Modernist poet Barbara Guest, the best-known woman in the influential New York School of avant-garde poets and a winner of the prestigious Robert Frost Medal, has died. She was 85.
Guest, who wrote more than 20 books of poetry, essays, plays, fiction and biography, died on February 15 in a Berkeley hospital of complications from a series of strokes, her daughter, Hadley Guest, said on Friday.
Guest, who was inspired by abstract expressionist artists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, wrote in unrhymed verses and was known for her liberal use of white space on the page.
”Her placement of words was like the placement of paint on a canvas,” said Hadley Guest, who lived with her mother in Berkeley.
Born Barbara Pinson in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1920, she was the oldest of five children and grew up in several Florida towns before moving to Los Angeles to live with relatives at the age of 11.
After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s degree in English, she moved to New York City and worked as a reviewer for Art News magazine for most of the 1950s.
Her first book of verse, The Location of Things, was published in 1960, when she was a member of the influential New York School, which included writers such as Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery. Her other books of poetry include The Countess from Minneapolis (1976) and The Tuerler Losses (1980).
”In short stanzas and single lines that pour over the page, Guest writes as if recording the topmost level of impressions that have roots in unfathomable histories,” a reviewer wrote for Publisher’s Weekly.
Guest, who was married three times, is survived by her two children. A funeral was held in Oakland last month. — Sapa-AP