Synopsis
Frank O’Hara’s writing is central to any consideration of 20th century American poetry. This collection of essays, the first to be dedicated to O’Hara in nearly two decades, asks why O’Hara remains so important to 21st century readers and writers of poetry. The book is transatlantic in tone, combining American scholarship with a wide sampling of British writers. For many, O’Hara’s distinctive appeal depends on his witty depictions of urban experience, his relationship to the painters of Abstract Expressionism and the exhilarating immediacy of his poetic voice. Yet these chatty and approachable qualities coexist with a testing engagement with currents in European and American modernism. Frank O’Hara Now offers a comprehensive picture of the poet, presenting the conversational insouciance of the writing alongside its more intransigent features.
‘A very well-conceived and well-structured book. I highly commend the conception of this collection, its careful structure and its pertinence to the contemporary understanding of avant-garde writing.’ Professor Tim Woods, Aberystwyth University
255pp., 234 x 156mm, paperback
Published July 2010
Contents
List of illustrations
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction Robert Hampson and Will Montgomery
1 City
‘Housing the Deliberations’: New York, War, and Frank O’Hara
Geoff Ward
Gesture in 1960: Toward Literal situations
Lytle Shaw
French Frank
Rod Mengham
Distraction and Absorption on Second Avenue
Andrea Brady
Stepping Out with Frank O’Hara
David Herd
‘A Certain Kneeness’: The Boring and the New in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry
Tadeusz Pióro
2 Selves
‘Where Air is Flesh’: The Odes of Frank O’Hara
John Wilkinson
Close Writing
Keston Sutherland
Naming the Seam: On Frank O’Hara’s ‘Hatred’
Richard Deming
‘A Gasp of Laughter at Desire’: Frank O’Hara’s Poetics of Breath
Josh Robinson
3 The Work of Others
Frank O’Hara, Alfred Leslie and the Making of The Last Clean Shirt
Daniel Kane
Kites and Poses: Attitudinal Interfaces in Frank O’Hara and Grace Hartigan
Redell Olsen
‘In Fatal Winds’: Frank O’Hara and Morton Feldman
Will Montgomery
‘Footprints of a Wild Ballet’: The Poem-Paintings of Frank O’Hara and Norman Bluhm
Brian Reed
Memory Pieces: Collage, Memorial and the Poetics of intimacy in Joe Brainard, Jasper Johns and Frank O’Hara
Nick Selby
Index of Works by Frank O’Hara
General index
