From The Boston Review
Written when many critics still considered her subject more of an "art world" figure rather than a serious poet, Perloff's brilliantly organized study has been reissued with a new introduction. O'Hara's brief but prolific career distinguished him as a "master of peripheral vision . . . [who] devised linguistic structures that anticipate the work of our own moment." Blending biographical and critical resources, Perloff discusses O'Hara's friendships with poets as diverse as Ashbery and Ginsberg, his mixed-media collaborations with several New York artists, and his surprising range of influences. These essays persuade us that his fascination with surrealist poetics, action painting, and the cinema enhanced and deepened his poems, both stylistically and thematically. Literary criticism is rarely this lucid and warm. We are fortunate to have Perloff's book in print: not only was it the first to articulate O'Hara's important and complex role in American poetry, but its witty political and poetic observations retain their original power.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved.
Book Description
Drawing extensively upon the poet's unpublished manuscripts--poems, journals, essays, and letters--as well as all his published works, Marjorie Perloff presents Frank O'Hara as one of the central poets of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."--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."--Jonathan Cott, New York Times Book Review
