Poetry: Guest/Notley
1960s and 1970s poems from The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest
You recall I was telling you how genius “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher” was. The rest of her early work is typically less fanciful, concerning itself with scenes of New York and elsewhere. As the title The Location of Things hints, she’s interested in the meanings that objects acquire from their contexts. The Blue Stairs is a leap forward, now ascribing meanings to the aesthetics of the objects. Again, the classic is atypical: “A Handbook of Surfing” explicitly evokes “storms and tribal wars” circa 1968. Moscow Mansions increases her scope, though there are touristy moments. Her knowledge of art, however, is not in doubt: this is where she begins using art as a lens through which to view experience, as Peter Gizzi describes in the intro. The Countess from Minneapolis, which includes some proto-Language listmaking, I only skimmed: the references didn’t cohere. The Turler Losses begins with inventive typography and becomes an anti-tragedy of missing wristwatches and lost time.
Alice Notley: Culture of One (2011)
Quite Notley. Tells the story of an outsider-artist who lives at the dump, plus there’s a magical rattlesnake and someone called Eve Love. Then SHOCKINGLY she pauses the narrative to question her own motives, the meaning of afterlife, the perfidy of men. It wouldn’t be Notley if it weren’t sometimes breathtaking: “The Girls Mature” uses her gift for the multivocal to stuff mean-girl attitude to sex into fifteen lines that end by asking a question I want to ask Taylor Swift: “Do I have to be cruel to grow up?”
