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

Short story writer and poet Gooch has written a fine and lively biography of O'Hara, who was killed at the age of 40 in 1966 by a speeding Jeep on the beach at Fire Island after living through the whirlwind of artistic and bohemian life in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Grafton, Mass., O'Hara left his strict Catholic father and alcoholic mother for the Navy before matriculating at Harvard and venturing to the University of Michigan. Gooch paints the everyday details of O'Hara's life--he was a published poet, a critic for ArtNews and a curator at the Museum of Modern Art --with friendly and specific strokes. His career, loves and influences in New York City are all here: correspondence with John Ashbery about William Carlos Williams; posing nude while employed at MOMA; angry bouts with abstract painter Grace Hartigan, etc. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC alternate.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gooch offers a lengthy first biography of Frank O'Hara, the New York School poet of the Fifties and Sixties who espoused the Abstract Expressionism that gave way to Pop Art. Born of a Massachusetts Irish Catholic family, O'Hara contemplated music as a career but, after serving in the navy and attending Harvard, he decided on poetry. He did graduate work at the University of Michigan, then came to New York and became a poet, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and critic for ArtNews. He assisted many avant-garde poets and painters; his multimedia outlook marks much of his poetry. This well-researched book is generously garnished both with samples of his work and his homosexual attachments and details his struggle with alcohol. Tragically, O'Hara was struck and killed by a car in 1966, at the age of 40. Recommended for general and special collections.
- Kenneth Mintz, Hoboken P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The first biography of one of American poetry's finest lyricists--whose literary grace and authority, musical sense, and headlong (often foolish) way with life bears remarkable resemblance to the much differently circumstanced Boris Pasternak's. Gooch (Scary Kisses, 1988) follows O'Hara from his Massachusetts Catholic boyhood (son of an alcoholic mother who'd be a cafard to O'Hara all his life) to Harvard (where he was part of the remarkable postwar literary generation that included Creeley, Brodkey, Donald Hall, Ashbery, Koch, Edward Gorey, and more) and then to New York. There, O'Hara not only was (with Ashbery and Koch) the coagulator of the New York School style of poetry, but his art criticism became seminal to the first- and second-generation Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors of the 50's, a position that elided with ever higher curatorial positions he held at the MOMA until his tragic death at 40, hit by a dune buggy on Fire Island in the dead of night. O'Hara's friendships--homo- and heterosexual--were the very weft of his life: Around him much of the best of midcentury New York art revolved, played, feuded, splintered. Gooch misses none of these social complications, but no scale seems to have weighed the testimonies relatively, and this gives the book a passive and flattened feel: Interviewees come off as talking-head opinion- spouters, all--and none--equally to the point. The paucity of literary appreciation here, of critical eye, is the real disappointment. O'Hara's remarkable poetry is quoted, dated, summarized--but never quite appreciated for its unusual achievements. Literary queen bee--that's what O'Hara comes off as here (which, granted, at his worst he sometimes took himself to be only as well), not the prince of poetry he would more enduringly become. (Fifty-five photographs--not seen) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In the first biography of this noted poet, the author describes O'Hara's insular Catholic upbringing, his bohemian lifestyle, and his brilliant career as a poet and a museum curator. 20,000 first printing. $30,000 ad/promo. BOMC Alt.