PATRICIA DIENSTFREY & RENA ROSENWASSER

A Conversation on Symbiosis

Patricia Dienstfrey and Rena Rosenwasser, the co-founders of Kelsey Street Press, have published fóur books by Barbara Guest Forces of Imagination,:Writing on Writing as well as three collaborations between the poet and visual artists. They discuss Symbiosis here, a collaboration between Barbara Guest and Bay Area painter Laurie Reid published in 2000.

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Patricia Dienstfrey: We’ve written this paper as a conversation because Barbara preferred open-ended forms that allow room for the unexpected. Her friend, the New York poet James Schuyler, once referred to art as “a tissue of spontaneities.” Informal and scripted modes of art-making were integral to the New York School’s, and Barbara’s, embrace of collaboration.

Rena Rosenwasser: She was not a writer who craved solitude. She certainly didn’t subscribe to the romantic concept of the solitary genius. Barbara thrived on sociability

PD: At the opening of the book, she sets the context for the symbiosis of the title: “A writer and an artist working together establish a Symbiosis, as in Nature, where dissimilar organisms productively live together’ She envisions collaboration as creative cohabitation.

RR: Barbara’s response to anything having to do with art was not half-hearted. I had already talked to her about Laurie’s work before I introduced them. Barbara’s interest was immediate. As was Laurie’s. At the time, Barbara was seventy-nine and Laurie was in her mid-thirties. They discovered a connection in Eugene, Oregon, where Laurie grew up and where Barbara’s son Jonathan had lived. Both remembered the smell of wet pavement after it rained there, just the kind of sensuous detail that opened a personal connection and creative bond for Barbara. They began a friendship that went back and forth between their living rooms in wide-ranging discussions of poetry and art.

The first element of this book to emerge was the title, which Barbara suggested. Then Laurie, my brother Robert (who has designed many Kelsey Street collaborations), and I discussed what shape the book might take. Laurie proposed a drawing that would span forty- four book-sized pages, including the inside covers. The drawing gave us the book’s dimensions. When Robert and I brought Barbara to Laurie’s studio to see the piece, it was laid out on the floor. Barbara loved it. It was elegant and spare and left much unsaid. Spareness was a touchstone of Barbara’s aesthetic. Laurie at that time was mixing pigment with water. Brushed across the paper, it stained and warped the surface. Colors were tertiary greens, blues, and grays. Odd pools and thickenings resembling organic shapes, such as seaweed or nodes in the lymph system, formed where the brush stopped, paused, and went on. Her watery lines were assured and ephemeral. The piece reminded me of Mallarnié’s A Throw of the Dice:’ the first book in which he used the space of the page as a field for the poem. The fall of Mallarmé’s words onto the surface resembled Barbara’s way of floating linear fragments on a page: patterns generated by chance in the awakened imagination.

PD: Laurie had studied French poetry, Mallarmé and Baudelaire, and French influences worked their way into the book.

The read the complete artice, see the Chicago Review

BARBARA GUEST
SPECIAL ISSUE (53:4 & 54:1/2)

A triple issue celebrating the life and work of Barbara Guest. Three of Guest’s plays and a portfolio of five previously uncollected poems (edited by Catherine Wagner) are accompanied by critical and personal responses to Guest’s work by Charles Altieri, Eileen Myles, Donald Revell, John Wilkinson, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Martha Ronk, Andrea Brady, Brenda Hillman, Nancy Robbin, Patricia Dienstfrey and Rena Rosenwasser, and Garrett Caples.