I have often associated Barbara Guest's poetry with the sound of a certain cymbal made in Istanbul, what we might call an "Old K" Zildjian cymbal. Perhaps because I was reading her intensely at the same time that I was learning how to listen to cymbal sounds. Reading her essay "Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious: Byzantine Proposals of Poetry," I can associate this cymbal with her concept of the Byzantine. Sailing along the coast of Turkey, toward Byzantium [Constantinople, Istanbul] she buys some silk in Mersan, later has silk curtains made of them:

"This experience in Mersan may be called a first encounter with the Byzantine. Underneath the surface of the poem there is the presence of the 'something else.' Mallarmé said, 'Not the thing, but its effect.' 'The effect is what I have been leading to with my curtains from Mersan. The 'thing' is the poetic process which lends its 'effect' (the silk of the curtains) to the poem. Process and effect, each go about in disguise. They must be uncovered, these other realms Keats discovered 'When First Looking into Chapman's Homer.'"