Name Paul Guest Role Poet | ||
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Awards Whiting Awards, Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada Books The resurrection of the bod, Notes for my body double, One More Theory About Ha, My Index of Slightly Horrifying, Back to the Start | ||
Education University of Tennessee | ||
Paul Guest's revising process
Paul Guest (born in Chattanooga, Tennessee) is an American poet and memoirist.
Contents
When he was twelve Paul broke the third and fourth vertebrae in his neck in a bicycle accident, bruising his spinal cord and paralyzing him from the neck down. He is a quadriplegic. He graduated from University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and from Southern Illinois University with an M.F.A. in 1999. He is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia.
His poems appear in Harper's, The Paris Review, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Slate and elsewhere.
Honors and awards
Published works
Full-Length Poetry Collections
a Memoir
Reviews
To read Paul Guest's poetry is to expect the unexpected, to release oneself to dazzle, to performance, to the hurtle of his images, and the kind of strong emotional shifts that make one marvel at how the poem is able to contain such vast range. It is this quality, this synthesis of images, narratives, humor, and great pain, that calls into question any singular thread a reader might draw from My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge.
A Paul Guest poem likes to pull out fast in the first line, then zigzag from one eye-opening image to another: A high-speed, innervating trip all the way. The voice is edgy, hip: "In my neoprene monster skin, in my faux city/stormy with hellfire, in my broken/down dollhouse, in my tiny bed/that sleeps my toe, in my souvenir/sombrero, in that noontime shade/badly needed, in my die-cast/Corvette, cherry red, sun bright, comet/fast, in that shrunken hour/I cannot hold on to, in that dwindled dawn. ..."
Poetry about the extraordinary suffering of its author presents its readers with a special conundrum. On the one hand we don’t want to pretend that the suffering is incidental to the art; one of the more easily dispensable things that T.S. Eliot ever wrote was that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” But to err in the other direction—to read the suffering instead of the art—well, that’s what Oprah’s for.
Guest’s book takes a little love. He says “painful, pained thing[s]” and gets away with it. His poems are pleasurable, sloppy messes of images, thoughts, retractions, culpabilities, injuries, and salves. There is sex. There is the heaving, the suffering of love. There are familial complications. There is food and a moon and bruised gin. Porn. Pockets. Modern contraptions. Many pocked dreams. The excessive awkwardness of being alive. There is even a “tiny bed/ that sleeps [a] toe.” An “index” it certainly is.