A clean, unmarked book with a tight binding. 306 pages.
From Publisher:
An unprecedented eyewitness account of the New York School, as seen between the lines of O' Hara' s poetry
Joe LeSueur lived with Frank O' Hara from 1955 until 1965, the years when O' Hara 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 Poems-- so called because O' Hara 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 O' Hara' s 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 America' s greatest poet of city life since Whitman.
Alternating between O' Hara' s poems and LeSueur' s memory of the circumstances that inspired them, "Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O' Hara" is a literary commentary like no other-- an affectionate, no-holds-barred memoir of O' Hara and the New York that animated his work: friends, lovers, movies, paintings, streets, apartments, music, parties, and pickups. This volume, which includes many of O' Hara' s 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.