Friday’s Weekly Round Up – 728

It’s the anniversary of the death today of the great American “New York School” poet,
Frank O’Hara 

Rona Cran writes on the “radical friendship” of Allen and O’Hara, “Safe in your thoughtful arms” – The Radical Friendship of Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg” –   here

July 25, 1966 – Our 2023 posting on that tragic occasion – here

From Peter Schjeldahl‘s, August 1966 Village Voice account, “He Made Things and People Sacred“:

“It was 3 a.m. of a Saturday night on Fire Island, pitch black on the beach except for the head­lights of a disabled taxi and those of another jeep headed its way, sloughing through deep ruts at maybe 25 miles an hour.
Frank O’Hara, one of nine tem­porarily stranded passengers, stood alone off in the darkness, his companion and friend J.J. Mitchell wasn’t sure just where. Within inches of the crippled taxi, the second jeep churned past. Evidently O’Hara was just turning to face a blaze of its lights when it ran him down.
Panicked, Mitchell rushed to him. O’Hara stirred, then muttered something. He was in a rage. His delirious fury made it hard to hold him still during the efficient relay from jeep to police boat to ambulance to tiny Bayview Hospital in a place called Mastic Beach. There he subsided, however, and was examined, then laced with innumerable stitches. The doctor was encouraging: contusions, gashes, shock, and a badly smashed left leg, but nothing ostensibly lethal.
Then around dawn O’Hara’s blood pressure fell. Pints of rare RH-negative blood began arriving at the hospital by police car every few minutes. The exploratory operation that afternoon, when enough blood was on hand, revealed a partly ruptured liver and some damage to the kidneys, among other things: The liver, now a good deal smaller, was sewn shut; the kidneys were left for later.
Meanwhile, the New York art world was collectively thunder­struck. In 15 years as a poet, playwright, critic, curator, and universal energy source in the lives of the few hundred most creative people in America, Frank O’Hara had rendered that world wholly unprepared to tol­erate his passing.”

Famously, “the sketchy obituary in the Times next morning”, as Schjeldahl notes,” barely mentioned his poetry, focusing on his role as an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art” – “Frank O’Hara, 40, Museum Curator – Exhibitions Aide at Modern Art Dies – Also a Poet”

“Also a Poet” – Ada Calhoun,  Schjeldahl’s daughter, was able to take that monumental understatement and use it for her continuation and amplification on her father’s work on the legendary poet (as well as a memoir of growing up in New York and of her relationship with her father)

In April 2022 – “Frank O’Hara’s Last Night” –Kyle Schnitzer  tracks down “the dune buggy driver” for Vanity Fair  – see here

“New York School”,  next week – We’ll be celebrating John Ashbery‘s birthday and the upcoming publication of the eagerly-awaited biography of James Schuyler.

Ahead of that, tomorrow, in Hudson, up-state New York, at Christ Church, Episcopal Church, (his final resting place), a joyous birthday celebration

 

Readings by Karin Roffman, Ann Lauterbach, Emily Skillings, Tracie Morris, Eugene Richie, Charles North and others …

 

Elsewhere…

Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank‘s Pull My Daisy  (“arguably the most realised example of the Beat movement’s encounter with cinema”) gets an in-depth and informed appreciation by Sérgio Dias Branco for Senses of Cinema – here

(See also Steve Provizer‘s earlier appraisal – here)

Pat Thomas‘ , Evergreen Review – Dispatches from the Literary Underground – Covers & Essays, 1957-1973, (noted in these pages – here) is given an extensive and enthusiastic review this week by David S Wills at Beatdom

Wills quotes from Thomas’ intro:

“What is in these pages is not included in previous Evergreen anthologies; I dug deeper, weirder, and wider. Plus  –  this is the first ever facsimile reproductions of the original pages from the magazine, so you can see what else was on that page – be it a photograph or illustration, an ad for a book or record album or part of an entirely different article. This is the closest you’re gonna get to owning a stack of rare Evergreen Review magazines.”

and goes on:

“For me, the highlights were unsurprisingly related to the Beat writers and their various contributions to Evergreen. There is an account of Allen Ginsberg meeting Ezra Pound; an interview with LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka); a long interview with (William) Burroughs on his favorite topics, such as the Mayan calendar, the cut-up method, and Scientology; an account of the Naked Lunch trial in Boston; an explanation of the cut-up method by Brion Gysin; David Amram’s obituary for Kerouac; and a John Clellon Holmes review of a Seymour Krim book. I was pleasantly surprised to see Will Petersen’s name in a table of contents. He is a very seldom mentioned character from the mid-fifties Beat scene..”

“Kudos to Pat Thomas for putting together such a fantastic collection that highlights this era, this publication, and the eccentric man (Barney Rosset) behind it.”

 

City Lights and Howl – Loren Kantor swiftly summarizes the City Lights and Howl story -Freedom of expression, freedom of speech.  If it was under fire in 1957 (it certainly was!),
it’s, (as the renowned PEN Club recently pointed out, stating the obvious), exponentially worse, frightening, a conflagration, a “five alarm fire” now.