Rocks on a Platter: Notes on Literature

Abstract

Barbara Guest. Rocks on a Platter: Notes on Literature. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999. Rocks on a Platter contains some of Barbara Guest's most obscure and compelling lines since Defensive Rapture (1993). It has been interpreted by other reviewers as one long poem that examines the "implacable poet" as subject and vector in the process of creative production. While that may be the case, these poems are also literally "notes" on literature, as its subtitle suggests. The book can be seen as Guest's own jottings in response to her inspiring and eclectic research, with texts dissected and arranged to become poetic objects resonating as in a still-life painting. Guest was one of the central members of the New York School, though David Lehman (in The Last Avant-Garde) omits her in favor of an unnecessarily reductive, masculine view of the group. It could be argued that Guest's work, and perhaps Guest herself, is more radically individual, and less easily summarized. Canonical practices have typically excluded such writers in favor of more homogenous categorization. While this tendency has long been under critical scrutiny, the practice of dropping particularly influential, but often more clairvoyant poets from critical schema persists (see, for instance Alan Kaufman's omission of Edward Dorn and his connections to Black Mountain and the Beats from The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry). But what critics fail to recognize or like to forget is how different kinds of poets still speak to each other, still have friendships and discussions that are crucial to artistic germination whether or not they share the same aesthetics. The best poetry demonstrates this kind of complex engagement with different kinds of poetry and with a greater, interdisciplinary community. Most recently, Guest's work has been noted as one of the foundational influences for what could be considered a feminist "wing" of postL=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets such as Kathleen Fraser, Brenda Hillman, Meimei Berssenbrugge, Lisa Jarnot, Juliana Spahr, and Jena Osman. Intrinsic to the New York School's poetics was a fundamental crossfertilization with the visual arts. Painters such as Motherwell, Freilicher, and Rivers were just a few of those whose work and ideas coalesced with those of the poets. Frank O'Hara worked at MOMA and Ashbery worked as an art critic, as did Guest. Her own work often achieves a kind of poetic equivalent to Abstract Expressionism, forcing the literary critic to work with the vocabulary of the art critic: abstraction replaces representation, patina replaces simple imagery, chiaroscuro, diction. Her poetry reveals a primacy of page as "canvas" that draws from modernist sources, yet achieves a texture which is distinctly postmodern in its absence of a central, controlling ego. That Guest is the artist of the collage on the cover of Rocks on a Platter confirms that her close relationship to the visual arts and to artists is one of the fertile resources of her work. The collage is composed of several subtle, textured surfaces in nearly indistinguishable tones of gray, black, white, and beige. The collage, like the poetry, appears to be composed of shadows, of water and sand as much as of paper. Placement here is as imbued with meaning as the weighty rocks. This cover evokes "natural" sculpture: nature "placed" on a created surface. Rocks on a Platter is concerned with nature and the natural world, from the "flotsam of the world of appearances" to its "wet earth." One vision which emerges from these "Notes" is that of the natural world as element and object, as force and "life," animate and inanimate. Land is both ship's destiny or conquest and the very limits of language, "ground" is earth and page: The book begins with the aqueous beginnings of earth, with "Dreams set by / typography" like a ship in an immense sea. …