Word: hara
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...Frank O' Hara...
...Frank O'Hara's short life, somewhat surprisingly, does not always make for the best reading. The poet laureate of 1950s bohemian New York passed his first 20 years in relative quiet, leading a withdrawn existence in a small Massachussetts town. And despite the assurance on the book jacket of Brad Gooch's City Poet that O'Hara's accidental death at 40 struck down a poet "at the height of his powers," this book portrays these last years as more consumed by depression and alcoholism than creative passion...
...while the hefty and turbulent mid-section of this biography is fascinating, it is dragged down at either end by a surplus of mundane details. Quoting extensively from O'Hara's letters, journals and an unpublished novel, Gooch recounts in painstaking detail the poet's placid early years and his startingly unconfrontational outlook. In those years, the poet conformed at least externally to American middle class expectations, escorting girl-friends to prom, enlisting for service in World War II, writing home affectionate letters filled with responsible advice for his younger siblings. Although filled with vague bohemian aspirations and troubled...
City Poet really gets off the ground only when it comes to O'Hara's Harvard years. When he enrolled there after the war on the G.I. Bill, he joined an undergraduate population containing an astonishing number of future luminaries, including John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Harold Brodkey, Alison Lurie, Robert Bly and Robert Creeley. By sophomore year O'Hara and Edward Gorey, his roommate at Eliot House, occupied the center of a flourishing artistic and social scene whose campy, brittle style was a bald rip-off of Oscar Wilde and characters out of Evelyn Waugh...
This striking change in the social cast of O'Hara's life is most clearly gauged by the change in his literary tone; the small town G.I., who once wrote naive letters home suddenly began to use a cosmopolitan, often arch and usually hilarious poetic voice. At Harvard O'Hara developed his unique style, incorporating the traces of French Surrealism, American popular culture and chatty injoking that would characterize the New York poets. Disappointingly, Gooch records this artistic blossoming and social awakening without venturing much explanation for it; his careful recounting of events does little on its own to bridge...