ABSTRACT
When Barbara Guest died in 2006, some poets were invited to contribute to an online ‘Memory Bank’, selecting a favourite passage from her writing and offering thoughts and anecdotes. 1 The New York poet and painter Marjorie Welish chose a page from Guest’s late book Rocks on a Platter, first published in 1999, glossing as follows (and what Welish learnt from Guest is well attested by her decision here to gloss a gloss on ‘gloss’): ‘Her spacing is primarily of literature and of literariness, as is indicated in the remarkably located “thee GLOSS GLOSS” – this being text, inter-text and metatext all at once’. 2 Welish’s terminology is structural, describing the characteristics of text as a completed artefact rather than poetic writing. For the present purpose, her threefold division might be transliterated into more dynamic terms as substrate, resonance, and reflexivity, where ‘resonance’ refers to the poem’s response to the calls it ‘takes in’ from other poems across time and cultural divisions; also calls from philosophical and other discursive works; and from the daily welter of language.
