Guest’s The Past poem explores how time can change an object, and incorporates techniques from the New York School of poetry.

I’m going to compare Guest with the mistress of parataxis and radical anti-narrative: Stein. Guest’s use of parataxis is subtler than Stein’s. While she juxtaposes images and phrases, she often maintains a greater sense of lyricism and visual coherence. Her parataxis creates a dreamlike atmosphere where connections are suggested rather than stated. This invites the reader to participate in the co-creative process of construction of meaning. In “The Past,” her parataxis  evokes the fragmented and often illogical nature of memory, the way seemingly disparate moments can coexist in our consciousness.

While Guest’s poetry is not as radically anti-narrative as Stein’s, she often slips by traditional storytelling in favor of evoking moods and exploring subjective states. Her poems create spaces for contemplation rather than relating a sequence of events. In  “The Past,” an anti-narrative approach  focuses on the emotional and sensory experience of the past rather than on recounting specific events. It  explores how the past lingers in the present, coloring our perceptions and shaping our identity.

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However, The Past is not a “I did this, you did that” poem , but apparently, she runs into Frank Ohara at Martini time at the tavern, where poets convene, allegedly, someone heard Frank say something like this:

Barbara’s poem, it vanished at lunch, right into another one, sneaky. Larry saw it, the whole disappearing act, even the upside-down scribbles. “A celebration!” she said, but the sky, it was sinking into yesterday. Martini time. Poems, like cabs, you gotta grab one on the fly.

And speaking of the past, I even saw Hafez  sitting with Frank and Barbara in the tavern, the former getting a Martini, and he said in lyrical musicality:

A poem’s form, subsided, slips its rhyme, my dear
Enters a new song, whispered through time, my dear.

A witness found, in mirrors suddenly dimly lit,
Markings reversed, in a secret language hard to mine, my dear.

A celebration lost, a form subtly undone,
Sky sinks into past, day gives way to sun, time for wine, my dear.

O, Hafez, seek where vanished verses hide, in the latent space
Beyond all form, where love and truth abide, beyond time, my dear.

Overhearing their conversation I lean across the bar as the setting sun comes in through the dirty stained glass of the tavern, Hafez raises an eyebrow, Guest braces herself and I wax philosophical. You know I’ve read your poem Ms.Guest and 

Alas, at the lingering presence of the past
We gaze helplessly as the storm of time encroaches
The past , a faithful friend to the present 
If only the present would listen and learn 
Can the present  benefit and learn ?
From this friend who warns and cautions.
The present is chained to the past!!
But the Past  like a friend, a  teacher, an advisor or
The Past, like the setting sun, sinks into a pool 
of fragmented memories shaping the … 
<yes, fill in the blank here>


[credits to M Daftari for inspiration for many verses of this poem].
Now I gotta get home….