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Sara Lundquist - Brad Gooch, from City Poet, 166, 171. There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope - letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier - if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one's blood . . . . Meanwhile the whole history or possibilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.
- John Ashbery, from "For John Clare" | |
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HOW AND WHY does a poet, associated throughout her career with New York City take on the subject of Minneapolis and its environs? How does she navigate the strong, long-standing cultural prejudice that conceives of New York City and the Midwest as polar opposites, places so divergent in their mores and values that they can cause visitors from one to the other to suffer intra-national culture shock? Mutual attraction and hostility mark this divide: inhabitants of both places tend to hope or fear that "real life" might truly be found not here but there. | |
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When shall I understand Minneapolis?The surprising thing about these lines is their lack of Eastern or cosmopolitan condescension. Minneapolis is put forward as significant matter, worthy of attention, capable of rewarding study. The New Yorker is an immigrant seeking "permissions to approach," with more of the air of a pilgrim pursuing understanding than a tourist upon whom distinctions and qualifications are lost. This is a speaker who poignantly glimpses aspects of things she feels she may never see as thoroughly or as deeply as a native of Minneapolis (a Minneapolitan?). She has passed into environs she cannot satisfactorily comprehend. | |
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dust dust dust dust dust dustAnother poem salutes the epistolary language of the 19th century, recalling the letters of divided pioneer families and their struggles to ameliorate distance and loneliness: "Amaryllis, favorite daughter.Another seems to compress a whole romance novel into seven paragraphs, parodying that genre's melodramatic tone, but again taking up the subject of the ways one accustoms oneself, via intimate and sexual human relationships, to alien landscapes: His was the only icey hand with any warmth concealed in it. It was he who had called her "my light in winter". Who had led her in a northern country to the first wild strawberry.Poem #19 finds Guest comically aligning herself with an ancient traveler-poet, one Widsith, the fictional narrator of an old English poem, probably from the 7th century. She imagines herself to be in the tradition of this "scop" or minstrel, aptly borrowing a lively alliterative and boasting style to describe her own mock-heroics in taking on the wilds of the Midwest, the river and the prairie: Scoping along the Mississippi. I a Scop. Coasting the Myth-West, musing the margins, earth yearned river wracked, grieving and groping, I a Scop making my weird. I saw many fellows, lithesome liquor hoarders, drawers of the dream, also riven by the river, daughter of the Rood. All have heard of the musicians ravishing . . . the lake Scops inland . . . his ribbon of runes. Gusts from the Guthrie's stage spoken ear oaths, alas of an afternoon the wind sprung word tokens, host hoardings, sharers of sheaths . . . joust surmounting the silence where prairie plumes cuddle and clash.Guest finds the New York School tendency to eclectic appropriation of poetic styles abruptly juxtaposed to be indispensable to her attempt to know Minneapolis; it provides a means of demonstrating that Minneapolis also tells its story in many voices. Reviewers have focused on the poems about the Countess and have mistaken her as the collection's central consciousness. Anthony Manousos writes that the book "describes the encounter of an ultra-refined cosmopolitan woman with the hinterlands of America," without seeming to notice how the narrator (it might be practical just to call her Barbara Guest), slips in and out of sympathy with the Countess, how she is at pains often to gently mock the Countess's ultra-refinements, as well as the point of view that would dismiss Minnesota as "the hinterlands." The Countess is perhaps conjured up from the painting reproduced on the cover, Robert Koehler's "Rainy Evening on Hennepin Avenue, " which depicts upper-class Minneapolis pedestrians in 1910. Perhaps she owes some of her literary lineage to Carl Van Vechten's The Tattooed Countess, a short comic novel of 1924 that follows the fortunes of a worldly, rich, pampered European Countess among the inhabitants of Maple Valley, Iowa. | |
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Seated at the mirror rolling up her hair, feeling the thin papers curling around her fingers, the air in contrast thick from the low glaucous clouds, the color of flour, her fingers twisting the papers into shapes like grain bins - cylindrical . . . exactly the shape . . . remembering those one passed driving out over the rutted roads. The same routes she often dreamed of as passages to better things. Such as a lime laden or elm heavy driveway poised within a privacy, a refinement, a collection of tested images with their fragrances not here in the grain struck air, the summits of flour rising like pillows over the landscape. And her imagination hastened to where all was still, aged, and quartered.To portray so clearly the Countess's unhappy distraction in dislocation is surely in some measure to share it, but also in some measure to critique it. The countess remains an isolate partly because she wishes it, and is too weak and muddled (however charmingly so) to risk genuine connections with the world outside her window. She suffers from a certain agoraphobia, unmixed, as it is in Barbara Guest, with a counterbalancing agoraphilia. ¶ Unlike the Countess, Guest is curious about Minneapolis, she avidly seeks it out, she packs the book with allusions to Minnesota's history and geography. She wonders about the Persians who have settled there; she writes about the Native Americans, about the "Crystal Court" of Pillsbury Flour, about the Ice Palaces of St. Paul's winter carnival, about her friend's River Road studio, about the Guthrie Theatre, about Crocus Hill, Summit Hill, the towers of St Paul. She writes about eating Lake Superior Cisco Smoked Fish and about the taste of Mississippi rock water. She writes a strange and funny anecdote about the statue of Hiawatha which was placed in Minnehaha Park in gratitude to Longfellow (whose "sickening passages," she writes, "stink[] up the night.") She thinks about how prairie houses "correspond to hemispheric requests / of flatness." She satirizes a visiting scholar of Roman history who finds himself in love with the local descendants of Vikings; she describes the color of the "Minnesota twilight that edged in through each window." She delights in the sound of Scandinavian place and family names. She muses on the Walker Art Center with its eclectic collection bringing the world to Minneapolis, from the "once sacred and exotic collection" of ancient Chinese Jades, to the huge metal double-polyhedra sculpture that "spreads its tendrils aloof over the museum's roof" and which was made in 1965 by Tony Smith, a New York artist who was Guest's teacher, mentor, and friend. This curiosity, this attentiveness, this openness is rewarded in those poems in which Guest seems sure that the locale (both because of, and in spite of its essential strangeness) can be congenial to the self that expresses itself through language. She catches a poem acting as if it were at once the Minnesota sun and the Minnesota moon, traversing the Mississippi river in a boxcar over a bridge. The poem, #32, feels like a brightly lit moment of achievement, a moment when the beauty and meaning of a local landmark reveals itself to the receptive outsider: There was a poem withAlways aligned with the flashier aspects of the New York School aesthetic, as Marjorie Perloff recognized early on, is the key notion of "attention", a word these poets used consistently in their poems and in their literary and art criticism. "I am needed by things" declared O'Hara (197), who spent a lifetime trying to satisfy the need of things (events, people, paintings, poems, places) to be seen, written about, attended to. The immense inattention accorded the Midwest by New Yorkers in general, is partially, subtly, surprisingly redressed by Barbara Guest in The Countess from Minneapolis.
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