“Everything about O’Hara Peter Schjeldahl, “Frank O’Hara: He Made Things and People Sacred,” Village Voice, August 11, 1966.
“EXHIBITIONS AIDE AT MODERN ART “Frank O’Hara, Museum Curator, 40,” New York Times, July 26, 1966.
Now in New York, Somewhat more famously, Gary Simmons accompanied Wayland Flowers and his puppet, Madame.
“He seems to have Peter Schjeldahl, “O’Hara—Art Sustained Him,” New York Times, March 3, 1974. Years later, my father told Steve Martin in an interview: “I did tumble into clarity when I stopped trying to be John Ashbery and started trying to be Frank O’Hara.” Stephanie Murg, “Steve Martin Talks Art with Peter Schjeldahl at New Yorker Festival,” Adweek.com, October 7, 2011.
“In many respects, Roger Kimball, “A Very Sixties Person: Peter Schjeldahl on Art,” New Criterion, November 1991.
One book from 1979 Alan Feldman, Frank O’Hara: Twayne’s United States Authors Series (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), p. 11.
“cheerful and mannerly.” Jay Ruttenberg, “Has Ada Calhoun Just Become the Most Important New Voice on Old New York?” Village Voice, October 27, 2015.
My father opened it Patsy Southgate, “My Night with Frank O’Hara,” in Homage to Frank O’Hara, eds. Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1980), 119–21.
“Now I am quietly Frank O’Hara, “Mayakovsky,” in Meditations in an Emergency (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 51.
“marks of weakness, “Our Life in Poetry: Frank O’Hara Poetry Reading and Discussion,” Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination, Participants: Michael Braziller, Mark Doty, and David Lehman, November 11, 2010. YouTube video, 1:40:31, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z8sxX8YCMw.
O’Hara got a job “Frank O’Hara, Lunchtime Poet,” MoMA website, https://www.moma.org/calendar/galleries/5147.
a Matisse retrospective. James Schuyler, “Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters (excerpts),” in Homage to Frank O’Hara, eds. Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1980), 82.
he became a valuable emissary O’Hara was painted by Larry Rivers, Alice Neel, John Button, Robert Motherwell, Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and Alex Katz.
including a night guard Kenward Elmslie provided a similar account of O’Hara’s sex exploits in an interview with Gay Sunshine magazine. Winston Leyland, ed., Gay Sunshine Interviews, vol. 2 (University of Virginia: Gay Sunshine Press, 1978), 103.
All lyric poems are narcissistic Charles Simic, “How to Peel a Poem,” Harper’s 299, no. 1792 (September 1999), 152–5.
He overheard O’Hara Joe LeSueur, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 229.
“a voice that often reminded me Ron Padgett, “Six Memories of Frank,” in Homage to Frank O’Hara, eds. Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1980), 133.
“Even casual acquaintances Martha King, Outside/Inside … Just Outside the Art World’s Inside (Buffalo, NY: Blaze VOX Books, 2018), 217.
George Montgomery had a long life “George Montgomery, Poet, Photographer and Curator, 73,” New York Times, April 14, 1997.
“that the time is not yet ripe Marjorie Perloff, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters (New York: George Braziller, 1977), iv (by my count—the introduction pages aren’t numbered). Elsewhere Perloff referred to my father as a “New York antipoet” and O’Hara cultist. Marjorie Perloff, “Poetry Chronicle, 1970–1971,” (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019), 33.
The largest void Fragments of letters have been published here and there, as in Brad Gooch’s City Poet and Andrew Epstein’s Beautiful Enemies. On the anniversary of Lunch Poems, a few notes between O’Hara and his editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, appeared in the Paris Review. They’re dated 1963–65 and reveal that O’Hara wrote his own jacket copy and picked the book’s colors—his favorites—orange and blue. Nicole Rudick, “Lunch Poem Letters,” Paris Review, June 11, 2014.
I think of this piece Ron Padgett, Collected Poems (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2013), 117. Reprinted with permission of Ron Padgett and Coffee House Press.
In Manhattan, Padgett wound up Padgett said that parties were often held at Bill Berkson’s apartment on Fifty-Seventh Street or at Morris Golde’s apartment on West Eleventh, and that Jane Freilicher was the wittiest person he’d ever met.
