'Mad Men': Journey, scenery worth the ride Oct 24, 2008
Studious viewers will also notice a literary roundabout: The episode title, "Meditations in an Emergency," is the name of the book of Frank O'Hara poems Don read from in the first episode. A man who creates images for a living, Don has spent most of this season watching the image he created for himself come apart waiting, as that first episode poem prophesied, "for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again." Sunday, he attempts to come to terms with who he is and who he wants to... (USA Today -- Life)
In a haven for antiquities, a contemporary artist updates classics Oct 22, 2008
And he writes his own stuff: a sort of excitable, conversational and oblique montage in the spirit of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Ron Padgett and other so-called New York School poets. "I've been a poet my entire life - have been encouraged by these generous people, Robert Creeley, O'Hara, Ashbery, Padgett," Dine said in an interview in his studio in Walla Walla. (International Herald Tribune -- Arts)
'The Modern Element' and 'Invasions' Sep 8, 2008
Kirsch rules out in a stroke the "meaningful departures from tradition" by free verse poets from Whitman to Frank O'Hara. (He writes well about Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," but he is less interested in it as a poem than as a cultural event. (International Herald Tribune -- Arts)
Larry Rivers Floats Above Rest Aug 15, 2008
Here, too, are the nudes of Berdie, his mother-in-law, whose doughy rolls of flesh recall the models of Lucien Freud, alongside portraits of an equally nude, but slim, Roman-nosed Frank O'Hara, the poet who was Rivers' lover. There's also a nifty charcoal drawing of a stong-jawed Jack Kerouac, and Rivers' most ambitious work: "History of the Russian Revolution," a 14-foot-long construction replete with portraits of Marx and Engels, a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky and an actual machine gun. (New York Post -- Entertainment)
Dark secrets, understated performances make acclaimed 'Mad Men' riveting Jul 25, 2008
But the writer Weiner references in the premiere is the New York School poet Frank O'Hara, whose work calls out to Don when he sees a man reading O'Hara's "Meditations in an Emergency" at a bar. O'Hara, so open and direct, gives voice to Don's growing sense that he actually does have a center, a self, that love is not simply a promotional tool. (Boston Globe)
Books: Book review: August Kleinzahler's new book of poems, "Sleeping It Off in Rapid City" May 2, 2008
As "Sleeping It Off in Rapid City" demonstrates, you can find in Kleinzahler's verse echoes of poets as disparate as Frank O'Hara (the appraising eye and metropolitan ease), Jim Harrison (the life-affirming appetites), Tony Hoagland (the deft grasp of high culture and low) and Charles Simic (a certain satirical angularity, and attention paid to food and drink and their sorrows and delights). It's easy to troll through any of Kleinzahler's books and pick out fresh, alert observations. (International Herald Tribune -- Arts)
‘Actor's actor' keeps the shows coming Jul 31, 2007
I try and see art everywhere, not just in the reliably documented, like Tennessee Williams, Frank O'Hara or Picasso. I am very nave in thinking that art exists continually, and without it, there is no civilization (I think Tolstoy said that), and in so thinking, I really feel that I get a fuller life in recognizing each aspect of the human condition, at least in what I write. (Columbus Commercial Dispatch, MS)
Autobiography and Poetry: Mar 28, 2007
The visually ingenious detail, so real it feels like a snapshot (the doilies, for example, in Elizabeth Bishop's "Filling Station") or the affective detail so open and attractive as to feel "artless" (as when Frank O'Hara says "fun" in the first line of "Having a Coke with You"). And there are acts of strong intimacy, like Hopkins when he tells God, "I am gall, I am heartburn," or like Herbert's when (in "The Flower") he exclaims, "Who would have thought my shriveled heart/ Could have recovered... (Slate)
