SPEAKER:
This is the Poetry Foundation's Essential American Poets podcast. Essential American Poets is an online audio poetry collection. The poets in the collection were selected in 2006 by Donald Hall when he was poet laureate. Recordings of the poets he selected are available online at poetryfoundation.org and poetryarchive.org.

In this edition of the podcast, we'll hear poems by Barbara Guest. Barbara Guest was born in 1920 and spent her early childhood in Florida. It was a rootless time marked by frequent moving a powerful hurricane and her father's early death. Her life became more settled when at age 11, Guest was sent to live with relatives in Los Angeles. Guest would remain on the West Coast for two decades, a period during which she studied at the University of California at Berkeley, developed an interest in poetry and was twice married and divorced. On the eve of her second divorce in 1954, Guest moved to New York City at the suggestion of a friend, the writer Henry Miller. New York, said Guest, seemed like civilization.

There, she fell in with a thriving scene of painters and poets. She took a job at ARTnews and met Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler and others in what became known as the New York School. In this setting, Guest said, I began to believe in my poetry in its future. Initially Guest was the only woman among this informal but successful group of poets. Unlike Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, confessional poets who considered poetry an outlet for innermost feelings, poets of the New York school wrote more playful abstract poems, highly influenced by avant-garde and abstract expressionist painters. Their poetry drew on their own substantial backgrounds in art and was intended for both the eyes and the ears. Known as an experimental poet, her poems are often about the process of composition and the uses and possibilities for language as a medium. Though Guest was often neglected by critics, she continued to be prolific. She's the author of a novel, a biography of the Imagist poet HD, a number of plays, several collaborations with visual artists and more than 15 collections of poetry.

She spent her later years in California with her husband, a military historian, and in 1999 received the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society of America. Barbara Guest died in 2006. The poems you are about to hear were recorded at the Library of Congress in 1969.

BARBARA GUEST:
This poem is called Barrels. And it was after a poem by Cesar Vallejo in which he says and other people pass by and sing how sad I am. Today I drink in the chasm of my terrible tristesseness and I've called this Barrels.

I won’t let anybody

take a drink

out of this barrel of tears

I’ve collected from you.

Least of all another woman.

I see her coming along.

I know the type.

I can tell you what she’ll

be wearing.

I know the type

I won’t like it.

She’ll look at that barrel

she’s had a few in her day.

Not that she’s ever filled one.

She’ll remark casually,

“Sweet water,

good to wash my hair.”

And who doesn’t know

tears are purer

than rain water

and softer on the hair.

Just as she steps toward it

and makes for the cup,

I’ll see phantom you

and what you were

brought up by the sea.

And scraps of paper

from this ditch of my brain

will float on the water

and choke her.

Words

after all

are syllables just

and you put them

in their place

notes

sounds

a painter using his stroke

so the spot

where the article

an umbrella

a knife

we could find

in its most intricate

hiding

slashed as it was with color

called “being”

or even “it”

Envoi

C’est juste

your umbrella colorings

dense as telephone

voice

humming down the line

polyphonic

Red plumaged birds

not so natural

complicated wings

French!

Sweet difficult passages

on your throats

there just there

caterpillar edging

to moth

Midnight

in the chrome attic

Roses. This poem is inspired by the quotation which I use with the poem from Gertrude Stein, who said, painting has no air.

That there should never be air

in a picture surprises me.

It would seem to be only a picture

of a certain kind, a portrait in paper

or glue, somewhere a stickiness

as opposed to a stick-to-it-ness

of another genre. It might be

quite new to do without

that air, or to find oxygen

on the landscape line

like a boat which is an object

or a shoe which never floats

and is stationary.

Still there

are certain illnesses that require

air, lots of it. And there are nervous

people who cannot manufacture

enough air and must seek

for it when they don’t have plants,

in pictures. There is the mysterious

traveling that one does outside

the cube and this takes place

in air.

It is why one develops

an attitude toward roses picked

in the morning air, even roses

without sun shining on them.

The roses of Juan Gris from which

we learn the selflessness of roses

existing perpetually without air,

the lid being down, so to speak,

a 1912 fragrance sifting

to the left corner where we read

“La Merveille” and breathe.

20.

Sleep is 20

remembering the

insignificant flamenco dancer

in Granada

who became

important as you watched

the mountain ridge

the dry hills

What an idiotic number!

