Guest, Barbara

▪ 2007

Barbara Ann Pinson 

      American poet (b. Sept. 6, 1920, Wilmington, N.C.—d. Feb. 15, 2006, Berkeley, Calif.), was a member of a group of writers that became known as the New York school of poets and included John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler. Their works were deeply influenced by Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. Guest used language in a painterly manner in her early works, but later poems focused on the actual word rather than the image it conjured. She published some 20 volumes of verse, including The Blue Stairs (1968), The Countess from Minneapolis (1976), and The Red Gaze (2005). In addition to her poetry, Guest wrote a novel, Seeking Air (1978), and a biography, Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World (1984), about poet Hilda Doolittle. In 1999 she was the winner of the Robert Frost Medal of the Poetry Society of America.

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