Martha Ronk
from The Chicago Review, 2007
“A Foreign Substance”
Barbara Guest’s poems not only utilize images that are vivid, polysemantic, and ambiguous, they ask in a more metapoetic way what poetry might convey with images. This seems a particularly important question to consider given the oft-cited critique of imagery as mere decoration, Pound’s dismissal of adjectives, and the Surrealist suspicion of imagery (despite employing unusual and vivid analogy) as well. In ways both off-hand and serious, Barbara Guest’s poems utilize images as—to use her language: definition, summation, what the poem means to say. As a poet interested in imagery, I am drawn inexorably to trying to understand the ways in which they function in the book I return to again and again, Fair Realism. It is my contention that Guest, extending the work of her chosen predecessors, radically changes the ways in which images are used. She does this by treating visual images—whether they are brief or extended—as foreign substances that run counter to or athwart much that they seem to be connected to. As she says in “H.D. and the Conflict of Imagism,” the image is a “foreign substance.” [i]
Often this sense of the foreign nature of Guest’s imagery is created by her use of ekphrasis, since an extended picture in words clearly moves away from the body of the text into its own space, separate from the rest, and offering the pleasures of opacity by obscuring or contradicting or causing friction with other aspects of the poem.[ii] Guest describes this particular use of the image in her essay on H.D. and I take her word “lonely” to indicate the way in which an image stands outside or athwart, related to what surrounds it, but also simply speaking for its independent being:
Yet the image despite all its energy and activity has arrived as if it were a foreign substance. It is strangely isolated. This isolation or foreignness of the image from the rest of the poem exerts a fascination to which the poem is willing to submit, but not always the reader. The reader is apt to say, ‘oh, another image,’ or ‘oh, another picture’—remember that Imagism is highly pictorial and visual. If you consider this, you realize the image has a lonely perch.”
(Forces of Imagination, 66)
By using ekphasis, Guest creates the sense of another realm, seemingly related to the one at hand, but in some ways—large or small—unrelated, a questioning not only of newspaper reality, but also of mimesis itself. Thus, despite their sensuality, one often questions what it is that one is “seeing,” and realizes that often Guest’s images appeal rather to the mind’s eye. The illusion permitted by the word (the illusion of an image it creates) liberates the mind. As Murray Krieger argues, the poet is not a painter; because the linguistic sign does not resemble its object: “it therefore [is] free to appeal to the mind’s eye rather than the body’s eye. And the mind’s eye, through which the intelligible is ‘glimpsed,’ is of course superior to the body’s, restricted as the latter is to the sensible.[iii] Or as Pound argues and as Guest twice quotes in her essays on imagism, the image may arise from external sources, but it is the rearrangement of various elements and aspects in the mind that creates the cluster of fused ideas, a cluster infused with energy (“Imagism,” Forces of Imagination, 58).
Yet, more significantly perhaps, Guest’s use of ekphrasis not only enables a movement beyond what she calls the locked kingdom of linearity, but also suggests the ways in which ekphrastic failure, a failure built into the very project itself, aids in producing certain desired effects. No matter what the effort, a poet can never bring the visual into language, but is ever destined to confront impossibility and failure. No matter how detailed or extended the visual description, a poet cannot produce a visual object and it is then the very apophatic nature of ekphrasis that has the potential to unleash the unseen, the mysterious, the hallucinated. Ekphrasis performs both impossibility and its overcoming in alternating fashion.
“Wild Gardens Overlooked by Night Lights,” one of Barbara Guest’s most famous poems, begins where the title begins looking over gardens, night lights, buildings, parking lot trucks. Stanza two begins with an enigmatic pronoun without a clear antecedent:
Wild gardens overlooked by night lights. Parking
lot trucks overlooked by night lights. Buildings
with their escapes overlooked by lights
They urge me to seek here on the heights
amid the electrical lighting that self who exists,
who witnesses light and fears its expunging,
What follows is an ekphrastic rearrangement in which the speaker removes a landscape painting from the wall and replaces it with a scene from “The Tale of Genji,” an episode where Genji recognizes his son. This action rescues the speaker from immobility and allows her to be “mobile like a spirit,” traveling in and out of the story, the picture, the emotional configurations of the episode itself; and it also seems as if the Genji move outside their reality (“their screen dismantled”) into the space of the speaker, “that modern wondering space/flash lights from the wild gardens.”
