“... abstraction and idealism.’ To this end, Nelson contrasts the different ways in which Guest and Frank O’Hara compare words to rocks. O’Hara’s poem ‘Today’ giddily lists: Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! You really are beautiful! Pearls, harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all the stuff they’ve always ...”

“... inventiveness and inquisitiveness. In his ‘Answer to Voznesensky – Evtushenko’, Frank O’Hara writes: ‘We are tired of your tiresome imitations of Mayakovsky/we are tired of your dreary tourist ideas of our Negro selves.’ O’Hara’s rebuff to the two Russian poets shows him as a weird and ...”

“... in 1943, when Ashbery was 15, Margaret Hubbell Wells, a neighbour and family friend, wrote to Frank Boyden, the headmaster of Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, a legendary figure in 20th-century American secondary education. Wells’s two older sons had attended Deerfield and she had been impressed by Ashbery’s bravura showing on Quiz Kids: Do you ...”

“... different, but the unself-conscious way with which Zagajewski handles this ‘I’ brings to mind Frank O’Hara. Certainly, it wouldn’t be easy to say who is the more charming, and charm is very much the issue. The difference is that in O’Hara the ‘I’ (as in ‘I do this, I do that’) is the repository of all ...”

“... perpetual itinerancy. She began by writing free verse – her early work tended to emulate Frank O’Hara and other New York poets – and now composes mostly in rhyme and off-rhyme. She completed her third collection, Shoulder Season (2010), in Beirut. But her ‘poet baptism in the Mediterranean’, which brought an ‘altered relation to ...”

“... New Zealand, all national dots. Not all poets love places. And not many poets love cities the way Frank O’Hara loved New York. Crawford, like his nearest literary forebear Norman MacCaig, loves places both rural and urban: in his work, he can throw his voice ‘deep down the larynx of Glen Esk’, and he can marry Iona, or bring the reader into close ...”

“... like a hand tap-tapping the small of my back The light, breezy tone is well caught. It’s not Frank O’Hara, but it is amiable and suitable. The style itself expresses the democratic principles which the poem gently affirms, before concluding: The buttery sun kept casting its light on everything equally. The soft breeze did as it always does, and ...”

“... enquire whose soul dangles from his watch-chain That deliberately naive opening line could be Frank O’Hara (and probably signals an important O’Hara source); but the lower-case voice of the little nobody, the Chaplinesque charmer, together with the strong cartoon-image of Success (boots and a ...”

“... and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic Atlantic cutting at our feet, speaking of Hart Crane and the last words we would have in our mouths at that moment of surrender.’ His idol was Billie Holiday, who gives the name to one of his best ...”

“... of the poems in Early Works have a chatty, diurnal music that can also be heard in the work of Frank O’Hara or John Ashbery. Ashbery’s notion of the poem as ‘the chronicle of the creative act that produces it’ is a good description of Notley’s shapely, improvisatory poetics – full of changing weather, changing clothes, the impressions of ...”

“... and unsentimentally. There can seem to be no problem. In ‘Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s’ Frank O’Hara writes that The poem goes on too long because our friendship has been long. In the context of poetry and longevity friendship seems to take a quite natural place at the civilised table. Mention of ‘friendship’, that is. What about John ...”

“... straight-acting insiders of the new moment, like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and Frank O’Hara). A successful commercial artist, homosexual, Catholic, working-class – the grounds for exclusion, or self-exclusion, were multiple. Warhol’s parents were Ruthenians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father came to America in ...”

“... Letter C’; it reappears in Chapter Nine, entirely concerned with American poetry and comparing Frank O’Hara with Ed Dorn (not the expected names? No, thank heaven); and in Chapter 11, where three English poets who normally trade in pathos are applauded for at one point departing into anti-pathos – Ted Hughes in Crow, Geoffrey Hill in Mercian Hymns ...”

“... stylistic obsessions, Ashbery’s montages (he wrote his DPhil on Ashbery) and the insouciance of Frank O’Hara. But nobody could now mistake Ford for any of the writers who have influenced him: watching his ‘long lost premises turn inside out’ (as he puts it in ‘Living with Equations’), we are led by means of ambiguous but compelling clues down ...”

“... and Paul Celan, and to the work of Americans such as Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, Jack Spicer or Frank O’Hara and the New York poets. When I look back on it now, it’s clear that Quin’s writing sits more easily alongside this internationalist milieu. She was always critical of English narrowness and its ‘safe comfortable rituals, the monotony ...”