I decided to shake up my diastic experiment this morning. Rather than using my father’s name to read through Soundings magazine, I’m instead using The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest as my source. Specifically, The Location of Things (I took reaching the end of that book as a signal to stop for now). My father is the only one in the nuclear family of my childhood who was not an English major, and would have no interest in Barbara Guest in the slightest. My mother used to insist in vain “sailing is what our family does;” I don’t think my brother or I have been on the water in years (though I think we’d both say sailing plays a personal role for us). Make of all that what you will.
Wow, what a difference! I can see why Jackson Mac Low frequently (almost exclusively?) used literary sources. I’ve gotten more enjoyment than usual working on this today, if only for getting to bask in Guest’s wonderful diction. I think it’s possible a reader who knows her work well might be able to guess that this poem involves hers somehow, with its “autumn piazzas” illumining. I had intended this morning to pick up Mary Kinzie’s A Poet’s Guide to Poetry for a source text, but out of lucky laziness, picked up the Guest volume already on my desk instead rather than find the Kinzie on the small bookshelf above it.
Alongside my delight is a little (frivolous) worry. I picked up this book in earnest in November and have been haphazardly (as opposed to sequentially) making my way through it, slowly. But to do this project, I started at the beginning (I didn’t bother with any front matter and just dove straight into the poems). Some of the poems I’ve read before, but this would be my first time “reading” The Location of Things as a book. Part of me feels guilty about going through it with the “agenda” of the diastic, rather than reading it as one might normally read a book of poems. On the other hand, maybe this is simply an opportunity to an explore the act of creating a diastic poem as an alternative form of reading. It is an odd but pleasantly oblique way to perceive the book. I’d like to believe Guest would like the idea, though I really don’t know (and now I’m wondering if she and Mac Low knew each other, given that they may have had overlapping time in NYC and were almost the same age).
Lest you give me credit I don’t deserve, I’m pretty sure the idea of diastic as reading technique comes from a smarter junior or senior classmate (can’t be sure who it was exactly, among all the smart people from that class) from the Sound and Visual Poetries workshop I took my first semester in college (which I believe is where I encountered Jackson Mac Low via The Virginia Woolf Poems, though looking back now I’m not quite sure how that would have fit in the syllabus for that course…the holes of memory…).
remarkable to table
water enters thirst
hospital pain street
another become funerals
pontoon wandering
rushing corridors
Abbot after portrait flight
heart water turning pantaloon
autumn piazzas illumines southern
replied porcupine cubist after
disarray priest
hawks laughter dark routes
autumnal fountains counting continental
rigid to Nabiscos
digest afternoon flights
hurting ear farms weather
autumn several decadent borrowing
race sour embarkation
make their climate hear race strangers
last solemn heartache
hurrying decisions
river rocks embroidered
made several cannot
him hastens horizon that