He decided that he Allen Ginsberg told them they should also publish Gregory Corso and Robert Creeley.
Two chapbooks contain Josh Schneiderman, ed., The Correspondence of Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara 1955–1956, Part I and II. CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Series I, no. 2 (Winter 2009).
“for hay is dried-up grass Kenneth Koch, “Mending Sump” (1950), in The New American Poetry 1945–1960, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 229. Used with the permission of the Kenneth Koch estate.
New American Poetry 1945–1960. Not to be confused with the more academic anthology of poetry edited by Donald Hall that came out around the same time.
Marcel Proust wrote: Marcel Proust, Time Regained (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), 240.
Cronin’s Cronin’s was a popular Harvard bar at the time. When Osgood and O’Hara were drinking there, beer cost ten cents. “Fifteen Cent Beer Price Threatened,” Harvard Crimson, November 10, 1950.
Osgood decided that O’Hara Larry Osgood died in December 2018, just a couple of months after I found those tapes in my parents’ basement. According to his obituary, he left behind two nieces and would be remembered as “a lover of music, literature, dogs, and great friends.” He’d written plays and essays and taken a number of trips to the Arctic by kayak. Dapson Chestney Funeral Home online obituary, dapsonchestney.com/obituary/Lawrence-Osgood. Accessed May 14, 2020.
“One of the most agreeable children Christopher Isherwood, Liberation: Diaries, vol. 3, 1970–1983 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), 638.
“I remember one very cold Joe Brainard, I Remember (New York: Granary Books, 2001), 20.
When Vincent Warren left Frank O’Hara, “Variations on Saturday,” in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 378.
“One summer, in the late fifties, Pssst, John Gruen: You said “young” twice. John Gruen, The Party’s Over Now (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 147.
“the ever-present third man William Grimes, “Bill Berkson, Poet and Art Critic of ’60s Manhattan In-Crowd, Dies at 76,” New York Times, June 22, 2016.
rave review in theWashington Post Troy Jollimore, “Bill Berkson’s A Frank O’Hara Notebook Is a Magical Artifact from Another Era,” Washington Post, August 8, 2019. Used with permission of the Bill Berkson estate.
A woman has fallen From Bill Berkson, “Costanza,” in Expect Delays (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2014), 11.
B. kept apparently saying something Lisa Birman, ed., Dearest Annie: You Wanted a Report on Berkson’s Class: Letters from Frances LeFevre to Anne Waldman (Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose Press, 2016), 22.
“unthinking worship Lisa Birman, ed., Dearest Annie: You Wanted a Report on Berkson’s Class: Letters from Frances LeFevre to Anne Waldman (Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose Press, 2016), 36.
“too hip for the squares John Ashbery said that O’Hara was “the first modern poet to realize that the question was there, waiting to be asked, and he formulated it in terms of the highest beauty.” (The question: “Can art do this? Is this really happening?”) John Ashbery, “Frank O’Hara’s Question,” New York Herald Tribune: Book Week 4, no. 3, September 25, 1966. Found in John Ashbery, Selected Prose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 81–83.
In 1985, my father wrote “Hard Times for Poets,” New York Times, September 15, 1985.
By contrast, Kenneth Koch, My father’s interview with Kenneth Koch didn’t yield much, except for Koch’s account of discovering O’Hara’s poetry: “I don’t think I wrote a poem for the next three months that didn’t have some word in it like ‘aspirin tablet’ or ‘jujube’ or ‘doorknob’ or one of those early Frank O’Hara words. That’s why when you asked me which of Frank’s poems I liked the best, it’s very hard to get those early ones out of my mind. Because they were like my first love, you know?”
The executorship team The executorship team: Ron Padgett, Jordan Davis, and Justin Jamail.
Philip is full of details Some background: Frank O’Hara, born in 1926, was the oldest of three. He and his brother, Philip, born in 1933, and sister, Maureen, born in 1937, were the children of Russell and Katherine (Kay) O’Hara, middle-class, suburban Irish Americans. In Baltimore, Russell sold Stetson hats. When his great-uncle, J. Frank Donahue, died, he returned to Grafton to take over the family business, along with his younger brother, Leonard.
