Word: gooch
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This past weekend, Cambridge was brutally attacked by a play and a movie both detailing troubling boat trips half way around the world. The play, "Female Transport" by Steve Gooch, was directed by Jason Southerland, the Institute for Advanced Training's first year directing student, and showed some artistic potential, but was doomed to failure by its subject matter. "White Squall," Ridley Scott's latest film, was mauled by its script and story, which many reviewers have referred to as "Dead Poet's Society on a Boat." Luckily, both productions were chock full of pleasant visuals for those who enjoy...
While it may not offer the definitive statement on O'Hara's poetry, City Poet remains an lively presentation of a feverishly lived life. Gooch's intoxicating re-creation of O'Hara's milieu helps unlock some of the more insular references in his work (O'Hara once remarked to a friend on the small size of his audience: "You could fit the people I write for into your john all at the same time without raising an eyebrow"). Although O'Hara's poems to friends create an intimacy in which the reader can often share, Gooch's book adds...
Despite its frustrating gaps, City Poet generally remains close to its subject, to the emotional intricacies of what O'Hara called his "rococo self." Gooch has done a staggering amount of original research, and his book serves as a useful introduction to the intelligence and energy O'Hara brought to his life and poems...
Still, the story of the poet's circle is a fascinating one, and Gooch proves expert at handling this heady mix of characters. The Harvard section explores the exploits of a set of young men and women almost unbelievably concerned with art and confident of their ability to produce it. City Poet recalls an era when a dispute over the relative merits of Eliot and Stevens could strain a friendship, when a pro-Yeats faction at the Advocate battled with a pro-Auden contingent of modernist mavericks, and when the smoke-filled Grolier Bookshop was a bona-fide artists' hangout...
...times, this broad canvas tends to obscure the nuances of O'Hara's art. Gooch provides a detailed account of the party, argument or museum exhibit which inspired a particular poem, but usually offers little analysis of the aesthetic or linguistic concerns the poem explores. In some ways, this approach befits a poet who compared his poems to unmade telephone calls, but the overall effect sometimes privileges O'Hara's role as social butterfly over that of poet...