Listening to this show, this discussion of Barbara Guest’s casually and yet densely allusive poem “Roses,” you will hear about Juan Gris-style cubism circa 1912 (in his own “Roses”), about William Carlos Williams’ famous celebration in “The rose is obsolete” of a new kind of rose – the metal rose, the sharp-edged rose, the lovely unlovely rose – and also about a memory from the age of eight that Gertrude Stein often retold as a way of explaining her views on the difference between art and nature. Is that difference a problem – an anxiety, a cause for reluctance - for the modernism-conscious poet who comes after modernism, such as indeed Guest, who has an instinct to make room in her writing for the ill person requiring real air to breathe?
Al and sometimes the other PoemTalkers felt that this is a rebuke of modernist airlessness. Natalie Gerber (at right) and sometimes the others felt that this is more likely an expression of skepticism about postmodern art and perhaps a fresh return to the moment of 1912 – the thrilling New Era of collage-y paintings such as Gris’ “Roses,” which is (arguably) dated 1912 and which was a canvas Gertrude Stein herself owned. Randall Couch points out that the poem looks at a fork or divergence in the modernist evolution or modernist family tree, a turning point Guest feels is worth going back to. Michelle Taransky (at left) notes that the art in the poem is an art already encountered even as the poem itself imagines the possibilities of a fresh encounter.
As Natalie aptly puts it, we are discussing a poem that is testing out its stance in response to the modernist approach to representation.
Here’s one version of Gertrude Stein's telling of her early encounter with painting:
It was an oil painting a continuous oil painting, one was surrounded by an oil painting and I how lived continuously out of doors and felt air and sunshine and things to see felt that this was all different and very exciting. There it all was the things to see but there was no air just was an oil painting. I remember standing on the little platform in the center and almost consciously knowing that there was no air. There was no air, there was no feeling of air, it just was an oil painting and it had a life of its own.
Williams saw Juan Gris’ “Roses” (also called “Flowers”) and it is widely considered to be the source of “The rose is obsolete.”
This phrase in Guest's poem — “shoe which never floats / and is stationary” — refers, as Randall reminds us, to the painting by Fragonard whose famous short title is “The Swing”: the young lady swinging upward lets fly her slipper, which the painter catches in mid-air. And what kind of air is that? (Here again this was a scene Williams pondered, in his anti-descriptive poem “Portrait of a Lady.” What kind of man is Fragonard, asks WCW there.)
“painting has no air . . .” —Gertrude Stein
That there should never be air in a picture surprises me. It would seem to be only a picture of a certain kind, a portrait in paper or glue, somewhere a stickiness as opposed to a stick-to-it-ness of another genre. It might be quite new to do without that air, or to find oxygen on the landscape line like a boat which is an object or a shoe which never floats and is stationary.
Still there are certain illnesses that require air, lots of it. And there are nervous people who cannot manufacture enough air and must seek for it when they don’t have plants, in pictures. There is the mysterious traveling that one does outside the cube and this takes place in air.
It is why one develops an attitude toward roses picked in the morning air, even roses without sun shining on them. The roses of Juan Gris from which we learn the selflessness of roses existing perpetually without air, the lid being down, so to speak, a 1912 fragrance sifting to the left corner where we read “La Merveille” and escape.
Fast forward. Cid Corman died in 2004. Bob Arnold, Philip Rowland, Jack Kimball, Joe Massey and others have worked hard to keep Cid’s poems within the view of readers — especially Bob Arnold whose Longhouse Press published The Next One Thousand Years, the Selected Poems of Cid Corman. And then, as part of the PoemTalk series, we staged a mini-reunion of the November 2001 Cormanite moderators, Fran, Tom, Frank and Al, to talk about one of our favorite poems, “Enuresis.”
It means bed-wetting. The poem puts forward this audacious claim to understanding: I know the terror you’ve experienced in the midst of war because as a child I held my urine close to me for fear of my parents’ terrifying enmity. The claim is made with such poetic consciousness (at the level of word choice and meter - and in the spoken performance) that one hardly doubts the power of the homefront psychic terror being remembered.
Terror — Ed — is not Sitting in one’s piss. I know — I’ve sat there —
I’ve slept there and did Most of my childhood. That was warmth — in fact —
And comfort — in spite Of the unconcealed Unconcealable
Smell. Terror? That was And always will be Mother cursing Dad
And there there I am Alone in that night Hearing that door slam.