Barbara Guest’s “Red Lilies”
Barbara Guest holds a prominent place among poetasters such as Robert Bly, Pablo Neruda, Charles Bernstein, Elizabeth Alexander, Richard Blanco, and Margaret Atwood. Her piece “Red Lilies” flames out from the first singed line, snuffing itself out with a pilot light going out on the stove.
Introduction and Text of “Red Lilies”
In Barbara Guest’s “Red Lilies,” the speaker creates in eight versagraphs observations that stack up in her mind transformations of frivolity and motion. The ragged mind that concocts blistering stench pushes the envelope to the edge of oblivion. Poetry movements rage and range on difference, and sometimes the difference becomes so different that it is a whole other species from its ancestors.
Nonsense has its place in both the literary and non-literary worlds, but when it masquerades as the genuine, it is time to call it out for what it is. Beginning poets love to wallow in the abstruse filth of nonsense; it gives them a sense of elitism that high-brow guff may prove the holier-than-thou crowd is with-it, that is, socially and/or culturally up-to-date, in style in fashion.
What Barbara Guest needed was more critical responses like that of Matthew Cooperman, who remarked in his otherwise fawning essay titled “Envy and Architecture: On Barbara Guest’s Realisms,” “we can never quite fall into her worlds as the words get in the way.”
Let that thought sink in: if the words in a poem—made of words—”get in the way,” what happens to the poem? The following piece is an example of what happens. It ain’t pretty, but it is thoroughly postmodern (see “Poetry and Politics under the Influence of Postmodernism.”)
Also, Denise Levertov, as a Norton editor, rejected a Guest manuscript, offering an accurate description of Guestian swill, that it displayed “the typical chic flipness of the NY School” and that “often a poem of yours has seemed to me like an unrelated series of poem-seeds, none of them developed.”
As this surrealistic piece of wonder plays out in its eight raggedy, uneven versagraphs, its postmodern flavor lends itself too easily to satire as well as mockery—a conflated practice that I have employed in this commentary with genuine zeal and unrestrained alacrity.
Red Lilies
Someone has remembered to dry the dishes;
they have taken the accident out of the stove.
Afterward lilies for supper; there
the lines in front of the window
are rubbed on the table of stone
The paper flies up
then down as the wind
repeats. repeats its birdsong.
Those arms under the pillow
the burrowing arms they cleave
as night as the tug kneads water
calling themselves branches
The tree is you
the blanket is what warms it
snow erupts from thistle;
the snow pours out of you.
A cold hand on the dishes
placing a saucer inside
her who undressed for supper
gliding that hair to the snow
The pilot light
went out on the stove
The paper folded like a napkin
other wings flew into the stone.
“Red Lilies” at 4:06
Commentary on “Red Lilies”
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t know if he really likes you.
First Versagraph: Fried, Scrambled, or Otherwise
Someone has remembered to dry the dishes;
they have taken the accident out of the stove.
Afterward lilies for supper; there
the lines in front of the window
are rubbed on the table of stone
The speaker observes that the dishes have been dried and infers that someone must have remembered to dry them; she also observes that the accident has been removed from the stove. The speaker then invokes a brief reference to the poem’s name-sake, “Afterward lilies for supper. “
Now that the accident has been taken out of the stove, the cook is free to prepare the lilies in any style the eaters will like, whether scrambled, fried, or any other number of ways including completely raw. She then notes that “rubbed on the table of stone” are “the lines in front of the window.” She remains emotionless regarding the rubbing of the stone table, as well as caring little about the lines in front of the window.
Second Versagraph: Birds of a Paper
The paper flies up
then down as the wind
repeats. repeats its birdsong.
The speaker then diverts her attention from the kitchen; some papers outside flying about have caught her eye. She must report on this momentous act. The wind is causing the paper to “fl[y] up,” and it keeps it up until the speaker’s mind becomes bored with the notice and decides that instead of mere paper, the wind is “repeat[ing] its birdsong.”
One might have thought that actually birds repeated their songs; however, this speaker has corrected that notion: it is the wind, not the birds, that repeats the birdsongs. This notion plays out in utter sincerity while the speaker takes further mental notes.
Third Versagraph: Arms Cleaving to the Night
Those arms under the pillow
the burrowing arms they cleave
as night as the tug kneads water
calling themselves branches
Another mental jog lands the speaker’s attention on a memory of lying in bed with her arms nestled under the pillow. But these arms are creative; they “cleave / as night” would as it engulfs a boat in water, and these arms are so clever that they are calling themselves branches. The similarity between human arms and branches has not escaped the sharp eye of this speaker.
The world becomes a murky tangle of limbs and water, songs on the wind still spilling into the open air of night, when all things may look silvery and rested on the brim of consciousness.
Fourth Versagraph: Oh, So Clever! Tree Metaphor
The tree is you
the blanket is what warms it
snow erupts from thistle;
the snow pours out of you.
