“Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher” and “The Precarious Architecture of Barbara Guest's Spatial Imagination"

Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher

I just said I didn't know
And now you are holding me
In your arms,
How kind.
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher.
Yet around the net I am floating
Pink and pale blue fish are caught in it,
They are beautiful,
But they are not good for eating.
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher
Than this mid-air in which we tremble,
Having exercised our arms in swimming,
Now the suspension, you say,
Is exquisite. I do not know.
There is coral below the surface,
There is sand, and berries
Like pomegranates grow.
This wide net, I am treading water
Near it, bubbles are rising and salt
Drying on my lashes, yet I am no nearer
Air than water. I am closer to you
Than land and I am in a stranger ocean
Than I wished.


While women seem to have been tokenized within The New American Poetry 1945-1960, Barbara Guest’s presence is a relatively substantial one – with four poems included in the anthology. Guest was closely tied with the New York School of poets (including John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, etc.). She graduated from UC Berkeley in 1943 and remained, primarily, in the Berkeley area throughout her life. Also a lover of the art world, Guest wrote for Art News Magazine during the 1950s – the heyday of William de Koonig and Jackson Pollock.

Her ability to use poetry as a way of cutting into (and creating) something that is sensual and moves outside the bounds of the time-space continuum is what draws me to her work. In the above poem – “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher” – the reader can be simultaneously suspended in a love affair, the ocean, the air… and most certainly become submerged in feeling. Yet, while there is this ambiguity, and room for the reader to move, she does not fully depart into abstraction. We are able to cling to coral, pomegranates, parachutes, as well as the repetitions of phrasings. For me, this is a delightful, and yes, perhaps, “characteristically female” play-space for my mind, feeling, and viscera.

Furthermore, despite the delicately beautiful imagery and feeling, Guest employs a very direct diction: “How kind,” “They are beautiful” etc. So, there is a sweetly balanced dichotomy -- she speaks in a matter of fact manner, drawing the reader into a familiar space of language, yet, then leaving the reader hanging in the surreal space of parachutes and pomegranates.

Also, reading "'Literature as Destruction of Space': The Precarious Architecture of Barbara Guest's Spatial Imagination" by Robert Bennett, I am interested to note how this delicacy of her work is held up to the horrors – primarily those of WWII – inherent to her time, and how, the beauty of her work and its disconnection from political and social referents had its own intrinsic value, a value that has been sustained through time. So, this, too, leads me to think about the constant debate about poetry – “Should it be politically engaged?” “Should it be purely an act of aesthetic rebellion (against practicality and politics)?”etc… I feel both sides of the equation can certainly be of value (and, indeed, even a poem intent upon being disconnected from politics can be a political statement in and of itself). However, Guest’s work is a testament to the power of beauty (perhaps even comfort) within a world that can be challenging to all of the senses.

From “Literature as Destruction of Space': The Precarious Architecture of Barbara Guest's Spatial Imagination.":

"In opposition to... rigid social structures and architectural and urban spaces, Guest's writing attempts to imagine more complex literary spaces or "chamber[s] of ambiguity/where two equals may meet before disappearing" (Collected Poems 35). Even though Guest's writing infrequently raises these social and political issues, at least in any explicitly political manner, the "precarious architecture" of her spatial imagination extends far beyond mimetic representations of the "physical reality of place" to encompass not only a more complex exploration of the aesthetic and philosophical "metaphysics of space" but also a critical awareness of how spatial practices reflect, encode, engage, and imagine alternatives to various social and political antagonisms. In the "square" context of post-WWII America, the "precarious architecture" of Guest's "cubist angles," "extraordinary disorders," "chamber[s] of ambiguity," and other "destruction[s] of space" did indeed forsake the "topical nature of realist art in favor of the more `abstract' project of transforming the viewer's awareness" (Belgrad 21). The enduring legacy of Guest's writing proves, however, that such "abstract" transformations are not without significant aesthetic, intellectual, psychological, social, political, cultural, and material consequences."


Bennett, Robert. "'Literature as Destruction of Space: The Precarious Architecture of Barbara Guest's Spatial Imagination." Women's Studies 30.1 (Mar. 2001): 43.
(This article is available in Full PDF format via the MLA database for SOU students in the Hannon Library.)

I am also looking into the life and work of Denise Levertov… so that post is impending…

(The above image is of Jackson Pollock's "Number 7," which hangs at The National Art Gallery.)