He said he used to lay awake In his memoir of the war, Lament and Chastisement: A Travelogue of War and Personality, O’Hara bemoaned the deaths in war of architects, scientists, and musicians. Frank O’Hara, Early Writing, ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1977), 128.
The ensuing melodrama Philip fondly remembered the de Koonings, the Motherwells, Joe LeSueur, and J. J. Mitchell. But many of the others, he said, only seemed to care about their own grief.
He died with no will. Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 467.
doctrine of fair use. Fair use is a murky area. The resources that I found most helpful were a 2021 seminar at the New York Public Library called “The (Copy)right Stuff: Intellectual Property Rights Basics for Researchers,” with Kiowa Hammons, the Library’s rights clearance manager; and a 2020 Gumshoe Group defamation training hosted by Ava Lubell, NYC local journalism attorney for the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic. According to the Center for Media and Social Impact’s Code of Best Practices for Fair Use for Poetry, produced in January 2011 and available at cmsimpact.org, “under fair use, a critic discussing a published poem or body of poetry may quote freely as justified by the critical purpose.”
Frank gave me this poem. “Winston Leyland Interviews Ned Rorem,” in Gay Sunshine Interviews, vol. 2 (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1982), 205.
On one of my father’s two trips Bill Berkson, A Frank O’Hara Notebook (San Francisco: no place press, 2019).
He didn’t fit in Mark Dery, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey (New York: Little, Brown, 2018), 71.
“sit down and tweedle, tweedle, tweedle, O’Hara almost always wrote on his typewriter. He struggled to write anything good without it, LeSueur said. Joe LeSueur, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), xvi.
Bunny had Hodgkin’s disease The stories about Bunny Lang are legion. One time she pasted one thousand two-by-three-inch pink notes reading, in black letters, “My name is Stanley and I am a pig” all over Manhattan, anywhere Stanley—a junior executive who she felt had wronged her—was likely to be. She not only put them all over his apartment building and neighborhood but also inside his place of business, including the bathrooms, and his favorite bars and bookstores—even his laundromat. She kept 150 so she could continue mailing them to him for a long time. Alison Lurie, V. R. Lang: A Memoir (self-published, 1959), 67–68. The 1959 version of the book about Lang, which I found on eBay with a cover by Edward Gorey, is more colorful than the one published in 1975 by Random House, which, according to Gorey, was censored by Lang’s family. A review of this edition declared, “Eccentricity, in retrospect, seems limited and a little sad … [Lang’s] magic cannot be conveyed.” Sallie Bingham, “V. R. Lang,” New York Times Book Review, October 26, 1975.
“That’s Bunny Lang. Andrew Epstein, “‘First Bunny Died’: Frank O’Hara With, and After, Bunny Lang,” Spoke 4, 2017.
“a mysteriosabelle.” Frank O’Hara, “A Mexican Guitar,” in Meditations in an Emergency, 2nd ed. (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 28.
And this Security, Alison Lurie, V. R. Lang: A Memoir (self-published, 1959), 68. The Ben Jonson poem appears in Robert Anderson, ed., The Works of the British Poets, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: John and Arthur Arch, et al. 1795), 571.
Down, Gordon, down! This Gordon was probably Gordon Boyd, a young artist who was part of the artists and writers set at the University of Tulsa in the late 1950s.
He spent his final years Mel Gussow, “Edward Gorey, Artist and Author Who Turned the Macabre into a Career, Dies at 75,” New York Times, April 17, 2000.
Usually, the Yankees were winners In 1962, the New York Mets’ inaugural season, the sportswriter Roger Angell wrote: “This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman … there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us.” Roger Angell, “The Sporting Scene: The ‘Go!’ Shouters,” New Yorker, June 16, 1962, 121.
O’Hara’s appointment books? I got a lead that the appointment books might have ended up with Ted Berrigan, but his widow, the poet Alice Notley, and their two sons, the poets Anselm and Eddie Berrigan, told me they’d never seen them. Notley added, “I would definitely have known and would remember. Ted would have worshipped them and made speeches about them, and I would have been awestruck.” Alice Notley, email to the author, May 27, 2020.
