Modernist poet Barbara Guest, the only woman included in the New York School of poets that emerged in the late 1950s, has died at age 85. Guest died Feb. 15 in Berkeley, Calif., after suffering several strokes, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday. Guest wrote more than 20 books including poetry, plays, fiction and a biography. She was best known for her style of unrhymed verses and liberal use of white spaces, the Times said. For example, a line could be a single word, followed by five or six words in the next line. She once said her poems were more about language than ideas, the newspaper said. After graduating from University of California Berkeley in 1943, Guest moved to New York and worked as an art reviewer for Art News magazine in the 1950s. The Poetry Society of America awarded her the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement in 1999. Guest is survived by a son and a daughter, with whom she lived in Berkeley in recent years. © Copyright 2006 by United Press International

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