Pearls

from a student paper:

"Being involved with two people at the same time was really a hassle for me."

And that's just the first sentence!

Reviews

Here are two newish to new reviews of my book, the first from Main Street Rag, and the second from Prairie Schooner:

THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY
AND THE RUIN OF THE WORLD
by Paul Guest
New Issues (2003) 94 pages
ISBN: 1-930974-27-2, Poetry

Paul Guest’s lyricism ranges from mystical to self deprecation and sarcasm, and his The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World traverses a great distance. The collection is able to reference, among others, Godzilla, the poet’s disability, science, and much more. The mysticism doesn’t really come off as subject matter, but rather how the poet treats his subject matter.

In “Invocation to Destructive Muses,” Guest writes, Our poet writes for hours in the myth of quiet: / interruptions pile up like debris. Earthquakes happen. / They are canceled. Tsunamis lap under doors. / Sponged up. Beach Boys die. The poet feels bad / but not too bad. This is from a poem where the first seven words are, Be it Godzilla, King of the Monsters. Yet, of all the imagery of violent destruction, the persona of the poet starts peeking through, and Guest’s particular talent is taking things that wouldn’t ordinarily fit together, and making them work naturally.

Other entries into Guest’s first book are bluntly personal. “For a Long time I Have Wanted to Write a Handi-Capable Poem” best illustrates Guest’s refusal to fall into a self-pity trap. He doesn’t wave his disability in front of the reader, he just assumes his wheel chair is part of who he is. With that in mind, he chafes at disability political correctness: ... if I were the militant type, and I’m not, I might join / my brothers and sisters in disabledom and chain myself / in solidarity / to the Slurpee machine at the 7-Eleven, but they’re idiots, / and I’d rather have a super-size grape Slurpee any day. / God, I’ve fallen into a cranky orbit. The poem also describes failed attempts to pick up women in bars as well as speaking at a conference entitled “Transitioning the Adolescent Disabled into Adulthood.”

Lines like these do well to balance the collection against its richly textured imagery. More importantly, lines like these, and the rest of the book, work hard to present a solidly original voice.

Rich Ristow

The body is the fodder and foil in Paul Guest's first collection, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World. As the title suggests, poetry is an ambitious undertaking. Readers will not be disappointed with Guest's efforts. Muscular, stark, cool, original and biting, virtually every poem boasts a surprising thrust, a feast of description coupled with a quirky inverted logic. Open to any page and you'll find lines written with the intelligence and crafted ease of the young Frank O'Hara:

   Walking to get medicine
  for a pet, I am tempted

  to speak of the flesh
  a last time and fall silent

  upon the subject,
  as if sleep could claim

  my mouth for its own
  and close what I'd say

  like a wound.

Guest reminds us, again and again, of the pleasures of a well-placed line break, and as with Rosal's work, music in the lines accounts for ongoing sonic pleasures. Each syllable offers something fresh to savor and read aloud.

Geography is not a physical region for Guest, but rather the orbit he paints in your head, the one that presumably exists in his. Bold enough to use "heart" and "stars" in a number of poems, he gets away with it by offering a convincing conduit between the two, a taut landscape as elastic as a rubber band. A reliable narrator, he gains the reader's trust early on. Therefore, you trust him on the subject of "the looming cruelty of stars," which are "the topography of false starts" where "a whole constellation is lousy with desire."

Guest's subjects are both familiar (heaven, hell and the heart that stops, love, pain) and the unusual (comic book characters, machinery). He packs them densely in discursive lines and stanzas. Because of the structure of his lines, (they rappel down the page), it's hard to do justice to any of them in brief examples, but here are just four lines from "In Case of Rapture,":

   Something burning will go on
  like a sadness and leave a dark soot
  like a thumbprint on a throat.
  Love's constant graffiti will be effaced.

Autobiography does play a role in Guest's poems, as in Lockwood's and Rosal's. In a few poems he uses his paralysis from a childhood accident as subject matter. Read as a collection, this information adds a level of poignancy to poems already thumping with energy and pathos. For example, from the opening lines of "Pinocchio": "Once I was wood and my heart was a knot./From a block my brain was slowly cut--/legs, arms, knees and nose, my all of me/peeked out at the prompt of father's blade."

