Riddles of Form/ Four

Barbara Guest’s Crystal Objects

BELGRAVIA

I am in love with a man
Who is more fond of his own house
Than many interiors which are, of course, less unique,
But more constructed to the usual sensibility,
Yet unlike those rooms in which he lives
Cannot be filled with crystal objects.

There are embroidered chairs
Made in Berlin to look like cane, very round
And light which do not break, but bend
Ever so slightly, and rock at twilight as the cradle
Rocks itself if given a slight push and a small
Tune can be heard when several of the branches creak.

Many rooms are in his house
And they can all be used for exercise.
There are mileposts cut into the marble,
A block, ten blocks, a mile
For the one who walks here always thinking,
Who finds a meaning at the end of a mile.
And wishes to entomb his discoveries.

I am in love with a man
Who knows himself better than my youth,
My experience or my ability
Trained now to reflect his face
As rims reflect their glasses,
Or as mirrors, filigreed as several European
Capitals have regarded their past
Or which he is the living representative,
Who alone is nervous with history.

I am in love with a man
In this open house of windows,
Locks and balconies,
This man who reflects and considers
The brokenhearted bears who tumble in the leaves.

In the garden which thus has escaped all intruders
There when benches are placed
Side by side, watching separate entrances,
As one might plan an audience
That cannot refrain from turning ever so little
In other directions and witnessing
The completion of itself as seen from all sides,

I am in love with him
Who only among the invited hastens my speech.

*

The coincidence of a beautiful sunny day and the arrival of the Chicago Review with the special feature on Barbara Guest proved too powerful to resist. I found myself going back into her Selected Poems and worrying away – again – at ‘Belgravia’ and that line:

The brokenhearted bears who tumble in the leaves.

There are three main things I wish to tackle today.

First, how poems change over time, how any reading has to be of its moment – with all the advantages that entails – and always provisional. In some interview Peter Gizzi talks about his students saying they’ve read a poem implying it’s over and done with. He replies that he’s read the poem twenty times and still finds more to marvel at. I suppose that’s how I feel about ‘Belgravia’ today.

Words such as ‘marvel’ and the ‘marvellous’ seem to crop up when you talk about Guest’s poetry. It is unashamedly luxurious and dazzling and breathtaking. A connoisseur’s art – no doubt about it. You turn a Guest poem in the light like some precious objet d’art – and I can hear teeth grinding coming from more politically motivated readers out there. She’s not to everyone’s taste.

Guest, herself, wrote of the rare pleasures of reading – and I see Brenda Hillman has used the statement in her Chicago Review essay:

“The conflict between a poet and the poem creates an atmosphere of mystery. When this mystery is penetrated, when the dark reaches of the poem succumb and shine with a clarity projected by the mental lamp of the reader, then an experience called illumination takes place. This is the most beautiful experience literature can present us with, and more precious for being extremely rare, arrived at through concentration, through meditation on the poem, through those faculties we often associate with a religious experience, as indeed it is. The reader is converted to the poem ....”
(‘A Reason for a Poetics’ in Forces of Imagination)

I’ve written before about ‘Belgravia’ and while I still go along with much of the reading I’d want to place the emphasis differently. And – I think – I understand that peculiar line or at least can find a way to justify it. An ‘illumination’ of sorts?

The brokenhearted bears who tumble in the leaves.

*

Second: what is a word? Reading Guest yesterday and today I am made especially conscious of the mystery of the word. How a word ‘exists’ as a written/printed sign and shape, a black shadow of itself upon the white page (& yes, I am thinking of Guests’s repeated use of snow, mirrors, watery surfaces in her poems – they’re all potentially textual metaphors); as well as an acoustic entity (ephemeral, shaped by the interplay of breath, tongue, teeth, lips, received by the ear and its membrane and labyrinthine canals and inner chambers - & yes, I am thinking of voyages in Guest’s poems); as well as a concept (whatever psychology and neural science and cognitive linguistics have to teach us about how sound and sight work in terms of language acquisition and use). In short:

SHAPE SOUND IDEA

Where Critical Theorists would label and dissect I am happier today to remain with Guest’s sense of magic, mystery and alchemy.

*

Third. Crystal Objects. Two years ago I didn’t go far enough. Today let’s look at the process of crystallography:

How do crystals form 
and how do they grow?

Crystals start growing by a process called "nucleation". Nucleation can either start with the molecules themselves (we'll call this unassisted nucleation), or with the help of some solid matter already in the solution (we'll call this assisted nucleation).
Unassisted nucleation

When molecules of the "solute" (the stuff of which you want to grow crystals) are in solution, most of the time they see only solvent molecules around them. However, occasionally they see other solute molecules. If the compound is a solid when it is pure, there will be some attractive force between these solute molecules. Most of the time when these solute molecules meet they will stay together for a little while, but then other forces eventually pull them apart. Sometimes though, the two molecules stay together long enough to meet up with a third, and then a fourth (and fifth, etc.) solute molecule.

