Barbara Guest, 85; Modernist Poet Inspired by Abstract Expressionists

Barbara Guest, a Modernist poet inspired by Abstract Expressionist artists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning who was the only woman included in the New York School of poets that emerged in the late 1950s, has died. She was 85.

Guest died Feb. 15 in Berkeley of complications from several strokes.

The author of more than 20 books of poetry, plays, fiction and biography, Guest wrote in unrhymed verses. Critics noted that she held lyrical or musical sound and material images in tension in her work.

To create a particular visual effect and to emphasize certain words in her verses, she made liberal use of white space on the page.

One line might be composed of a single word, followed by a line of five or six words.

Like other members of the New York School that included John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler, Guest brought poetry and art together in her work. Her first book of verse -- “The Location of Things” (1960) -- was published under the imprint of Tibor de Nagy, a prominent art gallery in New York City.

Other books of her poetry include “The Countess From Minneapolis” (1976) and “The Tuerler Losses” (1980).

Guest wrote about nature as well as city life, and once said her poems were more about language than ideas. In the poem “A Handbook of Surfing” (1968), she refers to waxed boards, wipeouts and other terms best known to surfers, but did so in a way that painted word pictures any reader can grasp.

“Blue Stairs” (1968) describes a staircase. The “radiant deepness” of its span is “disarming as one who executes robbers,” she wrote.

Many of her poems are brief. “Echoes” from her book “The Red Gaze” in 2004 reads:

Once more riding down to Venice on borrowed horses,

The air free of misdemeanor, at rest in the inns of our fathers.

Once again whiteness like the white chandelier.

Echoes of other poems ...

“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,” wrote a reviewer for Publisher’s Weekly. “The diction of myth and fairy tale mixes freely with abstraction.”

Guest was well established as a poet when she wrote “Seeking Air” (1978), an experimental novel that is described as a series of prose poems and is compared to a diary. Six years later, Guest wrote a biography of Hilda Doolittle, a 20th century American poet and muse-like character whose friends included novelist D.H. Lawrence and poet Ezra Pound.

Guest’s book “Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World” was praised as a “shimmering, delicately patterned narrative” in a New York Times review by Michiko Katutani. However, another reviewer, Katha Pollitt in the New York Times, wrote that Guest offered “no approach of her own beyond plot synopses and cryptic judgments.”

Born Barbara Pinson in Wilmington, N.C., she was the daughter of a probation officer who moved the family to Florida when she was young. She grew up in several Florida towns. At age 11 she moved to Los Angeles to live with relatives. She enrolled at UCLA and transferred to UC Berkeley where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1943.

After college, Guest moved to New York City and was an art reviewer for Art News magazine through most of the 1950s.

After her early success as a poet, she went through a period of comparative obscurity but found a new audience in the early 1990s. Members of a younger generation -- the “language poets” including Charles Bernstein -- claimed her as their inspiration. In 1999 she received the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America.

Guest was married three times -- first to John Dudley, a painter and writer. Their marriage ended in divorce in the late 1940s. She then married Stephen Guest, a translator. The couple had one child -- a daughter, Hadley Guest -- before divorcing in 1954. That year she married Trumbull Higgins, a military historian. They had one child: a son, Jonathan Higgins. Trumbull Higgins died in 1990.

In recent years, Guest lived with her daughter in Berkeley. She is survived by her two children.