“... Surrealism). The afterlife of Surrealism is more active in poetry, as in the New York School of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others: ‘We all “grew up Surrealist”,’ Ashbery once remarked, ‘without even being aware of it.’ Surrealist directives – to suspend rational control as much as possible, to let language dictate, to hold to the ...”

“... a hostile philanderer.) At a Harvard College full of incipient talent – his classmates included Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery and Donald Hall – Creeley felt discouraged and alone. ‘My eager thirst for knowledge, almost Jude-the-Obscurian in its innocence, was all but shut down by the sardonic stance of my elders,’ he recalled. He ...”

“... that I first came across Malley’s poems, nestled up against an audacious collaboration between Frank O’Hara and the French language.) Both Ashbery and Koch have included Malley in the curricula of their university poetry courses. At exam time Ashbery would present his students with two unattributed poems, one from The Darkening Ecliptic and one from ...”

“... with its dialectical wiles, will find the worm of ideology at work in every apple; it is, as Frank O’Hara wrote in his poem ‘The Critic’, the assassin of orchards. But here are two books, both theoretically acute and both marvels of close reading, that argue the case from apparently different sides of the ideological fence, yet which ...”

“... of poetry and fiction as decisively as any in literary history. ‘You just go on your nerve,’ Frank O’Hara declared of the business of writing poetry, and Pound developed a nerve like no other. What is so weird and unique about his poetry, however, is not just the nerve it exhibits, whether it takes the form of mistranslated Propertius or chopped ...”

“... of the United States of America’ – does he repeat himself? Very well, he repeats himself.As Frank Kermode once said, literary canons ‘negate the distinction between knowledge and opinion’. They make beliefs about what we should know into what we do actually know. That is why they are both necessary and dangerous. They are necessary because you ...”

“... Nabokov) and for those who, having joined, resigned (Thomas Hart Benton, Lewis Mumford, John O’Hara, Yvor Winters, Ezra Pound). Nor was it famous for anything it actually did: for years its main business was merely to perpetuate itself by suitable elections. Of late, however, it has taken to sponsoring lectures and awarding grants and medals, so that ...”

“... and mechanics of mischief, of why accidents are likely to happen, are wonderfully displayed. P.J.O’Hara, whose fate turns out to be the beginning as well as the end of the book, would not have been in Liverpool at all if he had not been persuaded to take the place of the leading man, St Ives, who broke a leg falling down stairs when he heard the sound of ...”

“... as a language of diffusion, inattention, that he inhabits like Daffy Duck in Hollywood. His friend Frank O’Hara once grumbled that Ashbery was ‘always marrying the whole world’; charmingly, the poem ‘Houseboat Days’ itself admits that ‘The mind/Is so hospitable, taking in everything/Like boarders.’ Hence my reference to Hollywood, the ...”

“... or Apollinaire did. (Never mind other teen crushes like Charlie Parker and William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara and Andy Warhol.) He felt like a poet with a capital P, writhing in the coils of Church and Satan, Evil and Beauty, Sin and Damnation. Which, God knows, all held plenty of allure for a sulky, half-Catholic male adolescent. But Baudelaire the ...”

“... instead David Lynch, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis.Lamb deserves​ much better than this. He deserves, most of all, an account that makes you want to read him. His prose only intermittently ...”

“... ironic, single-breath, present tense, synthesised diary-takes by one of the great Americans; Frank O’Hara on his lunch hour from the Museum of Modern Art; Douglas Woolf driving somewhere, between jobs; Fielding Dawson. Drummond speaks of the pieces that make up 45 as ‘stories’. Some of them are very short, a set of acknowledgments dropped into ...”

“... and Luke and his younger sister, Sara, lived between Manhattan and Long Island with Goldberg and Frank O’Hara and his partner Joe LeSueur, an escape, as LeSueur put it, from ‘heterosexual circles dominated by sexist, egocentric males who thought of themselves as, to use Patsy’s most damning epithet, “entitled”’.By this point, Matthiessen had ...”

“... her influence seems very local, mostly confined to the New York poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara or the writing of Andy Warhol, though in fact so much of Hemingway’s manner of writing – the short, paratactic sentences, the use of repetition, the idea of removing the obvious subject – was taken from her, so the whole sequence of ...”

“... from the Cedar Tavern set, the Abstract Expressionists. You could be a fag back then, like Frank O’Hara, as long as you could pass, and understood you were supposed to suffer over it, lusting after those real guys painting their heroic, tortured canvases. Andy was a swish. A swish was someone who couldn’t hide it.One contemporary noted the ...”