Most of the time when there are just a few molecules joined together, they break apart. However, once there becomes a certain number of solute molecules, a so-called "critical size" where the combined attractive forces between the solute molecules become stronger than the other forces in the solution which tend to disrupt the formation of these "aggregates". This when this "protocrystal" (a sort of pre-crystal) becomes a nucleation site. As this protocrystal floats around in solution, it encounters other solute molecules. These solute molecules feel the attractive force of the protocrystal and join in. That's how the crystal begins to grow.

It continues growing until eventually, it can no longer remain "dissolved" in the solution and it falls out (as chemists like to say) of solution. Now other solute molecules begin growing on the surface of the crystal and it keeps on getting bigger until there is an equilibrium reached between the solute molecules in the crystal and those still dissolved in the solvent.

Assisted Nucleation

Pretty much the same thing happens as in unassisted nucleation, except that a solid surface (like a stone, or brick) acts as a place for solute molecules to meet. A solute molecule encounters the surface of a stone, it adsorbs to this surface, and stays on it for a certain time before other randomizing forces of the solution knock it off. Solute molecules will tend to adsorb and aggregate on the surface. This is where the protocrystal forms, and the same process as described above happens.

You can probably see why, from what I wrote above, crystals grow fastest in a solution in which the concentration is near saturation. If there are more solute molecules in a given volume, then there is more of a chance they will meet one another. You also don't want to heat up the solution because that acts as the major randomizing force in solution which causes the aggregates of molecules to break up.


(taken from http://www.chemistry.co.nz/crystals_forming.htm)

For me, it’s this paragraph which is of most relevance:

“Most of the time when there are just a few molecules joined together, they break apart. However, once there becomes a certain number of solute molecules, a so-called "critical size" where the combined attractive forces between the solute molecules become stronger than the other forces in the solution which tend to disrupt the formation of these "aggregates". This when this "protocrystal" (a sort of pre-crystal) becomes a nucleation site. As this protocrystal floats around in solution, it encounters other solute molecules. These solute molecules feel the attractive force of the protocrystal and join in. That's how the crystal begins to grow.”

It seems to me that this is a pretty good model of Guests’s poetic process in this poem. Guest’s imagination seems to be led by the ear. In the first stanza of ‘Belgravia’ notice how the poem works its sounds:

I am in love with a man

Guest establishes what will be a recurrent phrase – and we’ll look later at how this use of refrain works – shaping it by means of the near rhyme ‘am’/’man’. What I was not yet alert to was how this creates a sense of self containment to the line. The phrase has an integrity to itself.

Who is more fond of his own house

I notice here how Guest seems to be developing the ‘is’ sound through the line: “is” to “his” to “house”. (Semantically, the relation of “his” and “house” works well in terms of male property and possessions).

Than many interiors which are, of course, less unique,

Here,the ear detects the delayed echo from “man” in the first line in “than” and – possibly? - a typographical ‘rhyme’ in “many”. The ear and eye read in tandem. The ‘or’ sound set in motion by “more” is now attracted by “interiors” and “course” and – in passing – “are”.

But more constructed to the usual sensibility,

By line four Guest’s acoustic thinking is clear – “usual” echoes “unique” in the previous line.

So far so what? Isn’t this what many poets do? Yes – although not necessarily with quite such density or delicacy. However, what seems clear is how the crystallisation model holds. How sounds in Guest’s poem adhere (nice word) momentarily and then a new nucleus occurs.

Let’s transfer to another dimension of the poem.

Characteristically, Guest is working a highly allusive poem. It’s interesting to think of allusion as a kind of shadowing – another narrative haunting this story – or a kind of ‘anticipatory’ echo – other words sounding across time. Guest’s ‘crystal’ objects work in the dimension of time as well as sound.

So, what sounds here as we walk through the corridors of this haunted house-poem?

Nursery rhymes of falling (suggestive, of course, of loss of innocence):

Jack and Jill – where Jack broke his crown and Jill “came tumbling down”; Humpty Dumpty who fell off the wall and couldn’t be put back together again; Rock a bye baby (“rock a bye baby/on the tree top/when the wind blows/the cradle will rock/ when the bough breaks/the cradle will fall/down will come baby, cradle and all”).

