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Rocks On A Platter, Notes On Literature, Barbara Guest, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover and London, 1999. If So, Tell Me, Barbara Guest, Reality Street Editions, London, 1999. The Confetti Trees, Barbara Guest, Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1999. | |
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A body by itself doesn't mean anything.
- Vladimir Dzuro, Czech Police detective, forensic team.
Body in the field - beyond uneven brick,
- If So, Tell Me, Barbara Guest, 13 | |
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BEGINNING AGAIN and again surrounding a body with story "another STORY BEGINS." (Rocks, 3) Was there ever a body to begin with? Or can a body by itself exist? In Barbara Guest's three recent books there is only the surrounding that is poetry. Something imagined lying across the field of the page beyond the uneven brick of type. | |
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Now the pain has left the body. Only an outline remains. Down by the bathhouse where the soundless waves tumble the Montage ends in an unfinished tree. Nothing is alive. A writer sits at Windows, a woman on his Screen. He puts her on a reef with the shipwrecked sailor. The feeble sun he paws will not burn.
The problem of making the body mean, burn, is always before us - And the conditions of making differ depending on who proposes them, and by what means. This time a he sits at a computer screen looking out its window into the computer Screen at a program called Windows, at the reflection of himself as her in the window Screen. The "mouse" of the computer, the "feeble sun" - "will not burn." Where there is no burning there is the necessity of further investigation into the conditions, the various means of burning of producing illumination - by reflection, a trick of mirrors, or by candle, computer, lamp, film projector - each from a different era and producing different effects in the hands of different operators - poets, philosophers, composers, among others - rifling through her effects - retelling is required here where an outline will not burn. | |
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They told her they liked real fires and not those of the imagination. Imagination was harmful and always messed up the set. Putting burning where the props and plot were on the set. Subtracting one from one from one from one matching zero with the place of "real fires." Striking the set, replacing, stripping what appears to be intact. Writing as an act of removal - exhuming the body to tell the story to keep the furniture, the food cooking on the stove, while removing the walls of the house. Use the utensils, the elements, the structures of myth, poetry, fairytale, screenplay, narrative, to expose the beams and bolts. To require that we listen inside-out and doubly. Surround the body with subtraction since the body is always already cloaked in story as before it is born it is clothed in a history. That which is made up and can never fully reveal the origins of its making: That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery. I call the comportment which enables us to keep open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the mystery. (Heidegger, 55)In all three books "openness to the mystery" is the comportment - writing as finger on the disappearing present body of writing writer, of writing writing White
Technology's techne the machinations, writing finger's methods of making, chosen, as it were live on camera, while pawing a "feeble sun," or at gunpoint, that is, in the face of the urgency of "poetry of the moment" a "flame lit with nothing and nothingness stayed." ("Overboard," Confetti Trees, 9) Each moment approaching nothing because: "In whatever guise reality becomes visible, the poet withdraws from it into invisibility." (Guest, "Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious," a talk given in 1986.) practices of deception existing: to encounter arm, and sun,
Calling practices of deception which exist in order to create encounter which can only be "vanish and return" - what appears to be the light of day is "sun, cloak . . . " Revealing and concealing meaning Guest requires that we listen doubly to mystery, day's ambition, the light of night, illuminating "This elaborate structure around the text . . . " ("Doubleness," If So, 13) Skin of the lost paperConjuring an astonishing ethnographically "real" Hollywood of World War II in The Confetti Trees Guest uses the film camera to demonstrate exactly the ways in which "practices of deception" work to illuminate more than practices of "realistic" documentation or plot ever can: Rather than imitating reality, artworks demonstrate this displacement to reality. Ultimately, the doctrine of imitation should be reversed; in a sublimated sense, reality should imitate the artworks. (Adorno, 132)As they do in the desire to enter an ideal world of the made, displaced by the entrance into the motion of motion picture, The action began in heavy mechanical studio rain. An actor in a brown overcoat lit a cigarette and detaching himself from the group entered the house. Other actors in brown overcoats with lit or unlit cigarettes entered the house. One by one as the director watched, the actors reappeared. Each carried a barrel he then pushed down the rickety steps of the house. The action begins in doubleness that is likeness. The sublimated "physical" of the physical world. " . . . heavy mechanical studio rain," and "Puddles!" - "lit" and "unlit cigarettes" requiring further investigation into the nature of semblance: She shall disclose herself (herself still pointing)
Just like what you believe, is a world of proposed beliefs, but the poem is not itself what you believe. And likeness not where you would expect: Rocks On a Platter the "poetics" book is poetry about poetry, philosophy, reading, etc, no more or less than the other two are "Notes on Literature." In this land there can be no ideal platonic form of poetics or the poem "outside" the poem that occupies the realm of true belief. It is poesis - the act of this particular comportment that one can believe and the poem is belief's afterimage. "Yet this demise . . . " of belief? of the poem? " . . . shows itself in fragments, just as the poet slowly dies in his or her poem making sure there are fragments remaining of the empire which created the poem, the empire of the poet's soul." (Guest, "Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious".) | |
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Notes: | |
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Susan Gevirtz lives in San Francisco. She was an Assistant Professor for ten years at Sonoma State University and now teaches at The University of San Francisco. Her books include Black Box Cutaway Kelsey Street Press, 1999; Narrative's Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson, Peter Lang, 1996; PROSTHESIS : : CAESAREA, Potes and Poets, 1994; Taken Place, Reality Street, 1993; Linen minus, Avenue B, 1992; and Domino : point of entry, Leave Books, 1992. The Hourglass Transcripts is forthcoming from Burning Deck. | |
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