Product Description
With new interest in poetry as a performative art, and with prewar experiments much in mind, the young poets of postwar America infused the stage with the rhythms and shocks of their poetry. These energies manifested themselves all at once, and through the decades have continued to grow and mutate, innovating a form of writing that defies boundaries of genre. THE KENNING ANTHOLOGY OF POETS THEATER: 1945-1985 documents the emergence, growth, and varied fortunes of the form over decades of American literary history, with a focus on key regional movements. The largest and most comprehensive anthology of its kind yet assembled, the volume collects classics, long out of print rarities and texts from unpublished manuscripts. Copiously annotated, it will be an indispensable reference for students of postwar American poetry and avant garde theater. Included are works by Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, Michael McClure, Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka, Hannah Weiner, Barbara Guest, Sonia Sanchez, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Carla Harryman, Charles Bernstein, Leslie Scalapino, Kathy Acker, and many others. A unique feature of the book is its editors' notes even on works omitted but falling within the anthology's purview, including Pedro Pietri's The Masses Are Asses and Jessica Hagedorn's Tenement Lover. Erudite yet highly readable, the plays and prefatory matter offer a highly entertaining glimpse of the ways in which poets have used the theater to widen their audience, develop new techniques, or negotiate their aesthetic community's precepts and desires. In the process, some of the most mature and progressive work within and about the theater was produced, and is at last gathered in one place. ... Read more

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Word count: 2209. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from The Antioch Review, published by Antioch Review, Inc. on September 22, 2009. The length of the article is 322 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest.(Book review)
Author: Jordan Smith
Publication: The Antioch Review (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 22, 2009
Publisher: Antioch Review, Inc.
Volume: 67Issue: 4Page: 801(1)

Article Type: Book review

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more

Product Description
BARBARA GUEST SPECIAL ISSUE (53:4 & 54:1/2). A triple issue celebrating the life and work of Barbara Guest. Three of Guest's plays and a portfolio of five previously uncollected poems (edited by Catherine Wagner) are accompanied by critical and personal responses to Guest's work by Charles Altieri, Eileen Myles, Donald Revell, John Wilkinson, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Martha Ronk, Andrea Brady, Brenda Hillman, Nancy Robbin, Patricia Dienstfrey and Rena Rosenwasser, and Garrett Caples. ... Read more

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One of 500 copies. ... Read more

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A meditation on the difficulty of assemblage and a reflection on the poetic process. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Salute to Rocks on a Platter
I liked this book better than the other fellow, but I can sympathize with his feeling that these poems make no sense.(I'mjust guessing that the other reviewer is a guy, maybe because of the approving reference to August Kleinzahler, a poet unlike any other currently working.)ROCKS ON A PLATTER: NOTES ON LITERATURE to me sounded like a great idea, for Barbara Guest was an infinitely patient reader and any of her opinions on the writing of others were always welcome, sometimes a little astringent, more often felt and generous.So even a book of her table talk a la Coleridge woiuld have been a precious gift.

However these NOTES ON LITERATURE are something more and something less than the subtitle denotes.I believe that each page is her notes on a different text, but she has swept away most of the referents, like sand out of the foyer to her beach house, and so we come to them feeling the generosity and the asperity, but supplying our own texts.Like the Publishers Weekly review who guesses that, if trees are in the first line of the poem, then they are probably the trees branded by John Ashbery in SOME TREES."No ideas but in trees."Thus a hundred texts propose themselves and disappear, like the same sands you're trying to hold back from the tide, running through your fingers.A feeling of "crewlessness," as she advises.

I misunderstood her and thought it was going to be about rock music, thinking of the way 50s DJ in movies like THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT refer to 45s as "platters."In her work you always hear the surf music, and the other great California invention, the "wall of sound" Phil Spector ran in Los Angeles."Pockets jingle," she writes."highly responsive place in the shelter/ of thoee rocks at last the jingle of your pockets/ / HEARD ON THE PAGE."For her it became increasingly a question of punctuation, and indeed what alphabetical characters sat on top of others in the lines of a poem, the way John Cage would spell out the subject of his writing by enlarging one character and lining up the lines so you could read them vertically with greater ease than the horizontal.Must have driven the compositors mad!But then you get the wonderful tips, the tips of her hat to the poeets and prose writers she loved.For example in "Shattered Rocks," where the letters D, H and L line up on top of each other like faces on a totem pole," to salute Lawrence and his animalist, inclusive poetics (and his modernity of course).Like Guest, he was a painter too and thus deeply invested in the ethereal, yet scarily down to earth quality they called "tonality"

All in all ROCKS is a book that will repay dozens of readings.As I say, I was puzzled about it when it came out, and only now, in the silence of mid-August, do I start getting the beat.

Incomprehensible
This poetry makes no sense. There is a certain pleasure in the deliberate avoidance of meaning and sense, especially if one can ascertain some depth behind the surface. But here the experience of evasion is valued for its own sake, and anyone enamored of the concrete actualities of, say, August Kleinzahler, whose critique of Language I recommend, will find in these poems less than meets the eye. ... Read more

Product Description
Cultural Writing. Poetry. Art. "DURER IN THE WINDOW offers a selection of Guest's work on art written between the 1950's and 2000. It features the early art reviews, collaborations, longer essays, and, of course, poetry. Each component highlights her artistic sensibility, subtle and discrete, full of elegance with an exacting eye. Her work demonstrates the ability of one poet to navigate between the realms of two artistic worlds and maintain an active existence in both. DURER IN THE WINDOW is a showcase of Barbara Guest's writing and a winning example of collaboration itself"--Africa Wayne, editor. ... Read more

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Evocative poems in deliberately small packaging. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

huh?
I can't say I understood this writer's work, but it was very pretty, no not exactly that, it was inventive and sharp, but I didn't really know what was going on.I read it three times, and still didn't know.It's like the moment when an ant falls asleep.You can't quite catch it doing it, and this poetry is something like that.I wish I could talk to the author about what she was up to.This is even harder than Marianne Moore.She is kind of the Marianne Moore of the postmodern set, I'm to understand.Maybe it will take a long time to get her.She feels worth it.Let's keep trying.

fun minutes
Barbara Guest is a very interesting experimental poet.This book is so short -- & thsre are usually so few words on every page -- that it makes for a very good half hour or so of reading.But there's more.If the reader gives enough attention & time to the poems, they become more & more lucid.In their own way, their way of fantastic leaps & enigmatic surprises. ... Read more