I WOULD LIKE TO THANK A NUMBER OF PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS without whom I would have never completed this work. I received much-needed financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation for a research year at Yale. Melissa Watterwork of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut assisted me with O’Hara’s unpublished letters, and I am indebted to the staff at both the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale and the Rare Book Collection at the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill for their help with rare versions of O’Hara’s art criticism. I would also like to thank Elsa Dorfman, who answered a number of questions regarding O’Hara’s involvement with Paterson Society.
Peter Halter was kind enough to read a number of earlier versions of the entire work and each time offered gracious, cogent advice that helped me to expand the original thesis in fruitful directions. Patrick Vincent, Lukas Erne, and Thomas Austenfeld have assisted me in various ways in this project, and I would like to thank them here for their respective encouragement and support. I have benefited greatly from the guidance of the late Robert Rehder, who read a number of earlier versions of the manuscript and offered numerous suggestions and helped me understand what it means to be a true scholar of poetry. I would also like to thank Christine Retz and Joshua Allen for their guidance in bringing the manuscript to press and Wyatt Benner for his expert copyediting.
Anne-Claude and Nicolas Suter, Terry and Diana Mattix, and Roger and Mary-Claude Moret supported me in my research in numerous ways, and I would like to thank them here for their assistance. While thanks extended to one’s spouse are staples of acknowledgment sections, it is nevertheless true that I could not have completed this work without Carine’s patience and support over the years, and I would like to acknowledge that it is as much the result of her gracious sacrifices as it is of my research.
For permission to include the material below, I would like to thank the following:
Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., for permission to quote from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara by Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen, copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara, copyright renewed 1999 by Maureen O’Hara Granville-Smith, and Donald Allen Introduction copyright © 1971 by Alfred A. Knopf.
City Lights Books, for permission to quote from Lunch Poems, copyright © 1964 by Frank O’Hara.
Grove/Atlantic, Inc., for permission to quote from Meditations in an Emergency, copyright © 1957 by Frank O’Hara.
A version of chapter 3 originally appeared in American Poetry: Whitman to the Present, ed. Robert Rehder and Patrick Vincent (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2006), 139–149. I would like to thank the publisher for permission to reprint it here.