{"id":294,"date":"2008-01-26T21:28:15","date_gmt":"2008-01-27T01:28:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2008\/01\/26\/paul-guest-nothing\/"},"modified":"2015-08-18T09:02:22","modified_gmt":"2015-08-18T13:02:22","slug":"paul-guest-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2008\/01\/26\/paul-guest-nothing\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Guest, “Nothing”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Between Buck Owens and Vivaldi what’s left
\nto listen to but the stars, so I do, dialing
\nthe radio down to indeterminate static,
\nwhat I always thought was absence, an aria
\nof sizzling nothingness. Instead
\nit’s the Milky Way radiating arrhythmia
\nall the way back. It’s gossip
\nof the vacuum. That nothing has ever been<\/p>\n

truly nothing is why I believe,
\neven still, in love. Beside two rivers
\nI have lived nearly all my life
\nand these beneath one sky
\nmuttering its endless alphabet of sine waves.
\nJupiter with its flock of moons
\nand the stone from which we hope
\nto squeeeze one drop of water,
\nred Mars pulsing in the blank field of night—<\/p>\n

I’ve wanted to leave Earth
\nbehind, gravity’s orphan at last,
\nbut not Earth with its two good seasons and two bad
\nand not its angel-winged clams
\nluminous in the mud bed of a river
\nso distant from me
\nI can’t remember where
\nthat water is, except that I’ve dreamed it,
\nexcept that in it I sank<\/p>\n

all the way down.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"paul-guest-headshot.jpg\"The Atlanta Journal-Constitution<\/i> created a slideshow to Guest’s reading of “Nothing”<\/a> on the occasion of his winning the Whiting Prize last November.<\/p>\n

From Notes for My Body Double<\/i><\/a>, the winner of the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Poetry. Last week, Guest sold a new collection, to be called My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge<\/i>, to Ecco, along with a memoir, One More Theory of Happiness<\/i>. “I am amazed and excited,” he says of the two-book deal<\/a>. “[It] seemed like sci-fi, me who is used to contributor’s copies as payment. I was excited about an 80 dollar check the other day: lunch for the week! So I am still adjusting.”<\/p>\n

Guest has appeared often at Verse Daily<\/i><\/a>, and The Adirondack Review<\/i> has published two of Guest’s poems online<\/a>: “Notes For My Body Double” and “Pluto’s Loss.” From the Fishouse<\/i> has an ample selection of Guest MP3s<\/a>. Not to mention all the new work that shows up on his own blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Between Buck Owens and Vivaldi what’s left to listen to but the stars, so I do, dialing the radio down to indeterminate static, what I always thought was absence, an aria of sizzling nothingness. Instead it’s the Milky Way radiating arrhythmia all the way back. It’s gossip of the vacuum. That nothing has ever been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3721,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions\/3721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}