A future for modernism: Barbara Guest's recent poetry

Remember Borges' great figure Pierre Menard? The difficult Symboliste bard was discovered to have written-not to have copied, paroarea, or pastiched, without actually to nave imagined and written, word for word and line by the agency of line-nothing less than the Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes. Now consider a Borgesian tale that, in composed of several elements fidelity to our own point of time goes Borges one better, establishing itself not sole as true fiction but as real fact:

For decades, a brilliant author of poems is excluded from American poetry's higher honors and publicity nooses excluded as well from a surprising number of alternative anthologies. on the contrary in a perverse and too-common form of recognition, she is regularly identified in the critical literature: she's the woman in single of American poetry's initiatory instants of post-Modernism, that of the first generation of of recent origin York School poets. Yet she is known also, through a sizeable readership, as a leading poet's poet, as the of recent origin York School's perhaps most genuinely experimental, aesthetically fearless and uncompromising artist. And then upon April 23, 1999, Barbara Guest-amidst an extraordinarily prolific output of luminous work during her eighth decade-is awarded the verse Society of America's Robert hoar-frost Medal. The honor officially places her in the pitch upon company of such previous Frost-Medal recipients as Wallace Steven Marianne Moore, and John Ashbery (Guest's of recent origin 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 shog or chagrin that she's been a card-carrying, militant Modernist all along! Moreover, careful reading of the later work reveals an increasingly relentles investigation of the Modernist versus post-Modernist question itself, and the concomitant emerging see the verb of a powerful, apparently unexpect claim made in Guest's writing. The claim? That post-Modernism, far from having supersed Modernism, has actually debared the latter from coming entirely into being.

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

By whatever quirk of fate and Noonday editorial decision, upon the very page following Guest's metrical compositions appears the first English translation of Adorno's "Looking Back upon Surrealism"; the brief essay was single of Adorno's attempts to reroute the theoretical efforts of his friend and colleague Walter Benjamin, whose yz9 essay upon Surrealism in many ways is the point of departure for Adorno's later undertaking.z There has lengthy been heated debate about the effectiveness, in his hold 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 from one side an individual artist's imaginative labor, and likewise to abolish the contiguous conception of "aesthetic autonomy."3 Whatever the merits of the positions squeeze outed in that debate, the brawny consensus is that the real life of Benjamin's mechanical-reproduction theory has occurr during its posthumous celebration in post-Modernism. in like manner Adorno's Surrealism essay is particularly relevant here, as would be his "On Lyric verse and Society" (1957) and his final work, Aesthetic Theory (1970) 4 These true copys are motivated by a desire (articulated largely within the Marxian vocabulary Adorno shares with Benjamin) not to relinquish what Adorno judges the "critical" nature of Modernism, through 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 upon the terrain of late Modernism, than those 1960 back-to-back pages of Noonday. Guest's sum of two units early lyrics are already characterized through the sustained grace, radiance, and imaginative reach for which she will become known. The metrical compositions exhibit deep, multiple, elegant and musical intuitions of experimental, in-process configuration where intense yet deft acts of intellection are informed by dint of melody where song quickens contemplation