Royce Annotated Bib

Royce Chen

Dr. Churchill

ENG 394 – The Avant Garde

28 October 2017

Annotated Bibliography

Breslin, James. “The Contradictions Of Frank O’Hara.” The American Poetry Review, vol. 12, no. 6, 1983, pp. 7–16, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27777276.

This article notes the “contradictions” that many others have noted in Frank O’Hara’s life and poetry. “O’Hara’s poems are filled with signals that . . . interpretive procedures are not appropriate to them,” writes Breslin (8). One example in O’Hara’s “Personal Poem”: “[T]he reader may be tempted to stop and to metaphorize the ‘old Roman coin’ and the ‘bolt-head’–the one rare and the otehr plain–but he is not given enough clues to justify such a procedure,” Breslin explains (8). The article explores many other such dichotomies regarding themes such as surrealism, sex, and intimacy in O’Hara’s poetry.

Chiasson, Dan. “Fast Company.” The New Yorker, Mar. 2008, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/07/fast-company.

This article is also biographical like the below source “Frank O’Hara” by Poets.org), but goes more in-depth by avoiding a simple listing of the facts and dates, opting instead to offer a nuanced and sometimes subjective view on O’Hara’s personality. It particularly notes the casual and “improvised” nature of O’Hara’s poetry and lifestyle, recalling, “People in the high-toned literary circles, the Partisan Review crowd, considered him weird or frivolous, and he considered them, in their suits and black dresses, cadavers before their time.” This lifestyle, the article notes, showed itself in his writing, which was “zigzag[ging],” “swerv[ing],” “veer[ing],” and eventually “correct[ing]” in its nature and diversity of topics (from sex to aspirin) and cultural allusions.

Doty, Mark. “Frank O’Hara.” A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Jack Myers and David Wojahn, Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.

This excerpt focuses on O’Hara’s charactericstic style of poetry–“[u]rbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny”–and considers the simultaneously universalizing and personalizing effect of O’Hara’s affinity for utilizing popular culture references in his poems.

Equi, Elaine. “Frank O’Hara: Nothing Personal.” Conjunctions, no. 29, 1997, pp. 145–55, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24515725.

This article offers the American poet Elaine Equi’s perspective of and homage to Frank O’Hara, revealing his deep influence on the American poetry as a whole. She, like, others, sees Frank O’Hara as a simultaneously intimate and distant writer. She credits him with “first ma[king her] understand the intrinsically sociable .  . . aspect to writing poetry” (146), but also declares, “[His poems] end up telegraphing a curious mix of the heartfelt and the insincere. Is he serious or putting us on?” (149) This effect is created through the dichotomy exclamation points–“orgasms” of emotion (149)–as well as “tragic” undertones mixed in (154). Equi notes, “I still read Frank O’Hara today for the same reason as when I first read him in college: he makes me want to write” (146).

“Frank O’Hara.” Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, 6 Oct. 2015, www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/frank-ohara.

This brief biography of O’Hara gives a broad and digestible outline of his life: it covers his upbringing and education in Massachusetts, and follows him into his Harvard years, during which he was influenced by poets like Mallarmé and Mayakovsky. It cites him as one of the “most distinguished members of the New York School,” and describes his original volumes Meditations in an Emergency and Lunch Poems as “witty talk, journalistic parodies, and surrealist imagery.”

Girard, Didier. “Frank O’Hara’s Anti-Disciplinarian Discipline.” KulturPoetik, vol. 13, no. 1, 2013, pp. 82–93, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23608423.

This article notes Frank O’Hara’s standalone personality (“an inveterate alcoholic and a flamboyant homosexual” (83) is how it describes him as a person) and frames him as a unique poet for his use of three primary techniques: writing with the goal of “painting” a picture rather than simply utilizing prose, writing “action poetry” that took place in the moment but still touched deeper than immediately obvious, and channelling mass, or “pop,” culture in his poetry.

Sadoff, Ira. “Frank O’Hara’s Intimate Fictions.” The American Poetry Review, vol. 35, no. 6, 2006, pp. 49–52, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20683351.

This article focuses on the tone that Frank O’Hara takes in his poetry–playful, humorous, oddly specific, and sometimes cold–and analyzes the way that O’Hara initiates a significant intimacy with his readers. Using poems “The Day Lady Died” and “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday” as an example, Sadoff cites O’Hara’s casual style of composition (his “lunch poems”), his well-known allusions, and his sense of humor as tools that he uses to create closeness.