Sunday, June 29, 2008

NYT Frank O'Hara review


The New York Times has a review of a new Frank O'Hara collected poems. The review includes the following, which is good advice for any poet, I think (especially myself considering I was told by David St. John that I should read more O'Hara):
When Auden chose [John] Ashbery’s first volume for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, he wrote O’Hara a thoughtful rejection, saying, “I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic nonlogical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.”

1 comment:

kohlrabi said...

Ooh, thanks for linking to the review -- I didn't know a new collection had been released. I wrote my senior thesis on O'Hara and was just paging through the older collection the other day. Must go to bookstore...