Synopses & Reviews
"Writing the first major critical study of a poet ... demands the utmost intellectual rigor and confidence.... Marjorie Perloff has risen to the challenge with a book of great depth, learning, and dexterity, and in doing so, has accomplished the invariable task of such a first study: to stimulate a new consideration of the poet". -- David Lenson, Chronicle of Higher Education
When this book appeared twenty years ago, Frank O'Hara was known primarily as an art-world figure and coterie poet, not to be taken too seriously. Today, as Marjorie Perloff predicted in her groundbreaking study, no consideration of American poetry at midcentury can omit his name. As Perloff argued, tracing the poet's "French connection" and the influence of the visual arts on O'Hara's work, his seemingly casual, improvisatory "I do this, I do that" poems brought something genuinely new to poetry and look ahead to the radical poetry of the late century
This edition includes a new introduction in which Perloff reconsiders O'Hara's lyric as it looks to a new generation, coming to O'Hara's work in the wake of recent cultural poetics and gay studies. A revised Bibliographical Note brings the reader up to date on O'Hara scholarship.
Perloff brings an extraordinary attentiveness to the poems themselves -- not as mere relics of a cultural hero, but as works of art which shine with a new brightness when seen through her careful gaze". -- Tim Dlugos, Washington Post
Synopsis
Drawing extensively upon the poet's unpublished manuscriptsand#8212;poems, journals, essays, and lettersand#8212;as well as all his published works, Marjorie Perloff presents Frank O'Hara as one of the central poets of the postwar period and an important critic of the visual arts. Perloff traces the poet's development through his early years at Harvard and his interest in French Dadaism and Surrealism to his later poems that fuse literary influence with elements from Abstract Expressionist painting, atonal music, and contemporary film. This edition contains a new Introduction addressing O'Hara's homosexuality, his attitudes toward racism, and changes in poetic climate cover the past few decades.
"A groundbreaking study. [This book] is a genuine work of criticism. . . . Through Marjorie Perloff's book we see an O'Hara perhaps only his closer associates saw before: a poet fully aware of the traditions and techniques of his craft who, in a life tragically foreshortened, produced an adventurous if somewhat erratic body of American verse."and#8212;David Lenson, Chronicle of Higher Education
"Perloff is a reliable, well-informed, discreet, sensitive . . . guide. . . . She is impressive in the way she deals with O'Hara's relationship to painters and paintings, and she does give first-rate readings of four major poems."and#8212;Jonathan Cott, New York Times Book Review
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 221-226) and index.
About the Author
Marjorie Perloff is professor of English emerita at Stanford University and the Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. She is the author of many books, including, most recently, Poetics in a New Key and Unoriginal Genius, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Preface
1. The Aesthetic of Attention
2. The Early Years (1946-53)
3. Poet Among Painters
4. In Favor of One's Time (1954-61)
5. The Pillar of Our Deaths
Notes
Bibliographical Note
Index