also a poet frank o hara my father and me

Mark’s Bookshop, where I swooningly glimpsed Allen Ginsberg and Patti Smith perusing the shelves. Nearby, at the Holiday, jack-and-cokes went for $1.50 during happy hour. Boom boxes blared the Ramones, Bikini Kill, Queen Latifah. In the early ‘90s this crossroads was a hipster Times Square, baby-doll dresses and combat boots cheek-by-jowl with Mohawk haircuts and leather jackets. Mark’s Place, downwind from the Astor Place subway station, catty-corner from a pizzeria and a seedy bar called Continental Divide (RIP).

Ultimately, Calhoun offers an arresting and provocative carousel of family dynamics, creative paradoxes, literary history, unnerving dilemmas, thorny questions of inheritance and legacy, wry humor, and love.My East Village idyll formally launched three decades ago, when my best friend and I moved into a top-floor walk-up at 5 St. But each foray resurrects distressing memories she runs into the same unbreachable fortress surrounding the O’Hara archive and she is assailed by a staggering run of emergencies, from cancer to a fire to COVID-19. She dives in, sharing riveting excerpts from the tapes, profiling each interviewee, and bringing O’Hara into ever-sharper focus. Believing herself to be his opposite-reliable, productive, determined-Calhoun decides to complete the project. Discouraged, the habitually reckless Schjeldahl abandoned the project. When Calhoun discovered recorded interviews her father conducted with people who knew the poet Frank O’Hara, whom Schjeldahl and his peers revered, she learned that he intended to write a biography until O’Hara’s younger sister, Maureen, stood in the way. Here, in this fluidly morphing, magnetically candid chronicle, she ends up scrutinizing her often bewildering relationship with her father, the New Yorker art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl ( Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 2019).

First published ( Booklist).Ĭalhoun ( Why We Can’t Sleep, 2020) has shared some aspects of her bohemian childhood in her previous books, especially in her vital work of New York City history, St. The great Donna Seaman of Booklist writes: Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me By Ada Calhoun.

Also a poet frank o hara my father and me