Now Available from The Post Apollo Press

There Are People
Who Think That
Painters Shouldn't Talk

A GUSTONBOOK


by Patrick James Dunagan

Poetry $15 96pgs 978-0942996-73-9


GUSTONBOOK is a workman’s notebook of sorts sketched out in response to 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 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

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works at Gleeson Library Geschke Center for the University of San Francisco. A graduate of the Poetics Program New College of California, his writings have appeared in: Amerarcana, Art-voice, Big Bell, Chain, Critical Flame, Fulcrum, Jacket, ON, Polis, Rain Taxi, SF Bay Guardian, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Try!, and Vanitas. Recent chapbooks include: from Chansonniers (Blue Press, 2008), Spirit Guest & Others (Lew Gallery Editions, 2009), Easy Eden w/ Micah Ballard (PUSH, 2009) and her friends down at the french cafe had no english words for me (PUSH, 2010).