Description: "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

Please Wait