City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara [Hardcover]

City Poet goes past the Frank O'Hara that readers get to know so well through his poetry. If you have read and enjoyed O'Hara's work, this book gives you the biographical background to bring your appreciation full circle. It is no quick read, but it allows you to appreciate the man behind the words through meticulous interviews with everyone who knew him.

This happens to be one of those heavy biographies that for better or worse include everything the author ever found out about his subject, much of which isn't worth recording. Biographers should learn that just because something's a fact doesn't make it interesting. Having said that, this book isn't without its virtues. I found the passages dealing with his interaction with artists and co-workers informative. It was very interesting to discover that O'Hara's college roommate was Edward Gorey - what an odd couple. Also, the details of O'Hara serving as Cecil Beaton's secretary were enjoyable. I did learn some things about O'Hara's sexual adventures that made me cringe (having lived through the plague years my view is compromised). Mr. Gooch has written a book full of facts and trivia - it's certainly a worthwhile chronicle of O'Hara's life. If you're looking for a more intimate portrait I recommend "Digression On Some Poems By Frank O'Hara," for a more academic look at his work look for "Poet Among Painters."

I'm not a poetry scholar, and I actually found out about O'Hara through Jim Carroll, the late punk poet who admired "Lunch Poems" for their accessibility and followed O'Hara home one day three weeks before his death. Since O'Hara was well before the punk era and indeed, didn't even seem to be in the pantheon of beat poets, I was curious about him and picked up a copy of this biography when I came across it secondhand. It is a very thick, dense read but the density comes from a meticulous examination of details of O'Hara's life and times, not from scholarly analysis of his poetry (which does seem to have been written on the fly more often than not - but I'm the type who doesn't see anything wrong with that approach) nor from the length of his life. The most jarring thing about this book was to learn that O'Hara died at the young age of 40 and yet had managed to pack more interesting experiences and contacts into that short lifetime than most people cram into 75 or 80 years. While some of this no doubt stemmed from his wartime experiences, the war and the ensuing college education for veterans having exposed a generation of young men to horizons they otherwise wouldn't have had, I also got the feeling that Frank was a restless soul who would have been bored with the strictures of a conventional existence in Massachusetts and would have found some way to kick over the traces, war or no war.

O'Hara's homosexuality and his relationships with men are major themes of the book, and understandably so given the prejudice against homosexuals in the U.S. during his lifetime. To be a man openly in love with other men pretty much guaranteed you weren't going to have a "normal" life. The types of jobs you could hold, the people you'd have as friends, and your relations with your family members were all likely to be affected to some degree. However, this was just one aspect of the book, which as others have noted does seemingly go into detail about every aspect of O'Hara's life, from before he was born straight up to his funeral. The research that must have gone into writing this book is very impressive.

Frank's untimely death at the end left me wondering "what if" he had lived. Would he have become a jaded old (and old-fashioned) guy left behind in the wake of the new poets and artists emerging in the 60s, or would he have gone on to more interesting experiences in the worlds of poetry and art? Clearly Frank, without knowing it, was having an influence on then-unknown Jim Carroll and probably on others, and perhaps that's how his legacy lives on.

If you're looking for discussions of O'Hara's creative process, or studies connecting his life and his poems, or analysis of his poems or where he falls in the pantheon of poets, this is probably not the book you want to plow through. If, instead, you're interested in a biography of a creative and unusual person, with creative and unusual friends, that was set during an exciting period of U.S. history, this book is for you.

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