Guest's poems have a sharp edge of dark humor. They bristle with the life of the mind, an echo of the role the mind plays in the work of Wallace Stevens, as he mines that field himself.

The Resurrection of the Body pitches headlong into Guest's signature tone with these lines from the first poem in the collection, "Melancholia":

   Almost I rushed from home to tell you this:
  that melancholia, the word, when broken
  down to its roots, its ancient Greek particulars,
  means black hole. How perfect. How yes,
  I've been reading the dictionary again.

In a world where "pain grew like love," Guest gives us an unflinching view of the human condition rich with surprising contradictions. This is a sophisticated, erudite collection, all the more stunning because it is his first.

Elaine Sexton

selection

EVOLUTIONARY POEM

A man who knows more than me is easy to find—

the papers are filled up with them

and so too the public airwaves

buzzing with coded sound, with compressed

image. And this one, this man

tells me, as though he were speaking

only to me, that we’re evolving

to eat mush. Of all mammals,

our teeth are the worst, weakest

because we grew thumbs, invented

javelins and sledgehammers and cudgels

and whatever was killed

was cooked soft over a fire,

something we did not much improve

until jellied napalm dropped

from the pregnant bellies of planes.

And mush is all I seem to eat

these days while the tv buzzes

its way through plot,

while the last iterations of winter pile up

outside my door

which is cold to touch

at night, which I opened last week

to find a small pile of change

and a red swath of vomit.

Never let it be said the universe deals

in anything but the inscrutable.

I imagined the grief

of the stranger

who leaned against the wall

and whatever poison worked inside them

and I imagined the shameful ease

that settled in them

when it was over

and though it casts me a fool

I thanked them for whatever

was in their pockets

which they left as a kind of apologetic pittance.

And I set to the grim

cleaning. What does one do

with a tiny windfall,

besides wash it repeatedly?

I bought coffee for a friend,

watched her stir in milk, sugar, cinnamon,

all the sweetnesses

so harmful to our mammalian teeth.

To her broken heart

I talked until

I too was empty

and whatever I left behind was not enough.

My dad is having surgery tomorrow for two hernias; last year he had another hernia repaired. While I am certainly sympathetic to pain and suffering, let me also say I'm glad I don't live with my parents. My father is a patently awful patient. I also will miss out on him showing me the incision site with its wiry black stitches at least half a dozen times. Thanks, Dad. Just what I wanted with my breakfast.

Still, these two repairs are promised by the doctors to be considerably more painful than last year's surgery. So I can't knock him too much.

***

I now have five job applications out there: Akron; New York City; Savannah; Edmond, Oklahoma; and one other that's slipping my mind right now. With any luck, no, with record floods of luck, I'll, you know, have a job this fall.

Look at that list of places: will write poems for food.

Talking to Eliot this week, he suggested a few career alternatives, one of which was being turned into dog food. I've added it to the list. Right after doorstop.

***

The Oscars are tonight. I'm all for Million Dollar Baby. I'd hoped to see The Aviator before tonight. Not that I care much, or will even be watching, necessarilly. Maybe.

Today's word, which makes me very happy:

neuticles

which are prosthetic dog testicles.

Wow.

Fun with commas

Very feisty students today. I think my quiz on commas pushed them over the edge, but they needed it. Most of them have some serious comma splice issues. I will hammer that out of them if my life depends on it. It doesn't, thank God.

***

One of my students called me 'Teach' the other day, which amused me. Now the whole class is. Ha ha.

***

Wrote a new poem called "Swallow." It's ok.

***

Too busy. Too too.

All this time

Yesterday, around 5:15, I went to get a drink of water from my bathroom sink. Backing out into the narrow hallway that leads on either side to my bedroom or the guest bedroom, my chair came to a sudden stop. I looked down at the controls: the power light was out. I toggled the switch but nothing happened. The chair was dead. That didn't stop me from trying the switch several more times, though. Almost immediately, I knew what I was looking at, besides the wall: five and a half hours until Steve would show up. And five and a half hours it was.

Let me suggest to you that this is less than a fun way to spend one's evening. The floor is hardwood; I now know where all the whorls, the knots, the rings that look like faces, both human and vaguely monster, are. I'm quite familiar with the imperfections in the paint job. And I'm a little sore from attempts at half-napping.

