Frank O'Hara Now
New Essays on the New York Poet
Distributed for Liverpool University Press
The work of Frank O’Hara (1926–66) is central to any consideration of twentieth-century American poetry. Frank O’Hara Now, the first collection of essays to be dedicated to O’Hara in nearly two decades, asks why O’Hara remains so important to twenty-first-century readers and writers of poetry. 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 approachable qualities coexist with a demanding engagement with currents in European and American modernism.
The book includes coverage of O’Hara moods that have rarely been discussed in the criticism to date, including boredom, hatred, and nihilism. Throughout, there is a powerful sense that fresh readings of O’Hara are crucial to understanding his continuing influence, making it essential reading for scholars and students of American poetry.
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction by Robert Hamspon 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
Andrew 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
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
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