by Martha Ronk

from Chicago Review, Summer 2008 (Special Issue: Barbara Guest)

Wild Gardens Overlooked by Night Lights
     Barbara Guest

Wild gardens overlooked by night lights. Parking
lot trucks overlooked by night lights. Buildings
with their escapes overlooked by lights.

They urge me to seek here on the heights
amid the electrical lighting that self who exists,
who witnesses light and fears its expunging,

I take from my wall the landscape with its water
of blue color, its gentle expression of rose,
pink, the sunset reaches outward in strokes as the west wind
rises, the sun sinks and color flees the delicate
skies it inherited,
I place there a scene from "The Tale of Genji."

An episode where Genji recognizes his son.
Each turns his face away from so much emotion,
so that the picture is one of profiles floating
elsewhere from their permanence,
a line of green displaces these relatives,
black also intervenes at correct distances,
the shapes of the hair are black.

Black describes the feeling,
black is recognized as remorse, sadness,
black is a headdress while lines slant swiftly,
the space is slanted vertically with its graduating
need for movement,

Thus the grip of realism has found
a picture chosen to cover the space
occupied by another picture
establishing a flexibility so we are not immobile
like a car that spends its night
outside a window, but mobile like a spirit.

I float over this dwelling, and when I choose
enter it. I have an ethnological interest
in this building, because I inhabit it
and upon me has been bestowed the decision of changing
an abstract picture of light into a ghost-like story
of a prince whose principality I now share,
into whose confidence I have wandered.

Screens were selected to prevent this intrusion
of exacting light and add a chiarascuro,
so that Genji may turn his face from his son,
from recognition which here is painful,
and he allows himself to be positioned on a screen,
this prince as noble as ever,
songs from the haunted distance
presenting themselves in silks.
The light of fiction and light of surface
sink into vision whose illumination
exacts its shades,

The Genji when they arose
strolled outside reality
their screen dismantled,
upon that modern wondering space
flash lights from the wild gardens.

           from Fair Realism, 1989

Many of Barbara Guest's poems work with vivid and unforgettable images—architectural, pictorial, swirling images that dissolve and nest and metamorphose. Her ekphrastic images, specifically, move away from the body of the text into their own space, offering the pleasures of opacity by obscuring, contradicting, or causing friction with other aspects of the poem. Guest describes this particular use of image in her essay "H.D. and the Conflict of Imagism":

Yet the image despite all its energy and activity has arrived as if it were a foreign substance. It is strangely isolated. This isolation or foreignness of the image from the rest of the poem exerts a fascination to which the poem is willing to submit, but not always the reader. The reader is apt to say, "oh, another image," or "oh, another picture"—remember that Imagism is highly pictorial and visual. If you consider this, you realize the image has a lonely perch.

I take the word "lonely" to indicate the ways in which an image's autonomy energizes the poem and speaks for its own independence. Guest's ekphrastic images create the sense of a world that exists in a fraught relationship with the one at hand—both in and outside the 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 the ways in which ekphrastic failure, a failure built into the very project itself, produces various significant effects. No matter the effort, a poet can never bring the visual fully into language. Yet it is ekphrasis's very apophatic nature that has the potential to unleash the unseen, the mysterious, the hallucinatory. Ekphrasis performs both impossibility and its overcoming in alternating fashion.

"Wild Gardens Overlooked by Night Lights," one of Barbara Guest's most famous poems, begins where the title begins: looking over gardens, night lights, buildings, parking lot trucks. The second stanza begins with a pronoun without a clear antecedent: "They urge me to seek. . . that self who exists, / who witnesses light and fears its expunging." What follows is an ekphrastic rearrangement in which the speaker removes a landscape painting from the wall and replaces it with a scene from "The Tale of Genji": the scene in which Genji recognizes his son. This action rescues the speaker from immobility and allows her to travel "mobile like a spirit" in and out of the story, the picture, the emotional configurations of the episode itself. It also allows the Genji to move outside their reality ("their screen dismantled") into the space of the speaker, "that modern wondering space / flash lights from the wild gardens."

