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Ojai-geeky-too-LA

Lucie Elven: LA Non-Confidential, 17 June 2021

I Used to Be Charming 
by Eve Babitz.
NYRB, 448 pp., £14.99, January 2020, 978 1 68137 379 9
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... as much as I thought I deserved. I guess it was too much.’ She introduced Salvador Dalí and Frank Zappa: ‘Dalí took one look at Frank from across the room and rose to his feet in immediate approbation.’ In New York, she wrote, ‘there are no spaces between the words, it’s one of the charms of the ...
Selected Poems 
by James Merrill.
Carcanet, 152 pp., £9.95, April 1996, 1 85754 228 2
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... John Ashbery, who combines the exaltation of Wallace Stevens with the shrugging insouciance of Frank O’Hara in order to come up with poems as expressive and as inscrutable as Reverdy’s. If Merrill was experimental, then it was in the way Bach played with harmonics and textual interpretation in a late cantata such as ‘Ich glaube, lieber ...

Must poets write?

Stephanie Burt: Poetry Post-Language, 10 May 2012

Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century 
by Marjorie Perloff.
Chicago, 232 pp., £11.50, April 2012, 978 0 226 66061 5
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Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 
by Kenneth Goldsmith.
Columbia, 272 pp., £15.95, September 2011, 978 0 231 14991 4
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Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing 
edited by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith.
Northwestern, 593 pp., £40.50, December 2010, 978 0 8101 2711 1
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Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004, The Joy of Cooking: [Airport Novel Musical Poem Painting Film Photo Hallucination Landscape] 
by Tan Lin.
Wesleyan, 224 pp., £20.50, May 2010, 978 0 8195 6929 5
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... and artists – tracing a line from Rimbaud through Futurism to Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, Frank O’Hara, John Cage and beyond – who have advanced what she sees as modernist goals: above all, the up-to-date, sceptical investigation of the materials and ideas from which a work of art gets made. Though much of Perloff’s writing concerns the ...

Americans

Stephen Fender, 2 July 1981

The Life of John O’Hara 
by Frank MacShane.
Cape, 274 pp., £10, March 1981, 9780224018852
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... in American fiction. Even businessmen, from W.D.Howell’s Silas Lapham down to Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood (of The Financier and The Titan) and John O’Hara’s Alfred Eaton (From the Terrace), have been studied in their native habitat. The question is: why has fiction in this vein been commonly ignored by academic ...

Use Use Use

Robert Baird: Robert Duncan’s Dream, 24 October 2013

Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus 
by Lisa Jarnot.
California, 509 pp., £27.95, August 2013, 978 0 520 23416 1
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... probably still agree – but it’s become less plausible to rank Duncan’s work with that of Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop or the Roberts Lowell and Creeley, all of whom were born within a decade of him. I don’t imagine that even his most enthusiastic supporters would put his influence anywhere near that of John Ashbery, who seems pretty ...

Ohs and Ahs, Zeros and Ones

Colin Burrow: Lyric Poems, 7 September 2017

Theory of the Lyric 
by Jonathan Culler.
Harvard, 391 pp., £19.95, September 2017, 978 0 674 97970 3
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... and in some cases certainly do, construe this as overhearing a distinctive poetic voice.’ So Frank O’Hara addresses a leaf: ‘Leaf! You are so big!/How can you change your/colour, then just fall!’ and John Ashbery talks to a fictional reader who is not there: ‘Why do I tell you these things?/You are not even here!’ These fictional addresses ...

Stay Home, Stay Stoned

Andrea Brady: Diane di Prima, 10 March 2022

Revolutionary Letters: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition 
by Diane di Prima.
City Lights, 213 pp., £13.99, September 2021, 978 0 9957162 6 1
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... also had two children). Di Prima wrote plays, acted, directed and produced. They put on dramas by Frank O’Hara and Robert Duncan at various downtown venues and broadcast Antonin Artaud’s radio piece ‘To Have Done with the Judgment of God’, complete with ‘gongs and blood-curdling screams’, to the whole of Bleecker Street. In 1965 di Prima ...