The use of ekphrasis—most simply an extended picture in words—here allows for mobility and exchange: one picture (a rather delicate landscape) is exchanged for another dominated by the color black and the emotions of sadness and remorse.[iv] Cleverly, Guest
creates a literary device by literalizing it. Thus the poem suggests a formal and temporary solution to the problem of locating oneself and things by suggesting that it is a question of position, and a position that can be and will be shifted even as one changes one painting on the wall for another. Foreign—here literally foreign—images are inserted and extended in an arbitrary way. The picture of the Genji is inserted into the poem, and it operates paratactically to suggest possibilities, opening up the poem’s formal and emotional range. Imagery here is not mere color or design; it is the operation of the imagination in the poem; and such operation is underscored by the position of the line in which the scene of the Genji is inserted, coming as it does after the long pause indicated by blank space:
I take from my wall the landscape with its water
of blue color, its gentle expression of rose,
pink, the sunset reaches outward in strokes as the west wind
rises, the sun sinks and color flees into the delicate
skies it inherited,
I place there a scene from “The Tale of Genji.”
Moreover, abstraction and synesthesia tend to blur or erase visual description. Profiles detach from figures, become shapes and float. A line of green “displaces” Genji and his son. The shapes of the hair are rendered not by expected adjectives, but by the foreign intrusion of color so that any pictorial image is, if not obliterated, rendered far more complex as one struggles to comprehend a black shape.
An episode where Genji recognizes his son.
Each turns his face away from so much emotion,
so that the picture is one of profiles floating
elsewhere from their permanence,
a line of green displaces these relatives,
black also intervenes at correct distances,
the shapes of the hair are black.
As in others of her poems, Barbara Guest defines and calls attention to her use of ekphrasis by means of a frame, here the literal frame of a painting.[v] Her repositioning of herself and her readers is highly self-conscious; she evokes an “I” who “actually” moves pictures around in her room, an imagistic rearrangement literalized; such a technique moves ekphrasis into a realm that is not only highly artificial—far from organic—but also fake and thus close to a kind of “failure,” unless, as I am arguing here, this is what makes for Guest’s obvious success. That is, the poem acknowledges the failure of ekphrasis by wittily creating it as a theatrical scene in the poem itself, and thereby ensuring the potency of the Genji for all the readers of this extraordinary poem.
Barbara Guest. Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing. Berkeley: Kelsey St. Press, 2003, 66,
[1] Important work on ekphrasis in Guest’s poetry has been done by Sara Lundquist; see, for example, “Reverence and Resistance: Barbara Guest, Ekphrasis, and the Female Gaze.” Contemporary Literature 38.2 (1997): 260-86.
[1] Murray Krieger. Ekphrasis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992, 139.
[1] Barbara Guest returns again and again to her own interest in painting: “I grew up in the febrility of modernisms. I love constructionism and cubism, all those isms […] the white on white painting and the emptiness of a canvas. The ideas of space in modernism,” 176. Interview with Catherine Wagner. Colorado Review, 24.1 (spring 1994): 173-77. Other critics also draw attention to Guest’s interest in paintings: “Thus, over time, many of Guest’s poems have come to speak as paintings, that is, as paintings themselves convey their meanings, that is that what had occurred on canvas through the agency of brush and paint came to occur in her work by virtue of the ways in which she explored language, the page, space, points of view, fragments and disruptions,” 98. Anna Rabinowitz. “Barbara Guest: Notes Towards a Painterly Osmosis.” Women’s Studies 30 (2001): 95-109. Rachel Blau DuPlessis discusses “The Farewell Staircase” based on a Balla painting and notes that Guest uses “plasticity” for multiple subject positions. “The gendered marvelous: Barbara Guest, surrealism, and feminist reception.” how2journal, Online. (1999): 1-8. Most important is the work of Sara Lundquist who has written numerous articles on Barbara Guest’s ekphrastic poems; see, for one example, “Reverence and Resistance: Barbara Guest, Ekphrasis, and the Female Gaze.” Contemporary Literature 38.2 (1997): 260-286. Like others thinking about Barbara Guest’s work, I have been influenced by the work of Kathleen Fraser, and most recently by her compilation of memories of the poet in the memory bank for How2.