The 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 the black Genji headdresses and the "remorse, sadness" they represent. (In the twelfth-century Genji Monogatari Emaki scrolls, which illustrate Murasaki's novel, the hats are prominent as black shapes.) The picture of the Genji operates paratactically to expand the 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 the Metro." According to Hugh Kenner in The Pound Era, the poem "does not appease itself by reproducing what is seen, but by setting some other seen thing into relation.... The action passing through any Imagist poem is a mind's invisible action discovering what will come next that may sustain the presentation—what image, what rhythm, what allusion, what word—to the end that the poem shall be 'lord over fact,' not the transcript of one encounter but the Gestalt of many.... This setting-in-relation is apt to be paratactic.")

Guest's imagery enacts movement and metamorphosis, which she considered one of the major aims of poetry. As she writes in the essay on H.D.:

The momentum of the poem flows towards the suddenness of the image. This suddenness, this overflowing of an image into space, out of nowhere, is purposeful.
     All of this energy is employed to give definition to the poem;
to gather up the particulars, the threads, the hints of what is being said into a summation.

Guest underscores this purposefulness by introducing the Genji below the white space made available by the short "skies it inherited":

I take from my wall the landscape with its water
of blue color, its gentle expression of rose,
pink, the sunset reaches outward in strokes as the west wind
rises, the sun sinks and color flees into the delicate
skies it inherited,
I place there a scene from "The Tale of Genji."

Abstraction and synesthesia tend to blur or erase visual description, creating movement and imaginative possibilities. Profiles detach from figures and become floating shapes. A line of green "displaces" Genji and his son. The shapes of the hair are rendered not by expected adjectives, but by a color. One struggles to comprehend black shape:

An episode where Genji recognizes his son.
Each turns his face away from so much emotion,
so that the picture is one of profiles floating
elsewhere from their permanence,
a line of green displaces these relatives,
black also intervenes at correct distances,
the shapes of the hair are black.

In her poetry, Guest often calls attention to her use of ekphrasis by means of a frame; here she provides the literal frame of a painting. Her repositioning of herself and her readers is highly self-conscious: she evokes an "I" who "actually" moves pictures around in her room, a metaphorical and imagistic rearrangement literalized. Once the pictures are moved "we are not immobile / like a car that spends its night / outside a window." We are "mobile like a spirit." After this collective movement, the poem focuses on an "I":

I float over this dwelling, and when I choose
enter it. I have an ethnological interest
in this building, because I inhabit it
and upon me has been bestowed the decision of changing
an abstract picture of light into a ghost-like story
of a prince whose principality I now share,
into whose confidence I have wandered.

Movement becomes spiritual, surreal, and intimate as the speaker shares a space—both physical and metaphysical—with Prince Genji.

As the poem moves toward its conclusion, it becomes even more visionary. As with other Guest poems, this one begins with a quotidian gesture that morphs into an hallucinated vision. Guest fosters this metamorphosis through four forms of dissolution: 1) senses melt into one another ("songs from the haunted distance / presenting themselves in silks"); 2) narrative and image become one ("The light of fiction and the light of surface / sink into vision whose illumination / exacts it shade"); 3) objective and subjective become indistinguishable (in the phrase "wondering space" the poet's wonder becomes an adjective describing the modern space of an apartment building); and 4) story planes conjoin (the wonderfully easy, if impossible, verb "strolled" joins the Genji's world with our own).

In "Wounded Joy," Guest suggests that no matter what you write, something will always be missing: "Leave this little echo to haunt the poem, do not give it form, but let it assume its own ghost-like shape. It has the shape of your own soul as you write." In the final stanza of "Wild Gardens" the Genji move into the present-day world of the poet, thus reconfiguring and re-imagining "reality":

The Genji when they arose
strolled outside reality
their screen dismantled,
upon that modern wondering space
flash lights from the wild gardens.

Guest's poem moves ekphrasis into a realm that is not only highly artificial but also close to a kind of "failure"—unless, as I am arguing here, this is what makes for such obvious success. That is, the poem acknowledges the necessary failure of ekphrasis by wittily foregrounding and theatricalizing it in the poem: the Genji who cannot be represented in their own space ("their screen dismantled") join the poet-speaker in her own ("outside reality"). By insisting on an opacity that is nevertheless rendered in a clear and imagistic way, Guest suggests a sublimity both ordinary and startling.

About the Author
Martha Ronk is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently, Vertigo (Coffee House Press, 2007), a National Poetry Series selection, and In a landscape of having to repeat (Omnidawn, 2004), winner of the 2005 PEN Center USA Award in poetry. She is a 2007 NEA recipient and teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

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