Poetry
There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk : A GUSTONBOOK
by Patrick James Dunagan
Written in the Spring of 2009 and composed of short, fragmentary blocks of verse and prose, including several quoted sources, GUSTONBOOK is a workman's notebook of sorts sketched out in response to several years spent contemplating the work and life of painter Philip Guston in relation to the ongoing world, i.e. exhibitions, books on/about Guston, other books/art works amid daily walks, drinks, and talks. More explorations than explanations, the entries contained herein situate the eye of memory as witness to the immediate surrounds of now: day to day, hour by hour, the concern never (always) changing. As Guston once said, gesturing out the window, "Who wants that? and you can't have it anyway."
Sometime in the late 1960s, the mode of thought and talking known as Pondering with Guston became a frequent option for poets, most of them far younger than Guston himself. Aside from his prodigious genius as a painter, Philip Guston was an adept reader of modern poetry and prose, philosophy and art history; an ardent conversationalist and a sharp writer on his own and others? works. His multifarious Romance of Doubt was an ongoing and fructifying virtuoso performance of irony and dialectic, conscience and devilish enjoyment, sublimity and near-sublime despair. In this provocative sequence, Patrick Dunagan -- who never met the artist but knows his work cold, so to speak -- has caught the fever. Unlike others so inclined, he engages Guston?s thought very much on his home turf: Poetry, subsuming all matters of ?art? (as well as other parts of daily life), is where they join. As Dunagan says, ?Person is assemblage?.so many comprise a whole.? The book is a form of open conversation; the reader is welcome.
—Bill Berkson
Dunagan writes, ?A form is that which beckons.? Not only did this poem beckon, it put me in a state of reverberation with my own haunts. Guston?s legacy is paid homage to though the creation of a speculative (or in Guston?s term, baffling) environment. Steps forward in the world of the poem can provide ?a longed for /sense of fucked up? because it?s whatever the opposite of numb is ? it's the gong an artist rings to make us know that our bodies are surrounded by infinite ?companion volumes.?
—Stacy Szymaszek
96 pgs $15.00 ISBN 978-0942996-73-9