She says I can keep all the material In June 2020, I scanned the letters, most of which were from Fairfield Porter to Robert Dash, and emailed the PDF to Liza Kirwin at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, which houses Fairfield Porter’s papers. She said she’d love to have them but that by rights the letters, because they were sent to Bob Dash, should be with Dash’s papers at Yale. Nancy Kuhl, Curator of Poetry at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, said they would be a great addition to Dash’s archive. You can visit them there now.
There is no place in America Alice Notley, “The Prophet,” in Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970–2005 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), 102. Used with the permission of Alice Notley.
“Gee, thanks.” Irving Sandler, Goodbye to Tenth Street (Seattle: Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press, 2018), 77.
Mitchell Paints a Picture.” Irving Sandler, “Mitchell Paints a Picture,” ARTnews, October 1957. Reprinted at ARTnews.com, November 5, 2012.
He was witty and charming, A TLS essay calls “The Day Lady Died” “a poem about not knowing people … The poem’s one moment of unanimity is at the finish, a tribute to the singer and a premonition of death, hers and everyone else’s.” Michael Hoffman, “Feeling Good about New York City,” Times Literary Supplement, December 13, 1991.
“There is always some death Bill Berkson, “Frank O’Hara at 30,” in Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981–2006 (Berkeley: Cuneiform Press, 2007), 91.
Helen Vendler wrote: Helen Vendler, “The Virtues of the Alterable,” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 1, no. 1 (1972): 6.
“We fail to recognize Letter from Sparrow to the author, November 23, 2019.
Mondrian apparently Amei Wallach interview with Elaine de Kooning, November 1, 1986, 36.
or the time in 1951 Amei Wallach interview with Elaine de Kooning, March 17, 1988, 11.
as-told-to interview with Franz Kline Frank O’Hara, “Franz Kline Talking,” in Evergreen Review Reader 1957–1966 (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2011).
“To be right De Kooning died in 1997, but another painter of the period, Jasper Johns, is alive, and a friend gave me his email address. I wrote and asked what he thought about Frank O’Hara’s legacy. He wrote back: “As a participant in the areas of poetry, art, and music Frank was of course an important figure during the time in which I knew him. His generosity to younger artists was well known and benefitted many. His interest in my painting was a boost to my own confidence and I valued his attempts to broaden my interest in poets of the period. I can’t remember if he told me that he never took notes when he interviewed artists but wrote down the material when he got home. I know that he said that he had done this when he interviewed Franz Kline. He said that he had omitted from the interview that Franz had said, ‘To be right is the most boring thing in the world!’” Jasper Johns, email to the author, July 15, 2019.
“an enigma, Frank O’Hara, “Larry Rivers, The Next to Last Confederate Soldier,” in School of New York: Some Younger Artists, ed. B. H. Friedman (New York: Grove Press, 1959).
“Larry Rivers is one of the most fascinating Peter Schjeldahl, “At the Mad Fringes of Art,” New York Times, November 18, 1979.
“Let’s see what a kiss John Gruen, The Party’s Over Now (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 141. On this page, Rivers says the same thing to Gruen that he said to my father, about how he likes “boys, girls, animals.” In his memoir he describes having sex often with a blue velvet chair. Larry Rivers, “The Chair,” in What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Autobiography (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 51.
“An intense, wiry, John Gruen, The Party’s Over Now (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 131.
I feel repulsed Larry Rivers’s memoir (What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Autobiography, New York: HarperCollins, 1992) describes a household in which there was incest and sexual abuse. He said he was molested at age six by an eleven-year-old boy (p. 114) and lost his virginity in a series of what he calls “gang bangs” with a girl he describes as “short, fat,” and “retarded” (p. 14). He said he tried to have sex with his mother-in-law Berdie, whom he later painted in the nude for one of his most acclaimed paintings and who served as a kind of den mother for the New York School scene (p. 74).
He was so simple Larry Rivers, with Carol Brightman, “The Cedar Bar,” New York, November 5, 1979, 40.
“a square from New Jersey” Maxine Groffsky, interview with the author, July 1, 2021. I was pleased that Groffsky, then eighty-five, spoke with me, because she is wary of the press. On our call, she quoted de Kooning as saying on a visit to her office after he’d done a Life magazine interview: “You know what journalists do? They take the shit out of your mouth and they throw it in your face.”
