Wesleyan University Press is virtually celebrating what would have been Barbara Guest’s 100th birthday! Guest’s monumental career as a writer spanned over 60 years, during which she was deeply intertwined with poets of the New York School including Frank O’Hara and later on, with the Language poets. Over her life, she wrote extensively for Art News and published numerous poetry collections including Fair Realism (1989) and The location of things (1985). Throughout her life, Guest remained deeply fixated on the possibility of “invoking the unseen” through poetry. She took inspiration from Abstract Expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler and New York School poet John Ashbery, both of whom blurred the lines between reality and imagination, and subject and object. In the introduction to The Collected Works of Barbara Guest, poet Peter Gizzi writes that Guest’s written works compel the reader to “reconsider modernist traditions” and “delimit” poetry temporally and spatially, allowing her words to spill off the page as if they have no concrete beginning nor end. In the end of her final book, The Fair Gaze, Guest quotes philosopher Theodor Adorno: “in each genuine art work something appears that did not exist before;” such words encapsulate Guest’s life-long project of pioneering a post-modernist poetic tradition that stands at the edge of the horizon, gesturing towards an imagined becoming.
To read Guest’s works and celebrate September 6th, 2020 – what would have been her 100th birthday – we direct you to The Collected Works of Barbara Guest, edited by her daughter, Hadley Haden Guest, and published by Wesleyan University Press in 2013.
For a preview of the book, see her poem “Passage” below (pp. 130):
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Happy 100th, Barbara!
