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*Barbara Guest. If So, Tell Me.

This book was only widely available in the UK. Being the fanatic i am I ordered it from amazon several years ago. It is one of my favorite books of hers.

There is a weakness in some of the later Guest which is a certain preciosity. Here that quality is mitigated.

Her collected poems is coming out. I've pre-ordered it for myself.

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.02% finished. I am going to write one of those How I read 9,000 Books of Poetry and Saved Civilization books. It's sure to be a hit.

You can't translate Barbara Guest into French, since her poetry is already written in French.

Having insights about the poetry you read turns out to be harder than expected. In other words, having insights that can actually be articulated intelligently. For example, there are poets I've read for a while that I haven't been able to be that articulate about. I don't mean having opinions about it, that's the easy part...

For example, I am a great reader of the poetry of Barbara Guest, but I wouldn't know how to articulate any meaningful insight. Of course, I'm good at faking it with my lit crit skills.

You read through the essays written by poets, and discover they have no insights that they are able to put into language. At least, nothing that counts for me. This is where it gets tricky. You see writers dumbly dancing around the subject; you know they know they are expected to have something to say, so when they don't, there are always a few clichés they can fall back on.

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My dreams are of startling emotional clarity. For example, a dream in which my friends abandon me... The specific details are murky, but the import of the dream was very clear when I awoke.

In her recent poetry, Barbara Guest uses a sort of medievalism (knights and castles, damsels, romance) to express a nostalgia for high modernism. It is as though an equivalence were drawn: modernism is an age that can be romanticized, made into a legend. And modernism extends up to Guest and her own group of poets. Jimmy Schuyler can be made into a "king" of poetry ("The glass Mountain." This kind of superimposition of historical periods would be a fascinating thing to study: at what point did the new (modernism) become the old (medievalism)?