Remaining with the clever tree metaphor, the speaker blurts out, addressing herself employing the “self-reflexive you,” “The tree is you.” She then decides that if the tree is herself, then the blanket warms it. The blanket warms her when she is a human body, so now the blanket also warms her as she morphs into a metaphorical tree.
Then by fantastic luck, “snow erupts from thistle.” The speaker has landed full throttle in a tinseled universe, and she could not be more elated, because now “the snow pours out of you.” She becomes like thistle, enjoyable bristling with natural verve.
Fifth Versagraph: A Saucer of Breathlessness
A cold hand on the dishes
placing a saucer inside
The speaker then notices surrealistically that some cold hand now is in the process of placing a saucer somewhere inside something. She has not, at this point, determined where the saucer is going to be relocated, but she seems breathless with anticipation.
As she wonders, at this point, what difference it is going to make, she gleams out of ethereal wonder that a hand so cold could ever place itself on dishes, as she accepts each bit of jetsam flowing into her brain. Flotsam may hang or loom as traces of bilge hurry by.
Sixth Versagraph: The Naked, Clintonian Truth
her who undressed for supper
gliding that hair to the snow
Surprisingly, miraculously, and yet again surrealistically, the cold hand has placed the saucer inside the speaker. She did not see this coming; thus she placed the act in the following versagraph.
She had “undressed for supper” and has been “gliding that hair to the snow.” Neither the speaker nor the reader could not have wished for better news, but then, she is sure that she, like Hillary Clinton, regarding telling the truth, said, “I’ve always tried to. Always. Always..”
For this speaker, however, the naked truth is like finishing off supper in her birthday suit. Sprites and candles may glide more easily but hair that glides to the snow is better than yesterday stew.
Seventh Versagraph: Oh, the Inhumanity
The pilot light
went out on the stove
Unceremoniously, the stove, despite having the accident removed from it or maybe because of the accident itself, suffers the indignity of having its pilot light extinguished. This occurrence could be either advantageous if the gas somehow ceases to escape, or disastrous, depending on the proximity of a lighted match.
The speaker becomes agitated but continues to report only what she truly understands. If moss grows on the north side, she is certain she did not observe the green stuff on another side.
Eight Versagraph: Return of the Wind-Throttled Paper
The paper folded like a napkin
other wings flew into the stone.
But the speaker refuses to anticipate any likelihood of an explosion, as her mind once again returns to the wind- throttled paper that caught her eye a few versagraphs back; the paper has miraculously folded like a napkin. And the stone table is now being bombarded by other wings.
Likely, some wind giant with hands like cork-screws has fashioned that bleak napkin. Otherwise, the speaker seems certain that when “other wings” fly into stone, they will not only break but become the bones of cherubim stunted on the horizon but chilling in the pockets of red lilies.
Life Sketch of Barbara Guest
Barbara Ann Pinson was born on September 6, 1920, in Wilmington, North Carolina [1].
She married Stephen Guest, her second husband, in 1948, but they divorced in 1954. She married and divorced twice, with her third husband leaving her a widow. She held on to the second husband’s name, likely because that is name, under which she had become well known.
Guest graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1943. Guest’s poetry career earned her inclusion in the New York School of writers, along with the ilk of James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, John Asbury, and Frank O’Hara [2]. This group of writers had come to despise the confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell.
The New York School opted to take their inspiration from painters such as Larry Rivers, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning. The more abstract, even the more nonsensical the work, the more this group salivated over the prospects.
Deeming poetry not the place for ideas, they instead focused on individual words instead of meaningful groups of words. Unlike William Carlos Williams, who concocted the notion, “No ideas but in things,” this group believed no ideas ever, no images, just language [3].
Guest’s illustrious career includes the winning of several prestigious awards [4]: the Longwood Award, the Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement, and the San Francisco State Award for Poetry. She also benefited from a grant, offered by the National Endowment for the Arts.
About Barbara Guest’s poetry, Matthew Cooperman writes, “. . . we can never quite fall into her worlds as the words get in the way” [5]. In an otherwise piece of flattery, this gem is quite a testimonial for one whose words were the only focus—like saying of Vincent van Gogh, ”. . . we can never quite fall into his worlds as the paint gets in the way.”
Barbara Guest died on February 15, 2006, in Berkeley, California [6].
Sources
[1] Editors. “Barbara Guest.” Library of Congress. Accessed October 20, 2026.
[2] Emma Baldwin. “New York School of Poets.” Poem Analysis. Accessed October 20, 2026.
[3] Nasrullah Mambro. “The New York School of Poetry.” Literary Theory and Criticism. July 10, 2020.
[4] Curators. “Barbara Guest.” Prabook. Accessed October 20, 2026.
[5] Matthew Cooperman. “Envy and Architecture: On Barbara Guest’s Realisms.” Jacket 2. 2008.
[6] Curators. “Barbara Guest Obituary.” Legacy. Accessed October 20, 2026.