The art, the energy I imagine that would have been especially true after dating Philip Roth.
“sensationally inaccurate account” John Gruen, The Party’s Over Now (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 138–9.
“You know a major artist Michael Shnayerson, “Crimes of the Art?” Vanity Fair, November 3, 2010.
The New York Times story Peter Haldeman, “Her Father’s Daughter: The Turbulent Life of Lisa de Kooning,” New York Times, March 15, 2013.
“To the Harbormaster,” Lucas Matthiessen was convinced the beautiful poem “The Harbormaster” must have been about Vincent Warren and was disappointed to learn from my father that it was about Larry Rivers. See also Olivia Cole, “The Poem Stuck in My Head: Frank O’Hara’s ‘To the Harbormaster,’” Paris Review, December 15, 2011.
Born in 1953 Paris Peter Matthiessen was also later revealed to have briefly been a CIA spy. Jeff Wheelwright, “A Writer’s Controversial Past That Will Not Die,” New York Times, February 2, 2018.
Matthiessen remembers O’Hara Elaine de Kooning told Amei Wallach she knew about the relationship. Still, when the baby, Lisa, was born, she went to the hospital to see it and was wounded to discover that Ward had been admitted under the name de Kooning. Amei Wallach interview with Elaine de Kooning, March 17, 1988, 64–65.
Matthiessen remembers Larry Rivers Larry Rivers, “Speech Read at Frank O’Hara’s Funeral, Springs, Long Island, July 27, 1966,” in Homage to Frank O’Hara, eds. Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1980), 138.
Peter Orlovsky This seemed pretty outlandish, and it was a child’s recollection, so I contacted the Allen Ginsberg estate to see if it could be substantiated. I was told that it was the kind of behavior more commonly associated with “the 1980s Peter than the 1960s Peter, but it could totally be true!”
According to the article I find, Constance Rosenblum, “Love Story in Residence,” New York Times, June 8, 2012.
“My oldest granddaughter, Julie Haifley, “Oral History Interview with Grace Hartigan,” Smithsonian Archives of American Art, May 10, 1979.
Gregory LaFayette was a blond actor “Gregory LaFayette,” IMDb. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0480746/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1.
“Or he’d put bourbon This is a common story, but other versions I’ve heard identify his morning liquor as vodka.
He was living on Broadway According to Elaine de Kooning, when she left her studio in that building, Donald Droll moved in and then Frank O’Hara moved in on the floor above. A big 1963 party Donald Droll threw for Edwin Denby used both apartments.
And I came to ‘To the Art Profession,’ Vincent Katz is talking about the poem “Dear Profession of Art Writing,” which appears in Peter Schjeldahl, Since 1964: New and Selected Poems (New York: Sun Press, 1978), 12. It begins, “My crummy benefactor, how can I not be grateful?”
a verse from an eighth-century play. Bhavabhūti, Mālatīmādhava 1.6. Unpublished translation by Josephine Brill, University of Chicago, email to the author, May 20, 2020.
Malcolm writes Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (New York: Knopf, 1995), 8–9.
“When I painted Frank O’Hara, Elaine de Kooning quote from Art in America (1975), printed with image of the painting in Homage to Frank O’Hara, eds. Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1980), 97.
I asked if I could As it turned out, my son got sick the day before I was planning to go to Connecticut, so I postponed my trip.
She is a wonderful person When asked about this, Amei Wallach told me: “Maureen [Granville-Smith]’s characterization is inside out. What drew me to Frank O’Hara was indeed the intersection of art and poetry, his relationships with art and artists, and his role as curator at MoMA. My first visit with de Kooning in Springs, for instance, was to interview him about Frank. Ditto Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, and artists of that generation. I was earnestly educating myself in New York School poetry and poets but got lost in the brutal politics of the poetry world. And I came to feel inadequate in understanding precisely the intricacies of the social life that Maureen dismisses as my focus. I cannot imagine where she got that idea since it is so far off the mark.” Email to the author, July 2, 2021.
Maxine Groffsky called me Maxine Groffsky told me she does not remember any of the conversations she may have had with Granville-Smith.