[1] Guest’s essay, “Shifting Persona,” clearly articulates her views on positionality and the use of both paintings (Velasquez) and windows. The essay begins with the window and describes a “you” who moves in and out:
The windows are normally independent of one another, although you may pass back and forth from one view to the other. This absurd interdependence is like a lark at break of day. The altitude is assumed by the upper window. The lark song. The other window is the lark. The person inside a literary creation can be both viewer and insider. The window is open and the bird flies in. it closes and a drama between the bird and the environment begins…. Without the person outside there would be no life inside. The scene relies on that exterior person to explain the plangent obsessions with which art is adorned. (Forces of Imagination, 36-37)
[i] Barbara Guest. Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing. Berkeley: Kelsey St. Press, 2003, 66,
[ii] Important work on ekphrasis in Guest’s poetry has been done by Sara Lundquist; see, for example, “Reverence and Resistance: Barbara Guest, Ekphrasis, and the Female Gaze.” Contemporary Literature 38.2 (1997): 260-86.
[iii] Murray Krieger. Ekphrasis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992, 139.
[iv] Barbara Guest returns again and again to her own interest in painting: “I grew up in the febrility of modernisms. I love constructionism and cubism, all those isms […] the white on white painting and the emptiness of a canvas. The ideas of space in modernism,” 176. Interview with Catherine Wagner. Colorado Review, 24.1 (spring 1994): 173-77. Other critics also draw attention to Guest’s interest in paintings: “Thus, over time, many of Guest’s poems have come to speak as paintings, that is, as paintings themselves convey their meanings, that is that what had occurred on canvas through the agency of brush and paint came to occur in her work by virtue of the ways in which she explored language, the page, space, points of view, fragments and disruptions,” 98. Anna Rabinowitz. “Barbara Guest: Notes Towards a Painterly Osmosis.” Women’s Studies 30 (2001): 95-109. Rachel Blau DuPlessis discusses “The Farewell Staircase” based on a Balla painting and notes that Guest uses “plasticity” for multiple subject positions. “The gendered marvelous: Barbara Guest, surrealism, and feminist reception.” how2journal, Online. (1999): 1-8. Most important is the work of Sara Lundquist who has written numerous articles on Barbara Guest’s ekphrastic poems; see, for one example, “Reverence and Resistance: Barbara Guest, Ekphrasis, and the Female Gaze.” Contemporary Literature 38.2 (1997): 260-286. Like others thinking about Barbara Guest’s work, I have been influenced by the work of Kathleen Fraser, and most recently by her compilation of memories of the poet in the memory bank for How2.
[v] Guest’s essay, “Shifting Persona,” clearly articulates her views on positionality and the use of both paintings (Velasquez) and windows. The essay begins with the window and describes a “you” who moves in and out:
The windows are normally independent of one another, although you may pass back and forth from one view to the other. This absurd interdependence is like a lark at break of day. The altitude is assumed by the upper window. The lark song. The other window is the lark. The person inside a literary creation can be both viewer and insider. The window is open and the bird flies in. it closes and a drama between the bird and the environment begins…. Without the person outside there would be no life inside. The scene relies on that exterior person to explain the plangent obsessions with which art is adorned. (Forces of Imagination, 36-37)
Essay for Donald Revell 17th c. poetry
Martha Ronk
Images & Melancholy
I’ve spent many years thinking about the poets of the 17th c. in class, but I’ve come to realize, belatedly, that my own poetic meditations on images and unwillingness to give them up are the result of the deeply private influence of the work of John Donne. I was drawn to his work both for the shock of his extraordinary visual images, so vividly angular, and for a melancholic mind that is constantly questioning and probing. I have always been drawn to the distant and unfamiliar (where am I and what’s going on?) and to language that is witty, probing, and “strange.” This fits, I think, with a childhood sense that the ordinary was both strange and transient, with my “successful” experiments to nudge my foot through the yellow wall, with my sense that faces broke regularly into cubist facets (despite not encountering the movement itself until years later). I toyed with comparing this to that (“it was like”) especially if the match up seemed odd. Though we no longer live in a world of cultural, often religious, correspondences, yet it is as the plant .had been trained as a bonsai with wire and secateurs. No matter that such correspondences, are often rhetorical, surreal, and artificial; in fact, it may be the artificiality that I love.
My own personal attraction to the visual and to seeing and the difficulty of seeing clearly shows up, I now realize, in the titles of my books, Eyetrouble, Vertigo, Ocular Proof (forthcoming), and the chapbooks, Emblem and Allegory. My scholarly work focused on ekphrasis in Shakespeare’s plays, analyzing how silent emblems often reveal hidden aspects of a character. My efforts in Transfer of Qualities depend on a tradition of tracing out correspondences between an object and the realm of memories and associations, sliding from one to the other. The use of the verbal to encounter and coax the visual into being creates a particular frisson as it both succeeds and fails. The juxtaposition of images and poetic language enacts a kind of failure since a writer can never bring the visual into language and since the alternation of the visual and verbal seems to shatter each, to acknowledge the failure of congruity—even at the moments of greatest success and enrichment. The shattering affects me internally, on the spine.