But, that said, it's no big deal, really. I survived, sanity intact. In my situation, these kinds of things happen. It's just part of the deal.

So, I trust everyone had a better Sunday evening?

Sunday

was very Zen for me.

I'm leaving on a jet plane

After a great deal of dithering, even outright deciding against going, I'm excited to say I will, in fact, be attending AWP in Vancouver. I purchased the tickets last night. So let's get together, y'all.

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!

Also

in the mail today: a lovely issue of the latest New Orleans Review, in which I have a poem called "Ptolemaic Sunset."

Amazingly

my books arrived just now. 10 fresh copies. 1 goes to the long-suffering Erica Bernheim. The rest are up for grabs.

Anyone want a signed copy?

New Issues, why hast thou forsaken me?

Back in November, I ordered a new box of my books from New Issues for a reading I was doing. That box never arrived. I only had about 3 copies of my book left and those sold. Now, the only copy of my book that I own is a sadly battered little thing that my mom ran over with her Volkswagen. That was a sad day, friends. Well, it's been 4 months since I ordered those books and still do they wander in darkness. I've been a little lax about it, sending New Issues an email once in a while, but I'm kinda tired of that now. I paid for the books! So I called and left a message yesterday but no word as of yet today. It's still early in Kalamazoo. I'll wait.

And for some reason they've delayed announcing the winner of the Green Rose Prize until March 15th, the day after my birthday. Hmm.

***

I need help! It's too much to do job applications, manuscript submissions, and oh yeah, teach and grade.

Pro bono secretarial work, anyone?

Funned

I haven't had anything to eat today. If I had, I'd probably be feeling more worried. The dept. chair stopped me in the hall today to let me know that the funding that has been paying me will, in fact, switch over next year to paying for the new faculty member that was just hired for this fall. See, last year the job search didn't find anyone, which is how I was hired for this one year appointment. Well, this year the search was successful and now my appointment will end. I'm free to apply for another appointment, if more funding is available, or if someone else does not return. Yay me.

B.C.

In answer to C. Dale's question below, (is that how to address you? C.? Dale? C. Dale?) on whether I'll be at AWP this year: I just don't know. I've planned on going since last year, saving money for it, but the national/state economies being what they are, Tennessee's budgetary crises in particular, there's precious little job security in my current position. I probably won't find out until early summer whether there'll be funding for me. Rent begins to look very attractive at that point. I've paid up for the next few months with that in mind.

All that said, I'd love to go. I'm even supposed to read for Crazyhorse's anniversary reading. Rick was nudging me towards going today.

I need a patron! Or a windfall.

Advice? Suggestions?

Chi

It is deeply wrong, I know it is, to feel tingly warm upon hearing that Rodney Jones will be reading at Meacham this semester. But there it is, just the same. I haven't seen Rodney since last year, since AWP in Chicago. Where I hurt his feelings! Unintentionally, of course. Funny, funny. At any rate, another reason to look forward to March.

So excited

about the forthcoming new Beck album, Guerro. I downloaded the new ep from it, Hell Yes, and it's just bonkers: filled with bloops and bleeps from Nintendo's sample vault, lots of Spanish, lots of percussion. Insane, and insanely catchy. March can't arrive soon enough, when the album will be out. Also spring. Also my birthday. I'm on the cusp of decrepitude. I teeter.

Check out

David Hernandez's freaky new office-cam:

David!

This is probably where he was sending me emails the other day about preferences regarding the hyphenation of the word pogo-stick.

Today

was just the best day ever in class. I gave a pop quiz, which I should not admit is intensely gratifying, good discussion all around, in which one student, appropos of almost nothing, announced she was bisexual. Several other girls were scandalized by this admission, their faces near to falling off. Some light bulbs flickered on above others' heads for the first observable time this semester. One student made an absolutely astute, killer observation on texts which encourage the reader to engage in a kind of composition simultaneous with the reading. Points for him. For almost all of them, today. Good classes. They had a kind of spark within them. When that happens my job is fairly easy.

***

Ordered out tonight: pancakes! I'm reminded of a fragment by Whitman on his wonderment over oranges shipped up from Florida. Of course, what wasn't a source of wonder for him?

***

Listening to: "Bring It On Home To Me," by Sam Cooke.

***

Tell me your good news.