in The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest
edited by Hadley Haden Guest
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008)
First published: 1973
Words
after all
are syllables just
and you put them
in their place
notes
sounds
a painter using his stroke
so the spot
where the article
an umbrella
a knife
we could find
in its most intricate
hiding
slashed as it was color
called ‘being’
or even ‘it’
[…]
C’est juste
your umbrella colorings
dense as telephone
voice
humming down the line
polyphonic
[…]
Guest’s poem is a love letter to Coltrane in the form of a soft, impressionistic tissue of associations, a sort of exploded ballad (complete with envoi). It follows the modernist convention of comparing mediums (music and poetry) by invoking a third category—in this case, art. What binds the sudden paratactic leaps in the poem is the sense of being poised between or before clusters of activity or transformation—the polyphonies densely packed down the telephone wire, the slashings of colour, the cascade of syllables. The poem cuts its own delicate passage through the noise.
by Sam Buchan-Watts