Bye-bye, NY

Ange Mlinko: Harry Mathews’s Fever Dream, 18 March 2021

Collected Poems: 1946-2016 
by Harry Mathews.
Sand Paper Press, 288 pp., $28, February 2020, 978 0 9843312 8 4
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... It ran for four issues and included the founders’ work alongside that of Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara, Edwin Denby and others. Locus Solus was like the intersection of New York, Paris and a Surrealist Arcady.Mathews credited Roussel with showing him that prose could be generated under similar constraints to those that apply to poetry, a ...

Change at MoMA

Hal Foster, 7 November 2019

... photography, Latin American mail art, an archival dive into the New York poet and MoMA curator Frank O’Hara, and so on.For the most part art-historical terms – Fauvism, Cubism and the rest – are avoided in wall texts in favour of general rubrics like ‘Abstraction and Utopia’ and ‘Design for Modern Life’, and inclusive settings like ...

Waiting for the Poetry

Ange Mlinko: Was Adrienne Rich a poet?, 15 July 2021

The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography 
by Hilary Holladay.
Doubleday, 416 pp., £25, November 2020, 978 0 385 54150 3
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Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution 
by Adrienne Rich.
Norton, 345 pp., £13.99, May 2021, 978 0 393 54142 7
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... Nearly all the young poets of the age strove for formal competence: Lowell, Merwin, Plath and even Frank O’Hara wrote reams of quatrains and sonnets before breaking out into free verse, seemingly all at once, as if to the Muses’ baton. During his tenure as judge of the Yale Younger Poets prize, Auden was frequently unenthused; in 1947, he awarded it ...

Mostly Middle

Michael Hofmann: Elizabeth Bishop, 8 September 2011

Poems 
by Elizabeth Bishop.
Chatto, 352 pp., £14.99, February 2011, 978 0 7011 8628 9
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... than something to be envied; in the heyday of ‘lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals’ (Frank O’Hara), the New Yorker was not viewed as a particularly serious publisher of poetry. Appearing there did nothing to contradict Bishop’s self-stylisation as a ‘poet by default’: ‘I’ve always felt that I’ve written poetry more by not ...

Mysteries of the City

Mark Ford: Baudelaire and Modernity, 21 February 2013

Baudelaire: The Complete Verse 
edited and translated by Francis Scarfe.
Anvil, 470 pp., £10.95, January 2012, 978 0 85646 427 0
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Baudelaire: Paris Blues/Le Spleen de Paris 
edited and translated by Francis Scarfe.
Anvil, 332 pp., £10.95, January 2012, 978 0 85646 429 4
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Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity 
by Françoise Meltzer.
Chicago, 264 pp., £29, May 2011, 978 0 226 51988 3
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... Soleil’ that anticipates the urban poetics of another ardently Francophile American poet, Frank O’Hara, Baudelaire figures his traversing of the streets of Paris as an aleatory means of exploring simultaneously the city, the self, and the possibilities of poetry: Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime, Trébuchant sur les mots ...

Not in My House

Mark Ford: Flannery O’Connor, 23 July 2009

Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor 
by Brad Gooch.
Little, Brown, 448 pp., £20, May 2009, 978 0 316 00066 6
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... O’Connor offer a piquant contrast to Brad Gooch’s previous biographical subject, the poet Frank O’Hara – though both came from Catholic families of Irish origin. O’Connor disliked cities, and boasted to a friend of a spell in Manhattan: ‘I didn’t see much of the city when I stayed in New York . . . I didn’t go to a single play or ...

Cocteaux

Anne Stillman: Jean Cocteau, 13 July 2017

Jean Cocteau: A Life 
by Claude Arnaud, translated by Lauren Elkin and Charlotte Mandell.
Yale, 1024 pp., £30, September 2016, 978 0 300 17057 3
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... works of art: his cadences return in Pound’s Pisan Cantos; he appears as a blonde in a poem by Frank O’Hara; he becomes the name of a band, the Cocteau Twins. It’s as if he can beam into other worlds, as his voice does, through radio, in his 1950 film Orphée, transmitting from an elusive elsewhere. Cocteau’s life, as Arnaud tells it, mirrors ...

Big toes are gross

Hal Foster: Surrealism's Influence, 6 June 2024

Why Surrealism Matters 
by Mark Polizzotti.
Yale, 232 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 300 25709 0
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... 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 ...

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