Barbara Guest -- poems and poetics

Just published:

The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest
Wesleyan UP, 2008









Here are some excerpts from essays on poetics by Guest:

From "Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious," HOW(ever) (1986):

"In whatever guise reality becomes visible, the poet withdraws from it into invisibility."

http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/print_archive/alerts1086.html#barbara
(see Guest's EPC page)

***
From "Invisible Architecture" on Guest's EPC page:

"By whom or by what agency is the behavior of the poem suggested, by what invisible architecture, we ask, is the poem developed. The Surrealists taught us to wander freely on the page, releasing mechanical birds, if we so desire, to nest in the invisible handwriting of composition. There is always something within poetry that desires the invisible."

***
From "Wounded Joy" in American Poetry Review (2002):

"Do you ever notice as you write that no matter what there is on the written page something appears to be in back of everything that is said, a little ghost. I judge that this ghost is there to remind us there is always more, an elsewhere, a hiddenness, a secondary form of speech, an eye blink."

http://www.aprweb.org/issues/sept02/guest.html (see Guest's EPC page).