The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest: a marathon reading

On Saturday & Sunday, February 11-12, YU & Spare Room will present a two-part marathon reading of The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest (Wesleyan, 2008). Now in its tenth year, Spare Room organizes a monthly reading series at various locations in Portland, focused on experimental poetry. In recent years they have hosted marathon readings each winter, inviting members of the community to lend their voices to a new rendition of an existing text. Recent marathons have been devoted to single book-length poems, including H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, Clark Coolidge's The Crystal Text, and Charles Olson's Maximus Poems; this year's marathon presents the lively & varied life's work of an influential poet who worked mainly in shorter forms.

Barbara Guest (1920-2006) was a poet, art critic, novelist & biographer often associated with the New York School(s) in poetry & painting. Her work reflects a lifelong engagement with modernism in visual art & music as well as in literature, and is marked by a unique combination of audacious abstraction, vivid synesthesia and comic energy. Her posthumous Collected Poems brings together over twenty books published between 1960 and 2005. Readers from Portland's poetry community will read the book aloud from beginning to end over two afternoon sessions, each beginning at 3 p.m. and continuing till about 8, at YU's spacious kitchen table. Listeners are encouraged to come and go as they please, stopping by for a few pages or a few hours.

understanding what it means
to understand music

cloudless movement beyond the neck's reach

an hypnotic lull in porcelain water break mimics

tonality crunch of sand under waddling


a small seizure
from monumentality

does not come or go with understanding

--Barbara Guest, from "Dissonance Royal Traveler"

Saturday & Sunday,

February 11-12
3-8 p.m. each day
in the kitchen at YU

http://www.yucontemporary.org/yu/#yu
800 SE 10th Ave.
free