulated diffusion and liminal warping and woofing. Guest never fit in to our pre-made categories, our expectations, our explanations. She wrote her work as the world inscribes itself, processually, without undue obligation to expectation. These poems unravel before us so that we may revel in them, find for ourselves, if we go unprepared, the dwelling that they beckon us to inhabit.

Freed Color
--Barbara Guest

The branches are placed in a wet cloth,
clover reaches out.


They cannot locate a blue vein.
Purple fills the agenda. Red is on the plant,
the setting of a hibiscus tree.
They are warned not to linger in the purple shade.


Are these bitter colors? Are they accompanied
by rhyme to cheer them when they cross
into that land where color is rare?


They hasten to make use of freed color
who bends to no one,
who dwells in a tent like rhythm
continuously rolled.


To stop the riot of color, to hasten the quiet paucity of rhythm,
to sleep when it is time.


And doors open into a narrow surprise.
The jingle of crystal follows you everywhere,
even into a whistling corridor.

February 2004, Jacket 25, Sara Lundquist, on Guest’s irreverent reverence:

....her world is full of art; she practically breathes it; she laughs at its jokes and, sympathetically, with its trials and triumphs. In intimate aesthetic involvement such as hers, there is nothing automatic; no occasion for such glib dismissals by way of labeling. She is not interested in exposing art’s pomposity, but rather in enjoying art’s own deep knowledge about the (nearly always comic) limitations and ramifications of pomposity. She is not afraid that the slant truths of artifice might rather be lies or tricks. She is as serious in her humorous way about “high art” as anyone can be, seldom conceding that it can get so high as to spurn her attentive intellect, never so high as to lose its grounding or its permeability.

That’s one of the reasons her work is funny: she surprises with her strangely irreverent reverence, with her tendency to “immensely befriend, with her peculiar questions,” the art one has been taught to idolize, or at least to idealize. In work finely wrought, and multi-dimensional she finds much to love and tease, much pleasure, much sensory delight, emotional excitement, thrilling personal and poetic connections with the artist’s problems and discoveries.

24

........"What you need is a sophisticated cat."

The Countess reread the letter. Then opening her escritoire she took pen in hand and answered:

........"Contact nearest available feline breeding-- kennel-- was it kennel-- was it shed? Whatever. The sooner the better." And she would watch over it. It mustn't run wild, think itself a dog and have problems so difficult and different...especially those aristocrats. "Preferable non-pedigree," she wrote.

--from 'The Countess from Minneapolis'

While I enjoy contemporary poetry that exists in the cloudy borders of comprehension and incomprehension– the vastly colorful fringes of imaginative thought-- I do not like poetry that is written largely for its intellectual conceit, where the academic discussion of the poetry becomes more stimulating than the poetry itself. Sometimes its hard to distinguish between the two. But while discourse could accompany Barbara Guest’s poetry ad-nauseam, largely because it is so abstract and open for the hyper active run-on, experience with her poems reveals to the readers that she never wrote anything that was not entirely devoted to the page, the temporal voice and the raw concreteness of words that float within the connective spheres of writer and reader.

This is partly because of her background. She is associated with the New York School, which embraced the abstract expressionists and developed their artistic modes outside of any preestablished condition or study. She also didn’t publish her first book until she was 40, suggesting that there was no ‘career move’ to write poetry, a desire to gain from a supervising elite accessional approval for enterance into privileged circles, but wrote for the love of the imagination and the ways in which poetic gestures can deliver new realms of artistic being.

Appropriately, Guest could be understood as a shoot off the branch of American poetry initiated by Wallace Stevens. Imaginative reality as being a constant activity rather than an absolute. As such, to begin to make sense of Guest’s poetry, there is the expansion of thought which finds balance between the oppositional light-rays of Apollonian intelligence and the porousness of clay vessels that momentarily carry the abandonment of the Dionysian. From her poem, Geography:

to the mosses

the ripest blossoms fall
turn black in water
so dependency on sun is error

rather blue mild fields skimmed
and grass shod of twilight plain

than urn water swamp

Not direct sun, but the chiaroscuro of twilight. Urn as both verb and noun. It is the field between the two emobodying qualities of both. As such, how Guest’s poems begin and end has little to do with a completion of the subject matter at hand but more with the musical time/space being signified and the components contained therein. The poetry shifts, jumps, juxtaposes and correlates much too erratically for final definitions. Rather, there is the existence of the poem, the line, the word, the syllable, the phoneme, and the before and after of non-existence. Not unlike everything in a person's life.

For full impact, one is forced to slow down with Guest’s poetry so that an immediate present sense can constantly be re-established for each particular during the poem’s reading, as the cumulative meaning is often not as necessary as the existence of each particular. Which is far different than how language is usually understood. As you read the sentences of this blog post, the shared assumption towards the congruous meaning of the words creates a flow of thought that should be agreeable to your processing. That is often not the aim of Guest’s poetry. Instead, Guest’s poetry is fluid in its textual lyricism, but the processing of which is more snap shot and compartmental, even disruptive. At times a ‘meaning’ can be derived (defining intellects and expression seekers can now go), but always secondary to the experience of the poetry itself.

[Above the Clouds; Georgia O'Keefe, 1962-63]

Apparently John Steinbeck never quite settled the question of God and religion during his life, probably tending more towards non-belief than belief. However, he did choose a traditional Episcopal funeral and many of his books demonstrate just how much the Judeo-Christian tradition effected his view on life and the nature of mankind. The Winter of Our Discontent as a good example. And within the book, there are a number of references to his personal life and I think the following paragraph demonstrates how Steinbeck's religious upbringing was carried into adult life regardless of his belief or non-belief:

There's something very dear about a church you grew in. I know every secret corner, secret odor of St. Thomas's. In that font I was christened, at that rail confirmed, in that pew Hawleys have sat for God knows how long, and that is no figure of speech. I must have been deeply printed with the sacredness because I remember every desecration, and there were plenty of them. I think I can go to every place where my initials are scratched with a nail. When Danny Taylor and I punched letters of a singular dirty word with a pin in the Book of Common Prayer, Mr. Wheeler caught us and we were punished, but they had to go through all the prayerbooks and the hymnals to make sure there weren't more.

And then an example where Steinbeck weaves in his moral complexities:

"Maybe because I'm a Nosy Parker. Failure is a state of mind. It's like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it. You've got to make the jump, Eth. Once you get out, you'll find success is a state of mind too."

"Is it a trap too?"

"If it is-- it's a better kind."

"Suppose a man makes the jump, and someone else gets tromped."

"Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn't do anything about it."

"I wish I knew what you're trying to tell me to do."

"I wish I did too. If I did, I might do it myself....."