Donne’s images are often shattering, also scientific, global, perspectival, and often lead to a melancholy mediation on loss, on something becoming nothing. Oddly, perhaps, literary melancholy is often the seedbed of not only thought, but of language and the simultaneous suspicion of language, Hamlet, the melancholy Dane being an obvious example. Trying to understand why melancholy is seductive for me is complicated and elusive, perhaps because the Renaissance is steeped in the literature of melancholy, perhaps because of what the Japanese call mono no aware, the fragile pathos of things.
Part 1. Images
In Donne’s poems the poet utilizes techniques to convince readers that they are “hearing” the words of his Songs and Sonnets (“I wonder by my troth” or “Busy old fool, unruly sun”), and parsing his complex arguments. But it is also true that he creates entirely memorable and, as Johnson said, “occult” pairings of discordant things. And he frequently uses language of the visual, sometimes bizarrely as when in “The Ecstasie” he describes two lovers:
Our
hands were firmly cemented
By a fast balm, which thence did spring ;
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string.
How uncanny and surreal a scene these lines evoke. Donne has taken his image from Renaissance ideas about optics in which the eyes were believed to emit an invisible beam that reflected the object’s image to the spectator, but the poetic image operates in a physical way, palpably, in the transition from the invisible to the visible and back again.
In “Valediction forbidden Mourning,” Donne’s images work to express the inexpressible, thus seemingly reaching for the origin of imagination itself as we are lead towards the final line here step by step.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat. (21-24)
I try to focus to see such gold, to stand in the place where the simile is simultaneously true and preposterous. It’s the pleasure of being caught in the middle that I return to again and again, the pleasure of imagining such thin gold foil and its airy nothing, in flipping between one and the other. Donne’s imagery is never decorative, but demanding, startling, unsettling. The end of the poem asks a similar sort of effort as the poet speaks of himself and his beloved as both separated and joined, beginning with an announcement of “if,” a signal of an imaginatively wrought process:
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two:
The soul. the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, both doth, if the other do. (25-28)
It is an effort to follow the movement from souls to gold or from the leg of a compass to a beloved soul. The alternation of weighting the prominence of tenor and then of the vehicle creates an unsettling amazement. The same sort of straddle is demanded by the whole poem, a love poem, that begins with the scene of a death bed, by a poem of adoration that turns bawdy :
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home. (33-36)
I am dizzied as I read Donne’s poem by being pulled into different spaces, the space of love and of the fetid room of death, the spaces on earth and in the heavens. And by “if,” a word reminding us that the entire edifice is provisional—posited by the audacious poet. This is rhetorical language of artifice and drama and pizzazz and exuberant skill in the mouth: “Dull sublunary lovers’ love.” The pleasure in saying the words comes for me also with “inter-assured of the mind./Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.” Certainly the poet is claiming that he and his beloved meet spiritually rather than physically, but the sensuous sounds and naming of body parts work erotically by means of aporia; thus he has it both ways. Donne often demands that a reader think and rethink the poem’s argument and although it is a cliché to quote T.S. Eliot’s famous statement, I remain grateful for it: “a thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.” I am grateful that thinking and poetry are conjoined; I believe it and I also admire most contemporary poems that raise questions, draw one into effort, unsettle.
In Donne’s poetry one finds the challenge of his assertions that two are one or that one is nothing. Like his peers, Donne was constantly faced with the experience and prospect of death and was himself clearly fearful of obliteration. How could he have had his portrait painted in his shroud? His poems constantly refer to “nothing.” Something/nothing, nothing/something—a seesaw in which one is caught, spun about. In “A Valediction: Of Weeping,” separation from his beloved reduces the poet to nothing”:
Let me pour forth
My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here,
For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,
And by this mintage they are something worth,
For thus they be
Pregnant of thee;
Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more,
When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore,
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a diverse shore.
