Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara: A Memoir

An unprecedented eyewitness account of the New York School, as seen between the lines of OHaras poetry Joe LeSueur lived with Frank OHara from 1955 until 1965, the years when OHara wrote his greatest poems, including To the Film Industry in Crisis, In Memory of My Feelings, Having a Coke with You, and the famous Lunch Poemsso called because OHara wrote them during his lunch break at the Museum of Modern Art, where he worked as a curator. (The artists he championed include Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, Joan Mitchell, and Robert Rauschenberg.) The flowering of OHaras talent, cut short by a fatal car accident in 1966, produced some of the most exuberant, truly celebratory lyrics of the twentieth century. And it produced Americas greatest poet of city life since Whitman. Alternating between OHaras poems and LeSueurs memory of the circumstances that inspired them, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank OHara is a literary commentary like no otheran affectionate, no-holds-barred memoir of OHara and the New York that animated his work: friends, lovers, movies, paintings, streets, apartments, music, parties, and pickups. This volume, which includes many of OHaras best-loved poems, is the most intimate, true-to-life portrait we will ever have of this quintessential American figure and his now legendary times.