M.Phil.

in Modern and Contemporary Literature

Texts and Contexts, 1914 to the Contemporary
Dr Anne Stillman
Frank OHara in New York

In this seminar well consider Frank OHara in New York and New York in Frank
OHaras poetry. Well read several of his poems in detail, playing close attention to the
textures of his verse. Our seminar will surround these close-readings with materials
concerned with cityscapes, paint, urban pastoral, breath, theatricality and the Lyric. This
seminar falls under the title Texts and Contexts. So well also try and think through
some of the wider conceptual questions surrounding the word context (See below
suggestion for Context? New Literary History, 42, 4, 2011). Well test-drive the phrase texts
and contexts along Frank OHaras lines and down the streets of New York.

Core Reading
Frank OHara, Lunch Poems (1964), and [extracts from] The Collected Poems, ed. Donald
Allen, with an introduction by John Ashbery (1995)
Frank O'Hara, [extracts from] Standing Still and Walking in New York, ed. Donald Allen
(1975)
Frank OHara [extracts from] Art Chronicles, 1954-1966 (New York, 1975)
Film
The Last Clean Shirt (1964) 16mm, 41 minutes, directed by Alfred Leslie. Text titles by
Frank OHara.
Contextual Sources
Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur (eds), Homage to Frank O'Hara (1988)
Carol Berg (ed.), Light Years, An Anthology on Sociocultural Happenings, Multimedia in the
East Village, 1960-1966, (2010)
Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn
(1968)
Christopher Ricks, American English and the Inherently Transitory in The Force of Poetry
(1984), pp. 417-41
Harold Rosenberg, Act and the Actor; Making the Self (1970)

Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp (1964) in Against Interpretation (1966)

&
Context? New Literary History, 42, 4 (2011), edited by Rita Felski and Herbert F. Tucker
Further Reading
Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry; O'Hara, Bishop, Ashbery and
Merrill (1995)
Bruce Boon, Gay Language as Political Praxis: The Poetry of Frank OHara in Social
Text, Winter, 1979, pp. 59-92
Jim Elledge (ed.), Frank O'Hara; To Be True to a City (1990)
Brad Gooch, City Poet; The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara (1993)
Robert Hampson and Will Montgomery (eds), Frank OHara Now: New Essays on the New
York Poet (2010)
Billie Holliday, with William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues (1956)
Alice C. Parker, The Exploration of the Secret Smile, The Language of Art and of Homosexuality in
Frank O'Hara's Poetry (1989).
Marjorie Perloff, Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters (rev. ed., 1998).
- Poetic License; Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (1990)
Alexander Smith, Frank O'Hara: A Comprehensive Bibliography (1980)
Hazel Smith, Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara; Difference /Homosexuality / Topography
(2000).
Geoffrey Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (1992).