We are asked to imagine a tear imprinted with the image of another, valuable coins minted by the poet’s grief, and finally womb-like tears that grow pregnant with her image. Such a tear, containing her, obliterates her when it falls and melts. The vividness of weeping ends up as nothing: again the poet has, I believe, asked us to see a variety of images simultaneously. After traveling through the various compact stages of his weeping, we end up with his absolute grief at loss. In the second stanza the poet imagines nothing (a round ball) becoming something when imprinted with maps of all the countries; and also each tear as a globe imprinted with maps but then overflowing and drowning. Watching the proliferation of changing images, we are overwhelmed by the filmic rapidity of seeing so many images, but also by the sense that so much all is eventually nothing. In such a maneuver a beautiful edifice turns illusory; yet in the final stanza the beloved becomes the round moon (O), or rather, the far more beautiful—“O more than moon”:
O more than Moon,
Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere,
Weep me not dead, in thine arms, but forbear,
To teach the sea what it may do too soon.
The movements through time and space exist in this poem as well as in “Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” She is a tear, a world, a moon, a sea, a bit of saltwater, nothing. Magnifying and telescoping operate dramatically offering possibilities of almost surreal expansion and obliteration alternatively. I suppose it is not flying, but it must correspond, I think. Donne keeps taking me elsewhere, starting with a specific image and moving into a farfetched experience of strangeness, including that of hypothesis. What I mean is that the elaborated artifice of his poems is a challenge to representation: the poems are thoroughly engrossing and at the same time suspect in ways that remind me of Shakespeare’s metatheatrical technique of providing a play that keeps reminding his audience that it is (only) a play. Why do I “want” this so—perhaps it is watching creation at work, perhaps it is the sheer bravado, perhaps it is again the presentation of transience and edifice simultaneously, like standing in another’s workshop. I can’t actually explain it. I’ve tried to in multiple classes and occasionally I see a student’s bright eye, but not often. And then too it is perhaps ironic to applaud so dramatic and audacious a poet when I myself have never been. Is it living variously? Or is it that any poetic gestures, even modest ones, are in some sense audacious, foolish.
Part 2. Melancholy
My sense of humble affiliation with Donne derives as well from his melancholy, not so much because of the association of melancholy with sadness, but because of melancholy associated with books and meditation and writing, imagination and skepticism. (Durer’s great etching of Melancholia is accompanied by a cherub of artistic genius and by tools to fashion a world.)
It is the source of Hamlet’s awareness of the rot in the kingdom, of lies and hypocrisy, of the importance of theater. It can be the fruitful state out of which, in the case of Donne, unrequited love poems and religious devotions arise—and for many writers a state out of which one discovers what one thinks. It can also be a trouble in and of itself; as Hamlet says, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
17th century culture was obsessed with questions of truth especially in the realm of religion and in part because of the Reformation shift that changed so many aspects of worship, church architecture, statues, the nature of images—were they pathways to the divine or sacrilegious temptations of worldly beauty? Many poems wrestle with questions of betrayal, of faith, of inconstancy in relation to love, but even more importantly in relation to the Divine as Donne in “The Holy Sonnets.” As a convert Donne is especially troubled by the truth; in order to advance his career he converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, and the words of the sonnets are full of doubt and anguish. Yet his anguish, although specifically religious, is also for me the anguish of being also caught in “a fantastic ague,” of being full of contradictions, poses, attitudes, inconstancy. I have often turned to the tortured Donne for the solace of companionship and language:
Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one;
Inconstancy unnaturally hath begot
A constant habit; that when I would not
I change in vows and in devotion. (3) XIX
Despite the poet’s sense of his own powers of language (“Death be not proud”), he is most aware of his failures and his powerlessness in the face of death, sin, the devil. I see in these poems the fear of uncertainty and of its costs, and also a poet’s ambivalence towards his own language and whether it can do what it is meant to do. He is caught between a sense of his own weakness and his own potency, sometimes writing as if language itself could outstrip death:“At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow/ Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise/ From death, you numberless infinities/ Of souls. Yet despite his enormous gifts at various forms, including satires, sermons, essays, meditations, he worries over what language can do; he worries over words, fhis texts, his presumption, his needs. Melancholy helps to generate words (“words, words, word”), but also raises doubt about those words. I hope I am not blurring overmuch the differences between Montaigne and Donne, but I keep thinking of Montaigne’s acknowledgement that one seeks solitude because one is melancholy and then one becomes melancholy as a result of such solitude resulting sometimes in inspiration and sometimes in stupor—and the question of who will read it anyhow. Once one is intimate with words, the vexing problems of that relationship are part of one’s life. This is a kind of melancholy that creeps up on all writers, at least from time to time. The serious depth of such questioning for 17th century poets would never be dismissed as “writer’s block;” too much was at risk. Again, I find it enormously humbling to stand in proximity in any way with a poet like Donne, to live in the midst of his riches and to be able to time and again.