All the people you listed The people I mentioned hoping to speak with, in addition to Maureen Granville-Smith, were Katie Schneeman, Alice Notley, Lewis Warsh, Bill Zavatsky, Maxine Groffsky, Kenward Elmslie, Alex Katz, Tony Towle, Ned Rorem, Lucas Matthiessen, Larry Osgood, and Ron Padgett.
“There are stories James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection (New York: Vintage International, 1997), 215.
“I think at the root Robert Storr, “On Art and Artists: Peter Schjeldahl,” Profile 3, no. 4 (July 1983), cover.
“Perhaps, on closer examination, Christopher Isherwood, Kathleen and Frank: The Autobiography of a Family (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 510.
I gather that there will See, for example, the Janet Malcolm books The Journalist and the Murderer and The Silent Woman.
“Why is it worth recording? Helen Vendler, “The Virtues of the Alterable,” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 1, no. 1 (1972): 8.
“careful attention to misattribution Frank O’Hara, Art Chronicles, 1954–1966 (New York: George Braziller, 1975), 149. Also mentioned in Amei Wallach’s interview with Elaine de Kooning, March 17, 1988, 36.
Elaine quoted her mother: Frank O’Hara, Art Chronicles, 1954–1966 (New York: George Braziller, 1975), 155.
“How can we get at it Henry James, The Aspern Papers (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001), 51.
“There is no ‘always.’ Ted Loos, “Art/Architecture; Helen Frankenthaler, Back to the Future,” New York Times, April 27, 2003.
It’s the most profound pun Frank O’Hara, “Olive Garden,” in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 92.
I had to sign two contracts For permission to use these six lines in the audiobook and in print for countries excluding the U.S., Canada, and the Philippines, I paid Curtis Brown, Ltd., $195.37. For print rights in the U.S., Canada, and the Philippines, I paid Penguin Random House $90.
“What is a bar? Larry Rivers, with Carol Brightman, “The Cedar Bar,” New York, November 5, 1979, 39.
“Who but the dead know Morton Feldman, “Frank O’Hara: Lost Times and Future Hopes,” Art in America, March–April 1972, 55. My father has two articles in this issue, one about James Rosenquist and the other about Vito Acconci. Irving Sandler has one about Hans Hoffman.
“bracing, empowering study … “Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis,” PublishersWeekly.com, October 18, 2019.
“If I knew the world was to end Martin Luther probably didn’t say it, though. Jordan Ballor, “Luther’s Apocryphal Apple Tree,” Calvinist International, May 6, 2013.
“That by desiring George Eliot, Middlemarch (Knoxville, TN: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 323.
“He welcomes whatever is incomplete, Geoffrey O’Brien, “The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street,” New York Review of Books, December 2, 1993.
Take no prisoners. John Ashbery, “Prisoner’s Base,” in Chinese Whispers (New York: Open Road Media, 2014).
“as at the beach, Frank O’Hara, What’s with Modern Art? (Austin, TX: Mike and Dale’s Press, 1999), 29.
My daughter Ada has told me Peter Schjeldahl, “’77 Sunset Me,” New Yorker, December 23, 2019.
“Oh, no, she suffered My aunt Ann told me she wanted to make sure Oliver knew that what my father said about Grammy suffering was false. “Hospice made sure she was comfortable with medication. She spent that last twenty-four hours at our house, with Pip [Ann’s Boston terrier] and me by her side with her saying, over and over again: ‘I love you, I love you …’ When Peter showed up, she lightened up noticeably and, directly after he said, ‘I love you,’ she died.” Ann also told me that in the sixties my father took her to a party and Larry Rivers made a pass at her.
We talked about a controversial book Kent Johnson, A Question Mark Above the Sun (Buffalo, NY: Starcherone Books, 2012).
“Anyone who chose Goneril Frank O’Hara, Art Chronicles, 1954–1966 (New York: George Braziller, 1975), 155.
“As women, Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978), in The Selected Works of Audre Lorde (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), 31.
In Frank O’Hara’s “Rhapsody,” Frank O’Hara, “Rhapsody,” Evergreen Review 10, no. 43, October 1966, 29.