“O'Hara was a magnetic personality with a keen and discerning eye and an ability to capture the routines of life in plain and often humorous snapshots, and to juxtapose the mundane alongside acutely sensitive observations about much loftier human endeavors.” What's captured in the collection is what made Frank O'Hara so appealing as a writer and as a person, she says. O’Hara’s work has remained consistently popular with readers for six decades and has never been out of print, says Elaine Katzenberger, editorial director of the book’s publisher, City Lights. “No other poetry collection of the 1960s did more to shatter the congealed surface of contemporary academic poetry,” notes John Ashbery in his introduction to the newly published 50th anniversary edition of Lunch Poems, O’Hara’s signature book. What distinguishes O’Hara’s poetry? It is not just a remarkable grasp of the zeitgeist but the way his poems manage to feel contemporary, no matter what the year, the ways in which he broke new ground. O’Hara’s mystique, and the seductive power of his work, have lingered, and in recent years have grown even stronger. When John Gruen titled his memoir of the period The Party’s Over Now, the implication was that O’Hara’s sudden death marked the end of that party, with the departure of its essential guest, and even host.” O’Hara’s funeral, Gooch adds, “marked a historic shift of sensibility in the art world, partly an accident of time, partly a result of the disappearance of O’Hara’s own heroic-human percolating and animating energy. “By writing poems on napkins at the Cedar Bar, recording what Allen Ginsberg called his ‘deep gossip,’ O’Hara was raising all the lives of that remarkable bohemian circle of the time to art– in real time.” “The implication was that if he was Apollinaire, then de Kooning was Picasso, Larry Rivers Bonnard, and Kenneth Koch, Max Jacob,” says Gooch, whose City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (1993), has just been reissued and is now being developed as a film by producer Donald Rosenfeld. When his long-time roommate Joe LeSueur was leaving the cemetery on the day of the funeral, notes Gooch, he said to painter Philip Guston, “He was our Apollinaire.” O’Hara was buried in Green River Cemetery in East Hampton, New York, not far from Jackson Pollock’s grave. O’Hara was a sort of Hermes figure of the time, the painter Jasper Johns told Brad Gooch, O’Hara’s biographer, “carrying messages among poets and painters, both as a poet and Museum of Modern Art curator, involved in not only the studios but the lives of the artists.” He was a catalytic figure at the intersection of writing, art, dance and music at a seminal time in the US – that postwar moment when American artists began to assert originality after long being overshadowed by Europeans. O’Hara was a founder – with John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler – of the New York School of poets and was also an art critic and a curator. A decisive era in American cultural history ended in July 1966 when Frank O’Hara was struck down by a jeep in the dunes on Fire Island.
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