Fairy stories of imprisoned women (suggestive, of course, of sexual entrapment):

Bluebeard who forbids his wife to open the door of the room where hang the bodies of his previous wives; Beauty and the Beast where Beauty breaks the heart of the Beast when she leaves but keeps her promise to return;

And we can throw our allusive net still further – out to Jane Eyre and Citizen Kane.

I am in love with a man
In this open house of windows,
Locks and balconies,
This man who reflects and considers
The brokenhearted bears who tumble in the leaves.

We come back to the poem and this stanza which has tantalized me for so long. It’s now possible to see how Guest’s poetic imagination is working.

What else has this “house” been but the poem itself – a space in which she is the ‘guest’ (the pun had to come – and remember that Barbara Pinson ‘takes’ her husband Stephen Guest’s name) and yet simultaneously a trespasser and prisoner. Might this be symptomatic of Guest’s own uncertainties as a young poet entering that very male domain?

This house is “open” – invites all and sundry such as the readings and stories suggested above. There is transparency – “windows” – yet also “locks” and projections out “balconies” (into other poems?).

In the immediate vicinity “the brokenhearted bears” are prepared by the type of acoustic crystallisations we have noticed in verse one: the assonantal “broken” with “open”. But what of the “bears” – how do they arrive seemingly uninvited?

Go back to the second stanza and the “embroidered chairs/Made in Berlin” might Guest’s eery/eary imagination be bending – not breaking – “ever so slightly” “chairs” and “Berlin” (‘Ber-lin’ said in that US English speaker approximation reminiscent of Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” gaff).

How contrived! And yet is it? For Guest’s ear is whimsical and full of memories. For there’s another fairy story that comes to mind – which we’ve been deliberately saving up – about a girl who enters a house and sits on a chair and breaks it: Goldilocks.

Let’s listen to those lines again:

I am in love with a man
In this open house of windows,
Locks and balconies

“Locks” – Guest ushers her in so discretely, this little girl burglar, porridge taster, bed trier, chair breaker. And she breaks hearts too – those of the bears she leaves behind. As one cannot help but inferring this poem is at least partly autobiographical and touches on painful experiences of love and/or marriage.

And now I begin to understand Barbara Guest’s crystal objects: how sound crystallizes as image. The ear leads the eye and the mind. How she ‘invites’ her reader to read according to the “usual sensibility” – pursuing a sequential developmental logic – which the sounds are working to undermine.

This is why I lingered on the shape of the phrase: “I am in love with a man”. Guest’s use of this line as a refrain might lead one to think of a confessional poem, an unfolding of the convoluted secrets of the heart. Instead it holds the development back, the line imposes a formal patterning at odds with a greedy what-happened-next urgency.

How interesting that the last line of the poem should read:

Who only among the invited hastens my speech.

‘Hasty’ speech is inimicable to the poem’s need for time to crystallize, hasty reading, too, for that matter – illumination is“arrived at through concentration, through meditation on the poem”.

The third stanza also now seems more comprehensible –

Many rooms are in his house
And they can all be used for exercise.
There are mileposts cut into the marble,
A block, ten blocks, a mile
For the one who walks here always thinking,
Who finds a meaning at the end of a mile.
And wishes to entomb his discoveries.

This poem-house invites reading exercises – brisk walks and work outs. Yet for what? To achieve “blocks” – fortuitously for the pun, Guest’s New York habits of language transfer to (what I presume is) her London setting. And if we find “meaning at the end of the mile” there is deathly quality to any sense of triumph – “to entomb his discoveries” (the male possessive prounoun is deliberate).

Bell(e) grave ear after all.

It’s tempting to leave the poem here but we need to push the reading further still.

Question One: Is Guest – even in this early poem – setting a challenge to her readers as to how to read her ‘properly’?

To be greedy for meaning, to want to record one’s achievements is to kill the life of the poem? Whereas to go with the sounds and crystallizations of the language is to be alive to the magic and revelatory moments?

Question Two: Is Guest setting history – official narrative and factual time – against fairy story - ‘once upon a time’ – as a gendered opposition: ‘his’ versus ‘my’ – effectively my word against his? Sequential time versus the Other time of the poem?

Question Three: if the “garden” is allusively present as Wilde’s ‘Selfish Giant’ parable and Adam and Eve’s pre-lapsarian state of Grace what are we to make of the theatrical spectacle she immediately introduces? Where the audience become more intent on their own appearance –

As one might plan an audience
That cannot refrain from turning ever so little
In other directions and witnessing
The completion of itself as seen from all sides

As – earlier – “rims reflect their glasses”. Is there a very real danger that crystal objects might be traps? That we – the reader who give ourselves and our time to the text – become lost in a crystal maze of dazzling reflections?