Barbara Guest


Barbara Guest, née Barbara Ann Pinson, was an American poet and prose stylist. Guest first gained recognition as a member of the first generation New York School of poetry. Guest wrote more than 15 books of poetry spanning sixty years of writing. In 1999, she was awarded the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Poetry Society of America.
Guest also wrote art criticism, essays, a novel, biography, plays, and other prose pieces since collected in Meditations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest. Her collages appeared on the covers of several of her books of poetry. She was also well known for her biography of the poet H.D., Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World.

Early life and education

Born in Wilmington, North Carolina and raised in California, Guest attended UCLA, and then earned a B.A. in General Curriculum-Humanities in 1943 at UC Berkeley. She worked as an editorial associate at ARTnews magazine from 1951 to 1959.

Poetry

Barbara Guest wrote more than 15 books of poetry spanning sixty years of writing. "Her poems begin in the midst of action," wrote Peter Gizzi in his introduction to a collection of her work, "but their angle of perception is oblique." Her poems are known for their abstract quality, vivid language, and intellectualism. She believed that the subject of the poem finds itself through the writing of the poem and through the poet's imagination. "Disturbing the conventional relations of subjects and objects, of reality and imagination, is one of Guest's signature gestures," noted Gizzi.
Among her most well-known poems are and

Quotes

Selected bibliography

Poetry
  • The Location of Things
  • Poems: The Location of Things, Archaics, The Open Skies
  • The Open Skies
  • The Blue Stairs
  • I Ching, with lithographs by Sheila Isham.
  • Moscow Mansions
  • The Countess from Minneapolis
  • Seeking Air
  • The Türler Losses
  • Biography
  • Quilts
  • Herself Defined: The Poet H. D. and Her World
  • Musicality, with June Felter
  • Fair Realism
  • The Nude, Warren Brandt
  • Defensive Rapture
  • The Altos, with artist Richard Tuttle
  • Selected Poems
  • Stripped Tales, featuring art by Anne Dunn
  • Quill Solitary, Apparition
  • Seeking Air
  • Etruscan Reader VI
  • Outside of This, That is, with illustration by Trevor Winkfield.
  • Strings, with artist Ann Slacik
  • The Luminous, with artist Jane Moorman
  • Rocks on a Platter
  • If So, Tell Me
  • The Confetti Trees
  • Symbiosis, with artist Laurie Reid
  • Miniatures and Other Poems
  • Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing
  • Durer in the Window: Reflexions on Art
  • The Red Gaze
  • Fallschirme, Gebliebter. Ausgewählte Gedichte
  • The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest
Prose
  • Mediations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest, edited with an introduction by Joseph Shafer
  • Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing.
  • Dürer in the Window.