O Harashbery!

C.K. Stead

  • The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara edited by Donald Allen
    Carcanet, 233 pp, £18.95, October 1991, ISBN 0 85635 939 4
  • Flow Chart by John Ashbery
    Carcanet, 213 pp, £16.95, September 1991, ISBN 0 85635 947 5

I remember the pleasure of my first reading of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems when it came out in 1964 in a City Lights edition uniform (except that it was blue and red, not black and white) with Ginsberg’s Howl, Kaddish and Reality Sandwiches. Two years later O’Hara was dead, killed by a dune buggy at an all-night party on Fire Island. There was something Keatsian about his poetry, its vividness and particularity, and its spontaneity, though there might be difficulties for a critic who wanted to argue, as Matthew Arnold did when he tried to rescue Keats from the aesthetes, that ‘there was flint and iron in him.’

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