Barbara Guest’s poetry is suffused with
references to painting, her education as a writer inextricable from Abstract Expressionism as created in New York during the 1950s and ’60s by, among others, her friends Mary Abbott, Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Tuttle, and June Felter.
Her articles in ArtNews and Art in America were published as Dürer
in the Window, Reflexions on Art. Her Collected
Poems was published in 2008.
Here is a sample from “Quilts”:
Johns
Rivers
Reality could be their tassel
and Reality is there, that’s what I
think about a quilt
it’s Reality, and it satisfied
Rauschenberg . . .
they gave a dimension to a pattern
weaving in and out in streams
that’s Reality.
Her poem “The Nude” references a drawing by Warren Brandt:
As the swan entered Leda
so the actual timing of an artist’s
abrupt gesture
Is supernatural despite interferences
of local ornamental mundaneity,
The supernatural contacts ecstasy
hidden
in a guise of nudism.
The artist borrows mannerism and
technique,
he is free to copy, the other world is
ambitionless.
Guest
collaborated with artists on many books:
I Ching, with Sheila Isham, 1969, Mourlot Art Editions, Paris, France,
Musicality, with June Felter, 1988. Kelsey St. Press
The Nude,
Warren Brandt, Art Editions, New York,1989
The Altos, with artist
Richard Tuttle, Hank Hine Publisher, San Francisco, 1993
Stripped Tales,
with artist Anne Dunn, Kelsey St. Berkeley, California, 1995
Strings,
with artist Ann Slacik, Paris, France, 1999
The Luminous, with artist
Jane Moorman, Palo Alto, California, 1999
Symbiosis, with artist Laurie
Reid, Whitney Museum, New York City, 2000, and Kelsey St. Press, 2000.
Her
collages were used to illustrate her poetry books.
Here
is an essay on ekphrasis in Guest’s poems by Rachel Blau DuPlessis
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