A Foreign Substance
2008; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-5804
Autores Tópico(s)Visual Culture and Art Theory
ResumoMany of Barbara Guest's poems work with vivid and unforgettable images--architectural, pictorial, swirling images dissolve and nest and metamorphose. Her ekphrastic images, specifically, move away from body of text into their own space, offering pleasures of opacity by obscuring, contradicting, or causing friction with other aspects of poem. Guest describes this particular use of image in her essay H.D. and Conflict of Imagism: Yet image despite all energy and activity has arrived as if it were a foreign substance. It is strangely isolated. This isolation or foreignness of image from rest of poem exerts a fascination to which poem is willing to submit, but not always reader. reader is apt to say, oh, another or oh, another picture--remember Imagism is highly pictorial and visual. If you consider this, you realize image has a perch. I take word lonely to indicate ways in which an image's autonomy energizes poem and speaks for own independence. Guest's ekphrastic images create sense of a world exists in a fraught relationship with one at hand--both in and outside poem--a questioning not only of newspaper reality, but of mimesis itself. As Guest's ekphrasis enables a movement beyond what she calls the locked kingdom of linearity, it also suggests ways in which ekphrastic failure, a failure built into very project itself, produces various significant effects. No matter effort, a poet can never bring visual fully into language. Yet it is ekphrasis's very apophatic nature has potential to unleash unseen, mysterious, hallucinatory. Ekphrasis performs both impossibility and overcoming in alternating fashion. Wild Gardens Overlooked by Night Lights, one of Barbara Guest's most famous poems, begins where title begins: looking over gardens, night lights, buildings, parking lot trucks. second stanza begins with a pronoun without a clear antecedent: They urge me to seek ... self who exists, / who witnesses light and fears expunging. What follows is an ekphrastic rearrangement in which speaker removes a landscape painting from wall and replaces it with a scene from The Tale of Genji: scene in which Genji recognizes his son. This action rescues speaker from immobility and allows her to travel mobile like a spirit in and out of story, picture, emotional configurations of episode itself. It also allows Genji to move outside their reality (their screen dismantled) into space of speaker, that modern wondering space / flash lights from wild gardens. use of ekphrasis here facilitates mobility and exchange: a delicate landscape with its gentle expression of rose, / pink is exchanged for a picture dominated by black Genji headdresses and remorse, sadness they represent. (In twelfth-century Genji Monogatari Emaki scrolls, which illustrate Murasaki's novel, hats are prominent as black shapes.) picture of Genji operates paratactically to expand poem's formal and emotional range. As Guest sets one scene against another she creates an energy field between planes. (Something similar happens in Pound's In a Station of Metro. According to Hugh Kenner in Pound Era, poem does not appease itself by reproducing what is seen, but by setting some other seen thing into relation ... action passing through any Imagist poem is a mind's invisible action discovering what will come next may sustain presentation--what image, what rhythm, what allusion, what word--to end poem shall be 'lord over fact,' not transcript of one encounter but Gestalt of many ... This setting-in-relation is apt to be paratactic.) Guest's imagery enacts movement and metamorphosis, which she considered one of major aims of poetry. …
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