| Summary: | Barbara Guest’s poetry (American poet from the New York School) runs counter to conventional readers’ expectations, the event(s) of the poem being given priority over what is said: the poem’s subject is under erasure, the “enfolding” plastic process requires the reader’s ineluctable participation. Not only are Guest’s poems revealed as painterly, musical and playful compositions but they tend to borrow many worldly human processes like film making, plasticity, fabric making, writing as thinning down, as well as natural processes such as iridescence, osmosis and symbiosis. The event becomes the hazardous meeting point between different artistic means (Guest wrote mainly collaborative works) as well as the miraculous and mysterious correlation between reader and poem. To be sound, the poem should be looked at from various angles in order to generate a series of questions: “What is now happening? What does the poem itself, consider to be its probabilities ? (Guest, “A Reason for poetics,” 20). The reader is however never completely left in the dark since polysemy opens an area of “probabilities”. The latter is indeed faced with the ungraspable nature of events, led to witness the beauty of the ‘dance without a dancer’ (Silverberg) and the paradox of the absent event. Instead of delivering a fixed reality, Barbara Guest, the American Mallarmé, offers the poem as an event made of words and worlds in iridescent colours and subtle vibrations.
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