Sleep is twenty

it certainly isn’t twenty sheep

there weren’t that many in the herd

under the cold crest of Sierra Nevada

It’s more like 20 Madison Ave. buses

while I go droning away at my dream life

Each episode is important

that’s what it is! Sequences —

I’ve got going a twenty-act drama

the theatre of the active

the critics are surely there

even the actors

even the flowers presented onstage

even the wild flowers

picked by the wife of the goatherd

each morning early (while I sleep)

under the snow cone

of Sierra Nevada

yellow caps like castanets

I reach into my bouquet

half-dreaming

and count twenty

yellow capped heads

flowers clicking twenty times

because they like to repeat themselves

as I do as does the morning

or the drama one hopes

will be acted many times

As even these dreams in similar

people’s heads

20

Castanets

This poem is called 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.

A way of being.

There we go in cars, did you guess we wore sandals?

Carrying the till, memorizing its numbers,

apt at the essential such as rearranging

languages. They occur from route to route

like savages who wear shells.

“I cannot place him.” Yet I do.

He must ascend indefinitely as airs

he must regard his image as plastic,

adhering to the easeful carpet that needs

footprints and cares for them

as is their wont in houses, the ones we pass by.

Such a day/or such a night

reeling from cabin to cabin

looking at the cakewalk or merely dancing.

These adventures in broad/or slim

lamplight,

Yet the cars

do not cheat, even their colors perform in storm.

We never feel the scratch, they do.

When lightning strikes it’s safer to ride

on rubber going down a mountain,

safer than trees, or sand, more preventive

to be hid in a cloud we sing, remembering

The old manse and robins. One tear,

a salty one knowing we have escaped

the charm of being native. Even as your glance

through the windshield tells me you’ve seen

another mishap of nature

you would willingly forget,

prefer to be like him near the hearth

where woodsmoke makes a screen of numbers and signs

where the bedstead it’s not so foreign as this lake.

The plateau, excursionist,

is ahead. After that twenty volumes

of farmland. Then I must guide us

to the wood garage someone has whitened

where the light enters through one window

like a novel. You must peer at it

without weakening, without feeling

hero, or heroine,

Understanding the distances

between characters, their wakeful

or sleep searchingness, as far from the twilight ring

the slow sunset, the quick dark.

Eating Chocolate Ice Cream: Reading Mayakovsky.

Since I've decided to revolutionize my life, since I have decided to revolutionize my life.

How early it is! It is eight o’clock in the morning.

Well, the pigeons were up earlier

Did you eat all your egg?

Now we shall go for a long walk.

Now? There is too much winter.

I am going to admire the snow on your coat.

Time for hot soup, already?

You have worked for three solid hours.

I have written forty-eight, no forty-nine,

no fifty-one poems.

How many states are there?

I cannot remember what is uniting America.

It is then time for your nap.

What a lovely, pleasant dream I just had.

But I like waking up better.

I do admire reality like snow on my coat.

Would you take cream or lemon in your tea?

No sugar?

And no cigarettes.

Daytime is good, but evening is better.

I do like our evening discussions.

Yesterday we talked about Kant.

Today let’s think about Hegel.

In another week we shall have reached Marx.

Goody.

Life is a joy if one has industrious hands.

Supper? Stew and well-cooked. Delicious.

Well, perhaps just one more glass of milk.

Nine o’clock! Bath time!

Soap and a clean rough towel.

Bedtime!

The Red Army is marching tonight.

They shall march through my dreams

in their new shiny leather boots,

their freshly laundered shirts.

All those ugly stains of caviar and champagne

and kisses

have been rubbed away.

They are going to the barracks.

They are answering hundreds of pink

and yellow and blue and white telephones.

How happy and contented and well-fed they look

lounging on their fur divans,

chanting, “Russia how kind you are to us.

How kind you are to everybody.

We want to live forever.”

Before I wake up they will throw away

their pistols, and magically

factories will spring up where once

there was rifle fire, a roulette factory,

where once a body fell from an open window.

Hurry dear dream

I am waiting for you

under the eiderdown.

And tomorrow will be more real, perhaps,

than yesterday.

SPEAKER:
That was Barbara Guest recorded at the Library of Congress in 1969 and used by permission of Wesleyan University Press. You have been listening to the Essential American Poets Podcast, produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with poetryarchive.org. To learn more about Barbara Guest and other essential American poets and to hear more poetry, go to poetryfoundation.org.