There is a
poem in Barbara Guest's
slender new book Miniatures and Other
Poems — at 45 pages, it's almost more of a chapbook in spite of the
perfect binding — that, if it isn't her finest poem ever (a distinct
possibility), at least for me illuminates her writing as nothing heretofore has
done. "Pathos" shines.
Like much of
Guest's poetry, "Pathos" both does & does not "tell a
story." It begins with a distinct narrative image, that of an ice skater:
Arms flutter close to the body, skating on pure ice, harmonious
composition, —
Quickly
enough, the skater is gendered — "Lithe her romp!" — as the central action of the early narrative occurs:
"She is falling!" But from this moment forward, the poem moves
outward, both in terms of imagery & action — but in terms of idea &
theme as well. The skater's precarious process around the rink is equated with
word & alphabet, one's way in the world altogether:
Something she must know about hazard, what spills out —
— disturbance,
— pathos.
Equilibrium never fixed —
That last
line is the closest approximation I've ever seen to Guest's own writing
process. She is very careful as to when & how the poem might share any sort
of pause or rest, the inherent balance enabling all tumbling thoughts finally
to complete themselves, and she doles such moments out very sparingly. Reading
her work, as here, is perpetually a process of trying to get one's bearings.
Guest is
certainly not the first poet to utilize the reader's sense of balance to good
effect — Charles Olson & Larry Eigner both come immediately to mind. Yet
both of these men offer far more opportunities in the midst of their texts for
the reader literally to orient themselves than does Guest. In
"Pathos," these moments occur early, as part of the set up of the
piece, not as any offering — even temporarily — of closure.
Indeed, this
is why, I think, Guest often combines punctuation here, the comma with the
dash, where any style guide would tell the normative writer that only the
latter is needed. Guest wants the reader to feel both pulls away from the word.
Guest
continues this process, as close as she may ever get to manifesto or exegesis
in her poetry directly, in "Blurred Edge," the second long poem in
this otherwise short book, even as she declares
no
exegesis
no barnyard door.
"Blurred
Edge," with its unstated thesis that in an interactive world there can be
no hard demarcations, would be interesting to read alongside
