Joseph Shafer – författare

Six decades of writing on literature and art by one of the most significant poets of our time_x000D__x000D_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.

Appearing beside Text introduces how the negative space between print can appear as another type of text. If indeed text is any perceived material with a sense of meaning, then underlying pages may also enter the textual surface when visibly materializing for our reflection. But that movement involves not only perceiving different materials but conflicting senses of each. It raises a level of play long outlawed by common-sense theory, since blank pages are meant to epitomize the most repressed or radically excluded. Yet frameworks based on such hierarchies or absolute alterity are unsettled when paginal bodies start appearing inside and outside ‘the work’ of art. This transitioning into aesthetics, and its historico-political implications, are mapped here across the landscape of post-1945 American poetry, through poems and prose, novels and nonfiction, by poets as diverse as Claudia Rankine, Ronald Johnson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Rosmarie Waldrop, Barbara Guest, Susan Howe, and Charles Olson.