After Lunch with Frank O'Hara (2014)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 [Issue #49] (October 2014)

Books and Magazines in brief:

Craig Cotter. After Lunch with Frank O’Hara. Introduction by Felice Picano. ISBN 978-1-937627-18-8. New York: Chelsea Station Editions, 2014.

Craig Cotter: After Lunch with Frank O’Hara (2014)

I guess that my first thought about this was that it was rather an in-joke, a strangely dependent way of titling a book of poems, but I now think that that was a mistake. Frank O’Hara was, after all, a trickster who spent an immense amount of time and energy subverting and undermining the pomposity of his poetic peers and predecessors, and this book is definitely written in that spirit. “More like a Monty Python send-up than a nostalgic paean,” as Diane Wakowski puts it on the back of the book. Or, as Cotter himself expresses it:

I’m tired
but Frank and John want me to write on.
…
It’s how we learn –
knocking each other off [“Good Friday,” p.58]

(26-27/9/14)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 1 [Issue #49]. ISSN 0114-5770 (2014): 226.

[139 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 (2014)


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