Frank O'Hara

Frank O'Hara, 'Les Luths'

ModPo people crowdsource a close reading

Al Filreis
ModPo people in LA: James, Lori, Leigh, Darlene & Robin

ModPo people gather at a coffee shop in Los Angeles on October 22, 2016, to record an improvised collaborative close reading of Frank O'Hara's "Les Luths." HERE is a link to the video they made. HERE is a link to ModPo's collection/augmented syllabus called "CCCR" (Community Collaborative Close Readings).

Misguided (after Frank O'Hara's 'Second Avenue')

Charles Bernstein

My video for ––
The Day Before O’Hara Died: Frank O’Hara and Friends
50 years from death of O'Hara on July 25, 1966
July 24, 2016
at The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), The Mall, London

'It felt like many lifetimes'

The last issue of Angel Hair

Laura Sims
Angel Hair 6, cover art by George Schneeman

“Only three years had passed,” Lewis Warsh writes of publishing the journal Angel Hair, “but it felt like many lifetimes.” By 1969, when the last issue of Angel Hair appeared, Warsh and Waldman had begun publishing books--mainly because many of their poet friends needed publishers for their book-length collections, but also because The World, a new magazine published by the Poetry Project, was covering much of the same ground as Angel Hair. “I also felt,” Warsh says, “that we had made our point in trying to define a poetry community without coastal boundaries--a community based on a feeling of connectedness that transcended small aesthetic differences, all the usual traps that contribute to a blinkered pony vision of the world.” 

Habitation caesurae

A review of Heather Christle's 'Heliopause'

Laura Carter

First of all, what is a heliopause? If etymology can be believed, it’s the caesura that lives in the sun, a respite from ordinary days and nights, a pause in life wearing a yellow dress, or maybe a green dress, maybe also embedded with jewels.

Bright arrogance #9

Berrigan and Brainard's 'Drunken Boat'

Joe Milutis
Image from Berrigan and Brainard's Drunken Boat, courtesy estate of Joe Brainard

Ted Berrigan’s “The Drunken Boat” — a mimeograph publication from 1974 with drawings by Joe Brainard — exemplifies a different type of insouciance towards the source text than any we’ve seen thusfar. Berrigan passes off his seemingly straight, utterly conventional translation of Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau Ivre” as his own work.  He calls his translation a “homage” to Rimbaud — which, while usually a humble gesture acknowledging influence and gratitude, in this case could be possibly interpreted as a form of naked aggression and erasure.

Bright arrogance, gallery A

Subtitle hacks, neobenshi, & remix translation

Joe Milutis

Olivier Brossard on 'The Last Clean Shirt,' a film by Alfred Leslie & Frank O'Hara

from Jacket 23 (2003)

Jacket2

In 1964, American painter and film maker Alfred Leslie and poet Frank O’Hara completed the movie The Last Clean Shirt. It was first shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1964 and later that year at Lincoln Center in New York, causing an uproar among the audience. The movie shows two characters, a black man and a white woman, driving around Manhattan in a convertible car. The Last Clean Shirt is a true collaboration between a film maker and a poet since Frank O’Hara wrote the subtitles to the dialogue or rather the monologue: the woman is indeed the only character who speaks and she furthermore expresses herself in Finnish gibberish, which demanded that subtitles be added. [read more]

Further notes on my obsession with 'Some Trees'

It's a love poem but perhaps, ultimately, it's directed at someone in particular.

Al Filreis

Perhaps John Ashbery’s “Some Trees” is a love poem for Frank O’Hara. They met at the time the poem was written, and they shared a twangy, bumpkin, non-Harvard accent. “These accents seem their own defense.” See, above, two pages from Andrew Epstein’s Beautiful Enemies. You might have to enlarge the image to read it easily. See the marked block quote in the middle of p. 236.

David Shapiro

Feature in Jacket 23

John Tranter
David Shapiro lives surrounded by art and music. Photo by Claudio Papapietro for
David Shapiro lives surrounded by art and music. Photo by Claudio Papapietro for the Riverdale Press, copyright © Claudio Papapietro and the Riverdale Press, 2009. Used with permission.

[»»] Thomas Fink: David Shapiro’s ‘Possibilist’ Poetry
[»»] David Shapiro (in conversation with John Tranter, 1984)
[»»] David Shapiro: Six poems (from A Burning Interior, 2000)
     [»»] The Weak Poet
     [»»] Light Bulb

Olivier Brossard: 'The Last Clean Shirt'

A film by Alfred Leslie and Frank O'Hara, 1964

John Tranter
Still from the film 'The Last Clean Shirt', 1964
Still from the film 'The Last Clean Shirt', 1964

Where they’ve come from. We’re not even up to 23rd Street yet. Sings a little song in middle. ‘I hate driving.’ — Frank O’Hara, ‘The Sentimental Units,’ Collected Poems, 467.

In 1964, American painter and film maker Alfred Leslie and poet Frank O’Hara completed the movie The Last Clean Shirt. It was first shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1964 and later that year at Lincoln Center in New York, causing an uproar among the audience. The movie shows two characters, a black man and a white woman, driving around Manhattan in a convertible car. The Last Clean Shirt is a true collaboration between a film maker and a poet since Frank O’Hara wrote the subtitles to the dialogue or rather the monologue: the woman is indeed the only character who speaks and she furthermore expresses herself in Finnish gibberish, which demanded that subtitles be added.

Olivier Brossard’s article (with stills from the movie) is 9,000 words or about twenty printed pages long. You can read it all here, in Jacket 23.

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