A future for modernism: Barbara Guest's recent poetry

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 2000 by Kaufman, Robert

Remember Borges' great figure Pierre Menard? The difficult Symboliste poet was discovered to have written-not to have copied, paroarea, or pastiched, out actually to nave imagined and written, word for word and line by line-nothing less than the Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes. Now consider a Borgesian tale that, in complex fidelity to our own moment, goes Borges one better, establishing itself not only as true fiction but as true fact:

For decades, a brilliant poet is excluded from American poetry's higher honors and publicity loops, excluded as well from a surprising number of alternative anthologies. But in a perverse and too-common form of recognition, she is regularly identified in the critical literature: she's the woman in one of American poetry's initiatory moments of post-Modernism, that of the first generation of New York School poets. Yet she is known also, by a sizeable readership, as a supreme poet's poet, as the New York School's perhaps most genuinely experimental, aesthetically fearless and uncompromising artist. And then on April 23, 1999, Barbara Guest-amidst an extraordinarily prolific output of luminous work during her eighth decade-is awarded the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal. The honor officially places her in the select company of such previous Frost-Medal recipients as Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and John Ashbery (Guest's New York School colleague).1

At which point, the literary world, belatedly turning its attention to the oeuvre of this pioneer in a post-Modern experimentalism that can at last be accepted and codified, discovers in shock or chagrin that she's been a card-carrying, militant Modernist all along! Moreover, careful reading of the later work reveals an increasingly relentless investigation of the Modernist versus post-Modernist question itself, and the concomitant emergence of a powerful, apparently unexpected claim made in Guest's writing. The claim? That post-Modernism, far from having superseded Modernism, has actually prevented the latter from coming fully into being.

If this rehearsal of Guest's career appears structurally as a Borgesian reshuffling of historical sequence, its implicit form and content sound the overarching aesthetic and political themes of another great Modernist voice, that of the Frankfurt School philosopher and critic Theodor Adorno. There are many paths into the experimental modernity of Guest's poetry. But rumors about the comeback of both experimental Modernism and Adornian aesthetics make it especially interesting to approach Guest's work (and her plottings of a future for Modernism) via her poetry's intense engagement with Adomo. Indeed, it's worth backing up to note one of literary history's wonderful accidents, the sort of accident or contingency that art by its nature turns into necessity (at least, that's what art does until post-Modernism). It so happens that two of what Guest deems her most important early poems first appeared in a i96o issue of the journal Noonday. The second of these two lyric poems, "Lights of my Eyes," begins

By whatever quirk of fate and Noonday editorial decision, on the very page following Guest's poems appears the first English translation of Adorno's "Looking Back on Surrealism"; the brief essay was one of Adorno's attempts to reroute the theoretical efforts of his friend and colleague Walter Benjamin, whose yz9 essay on Surrealism in many ways is the point of departure for Adorno's later undertaking.z There has long been heated debate about the effectiveness, in his own lifetime, of Benjamin s Marxian advocacy of those Surrealist and allied artistic experiments that had highlighted what Benjamin called "mechanical reproduction": the attempt to jettison traditional notions about the "aura" created through an individual artist's imaginative labor, and likewise to abolish the contiguous concept of "aesthetic autonomy."3 Whatever the merits of the positions expressed in that debate, the strong consensus is that the real life of Benjamin's mechanical-reproduction theory has occurred during its posthumous celebration in post-Modernism. So Adorno's Surrealism essay is particularly relevant here, as would be his "On Lyric Poetry and Society" (1957) and his final work, Aesthetic Theory (1970) 4 These texts are motivated by a desire (articulated largely within the Marxian vocabulary Adorno shares with Benjamin) not to relinquish what Adorno deems the "critical" nature of Modernism, by Adorno's refusal to ratify the theory and practice of "anti-aesthetic" mechanical reproduction.5

One could not do better, when seeking an exemplary site for Guest's and Adorno's meeting on the terrain of late Modernism, than those 1960, back-to-back pages of Noonday. Guest's two early lyrics are already characterized by the sustained grace, radiance, and imaginative reach for which she will become known. The poems exhibit deep, multiple, elegant and musical intuitions of experimental, in-process structure, where intense yet deft acts of intellection are informed by melody where song quickens thought.