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Meditations
The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest
Edited by Joseph Shafer
Foreword by Marjorie Welish
Sales Date: 2025-05-06
Six decades of writing on literature and art by one of the most significant poets of our time
Meditations gathers together in one volume for the first time an extensive collection of the prose work of Barbara Guest (1920-2006), one of the major voices of twentieth century American literature. Known primarily as a poet, Guest worked in many styles, all represented herein: essays, lectures, art criticism, literary and art reviews, as well as forms of fiction, biography, poetic prose, drama, comics, and other mixed-genre pieces. This collection of the poet's prose illuminates Guest's singular genius, highlighting her structural awareness of language and placing her within the vanguard of American poetry. Much of her writing initially appeared in special editions, often through collaborations with visual artists. Lyrical and intellectually soaring, this collection is a treasure of insights into the relationship between language, image, and imagination. Joseph Shafer's introduction provides a meaningful context for sixty years' worth of critical and creative prose by one of America's finest poets.
Mysteriously Defining the Foreword • Introduction • Lectures, Essays, & Poetic Pieces • Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious: Byzantine Proposals of Poetry • Gothic Elevation • Sympathy with Ovid • Radical Poetics and Conservative Poetry • A Talk on "Startling Maneuvers" • Art in America: The Nineteen Fifties and Sixties (Viewed in 1999) • Kant Sees • Preface for A Portfolio of Poetry: Selected by Barbara Guest • Anarchy of the Emotions • Shifting Persona • Prague Walking • Forces of Imagination • An Inconsiderate Preface • The Shadow of Surrealism • Poetry the True Fiction • Imagism • A Reason for Poetics • Invisible Architecture • Wounded Joy • Profiles • "The Work" in Goodnough • The Vuillard of Us: James Schuyler • Why has Louise Bourgeois finally become the Artist of the Moment? • For Celebration of Allen Ginsberg's 60th Birthday • Robert Duncan, As I Once Viewed Him • The Story of Bryher (A Proposal) • Dorothy Richardson: A Letter from Cornwall • An Evening with Charles Olson • Jeanne Reynal • Nell Blaine at Yaddo in the 1950s • Robert de Niro in the 1950s and 60s • Helen Frankenthaler: The Moment & The Distance • Piet Mondrian • The Color Green in the Art Work of Richard Tuttle • Jean Arp • Leatrice Rose • June Felter • Service for Tibor de Nagy • Mary Abbott • H.D • The Intimacy of Biography • "PART FIVE" of Herself Defined • Chapter Twenty-Five: Lausanne-Lugano 1947-53 • Chapter Twenty-Six: The Bryher Path • H.D. and the Conflict of Imagism • On Richard Aldington & H.D.: The Early Years in Letters • A Review: H.D.'s Ion, a play after Euripedes; H.D.'s Nights • Letter from Barbara Guest to Susan Gevirtz • Other Fiction • Seeking Air [Dedication, Epigraph, Preface, & Chapters 1-10] • Foreheads, with Joe Brainard • The Influence of Music on the Work of George Eliot, as recalled by George Henry Lewes • Motion Pictures • Chinese Ghost Restaurant • Reviews • Frank O'Hara's "Hôtel Transylvanie" • A World by Dennis Phillips • Tlooth • The Fiction of the Poet by Anna Balakian• Benjamin Constant, Cécile • Dear Mei-mei, on the publication of Empathy • Kenneth Koch's Selected Poems: 1950-1982 • Anne Waldman, Iovis: A Poem • Beryl Barr-Sharrar Exhibitions • ARTnews (December, 1952 – May, 1954) • Notes
BARBARA GUEST (1920–2006) published over twenty volumes of poetry, and earned awards including the Robert Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society of America. JOSEPH SHAFER teaches at Auburn University and publishes on American poetry, critical theory, and aesthetics. He is also coediting, with Norma Cole, a new Selected Poems of Barbara Guest. MARJORIE WELISH is a poet, painter, and art critic. She taught modern art history at Pratt Institute before holding the Madelon Leventhal Rand Endowed Chair in Literature at Brooklyn College. Her arts practice was the subject of the book, Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish.
"Suggestive and unique, Barbara Guest's poetic writing offers heady scintillations alongside clarities of perception. Joseph Shafer's incisive collection of Guest's prose exfoliates within this joyous oeuvre, its powers of perception, and frank, articulate angles."
~Rachel Blau DuPlessis, author of Drafts
"Barbara Guest fully embodies Gertrude Stein's quizzical maxim: "All writing is written." She is a writer's writer, inviting us to a place of shared perception inside her vast repository of references and experiences. This new collection reveals the genius, plasticity, and diverse range of Guest's prose: literary and cultural criticism, essay, portraiture, fictions, collaborations, talks, lists, and, perhaps most dazzlingly, reflections on her own process. These are articulations of how art comes to be—how different mediums, different artists, influence each other—revealing the "contour[s] of a shared world." Guest is an uncategorizable writer of the finest kind, and this book is an invaluable artifact of her continuing legacy."
~Claudia Rankine
"Barbara Guest's poetics is a necessary strike for that most beautiful and difficult of possibilities: the intelligence of imagination. Wounded grace and charm's force join with critical reflection and aesthetic discernment to make this collection a fundamental gift of the –– still –– New American Poetry."
~Charles Bernstein, The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies
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