Lost and Found in the Türler Losses

Barbara Guest contended throughout her poetry with its ever-present disposition to fragment. For her friend Frank O'Hara, survival was a matter of poise sustained in incessant polylogue. The self holds itself up by a repartee that short-circuits introspection. For O'Hara, to become too conscious of a particular poem's ruses threatened enterprise, and he went to considerable lengths to distract himself from disabused knowledge that the sand inevitably seeks eye // and it is same eye. Guest's ruses are glimpse, indirection, tangent, arrangement-and prosodie inflections of connective air. This last ruse suggests song, and is intended to; but cadences of Guest's exploratory verse are intellectual as well as musical. Intellection is not exhausted by signification, and together Guest's ruses allow her to forestall both signification and she sometimes espouses. Signification alone might produce an off-text (a fully paraphrasable text) or a metatext (a text with tactical dabs of knowingness), both of which would reduce Guests redoubtable language-quiddity to a springboard for what would be consummated elsewhere. In other words, meaning would be produced after fact. But what matter for Guest are words as sounded. Mystery, on other hand, would be inherently contradictory. For to contrive mystery ends up with table-rapping-as biographer of H.D. well knew-or with self-conscious phrasemaking. In her finest poems, knowingness comes with linguistic territory: it is not contrived or concealed, not mapped-on or realized at poem's destination. This brief essay looks at Barbara Guest's revisions to The Tuner and shows her paring away at too-obtrusive, unincorporated metatext. For most part, her revisions are successful: she sharpens edges where blur and dissolution threaten. At some points, however, she appears to court enigma through abridgment, to settle on mystery, leaving linguistic outcrops exposed, high and dry. The sonic hum and buzz that shape ground of her poetry are more apparent in revised version because it refers less obviously to context of its composition. But Guest's discomfort with some autobiographical aspects of book seems also to have motivated cuts at its beginning and end whose effects are less successful. The comprises passages of a prose travelogue from Switzerland, drawn from Guest's visits to Zurich and to house H.D. shared with her lover Bryher; some whimsy around loss of two watches, which Guest associates with importunate and vanishing faces and surfaces; a response to paintings in both prose and verse; and a considerable amount of probably autobiographical material that tends to emerge in compressed lyrics. When Guest made a studio recording of excerpts from The in May 1984, text she used had been published as a chapbook in 1979 by Mansfield Book Mart in Montreal. This text differs significantly from text published in Fair Realism as Turler Losses in 1989 and reprinted in 1995 in her Selected Poems with definite article restored. Notably, final version of The Tuner loses four final poems (or poem sections) of original text, several brief narrative linkages, and two clearly metatextual passages. One or two changes may be printing errors, notably curious Less isn't so important (Fair Realism and Selected Poems) for Loss isn't so important: identical lineation of prose sections in these two later printings makes it plausible that an error might have been carried over. The first deleted metatextual passage perhaps too unambiguously defines book as biographical work or as its outgrowth: SEE: INDEX, CROSS-FILING, UNIVERSITY, CORRESPONDENCE ac-Va Yu, post, previous, subsequent, intervening, chronological, summary, additional material, foreign-native, biographical, birth, posthumous.. .NB All private papers withheld. …

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