Back in 2014, we read Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems, and last October we discussed Brad Gooch's biography, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara. (He's also figured into several other books we've discussed over the years.) With that in mind, I appreciated Ada Calhoun's tribute to her fellow poet in the June 22 New York Times "Letter of Recommendation." She observes that O'Hara "had tremendous belief in the value of one person honestly encountering another" (quoting his declaration that "The only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your mouth"), and "faith in the world to provide for us. ... He loved the world so much that seeing it through his eyes made me love the world, too."
As a bonus, she links to the obituary her father, Peter Schejeldahl, published in the Village Voice soon after O'Hara's untimely demise in 1966: "Everything about O'Hara is easy to demonstrate and exceedingly difficult to 'understand.' And the aura of the legendary, never far from him while he lived, now seems about to engulf the memory of all he was and did." I warmly commend both tributes to you.
No comments:
Post a Comment