At 20, [Edward Gorey] showed up as a French literature major at Harvard, where he had the distinction of corrupting a fellow mad genius, the future poet Frank O'Hara. Brad Gooch documents their madcap college days in "City Poet," his 1995 biography of O'Hara. The photographer, George Marshall, said Gorey, who was given to wearing capes and numerous rings, was the "oddest person I've ever seen. He was very tall, with his hair plastered down across the front like bangs, like a Roman emperor."From an obituary of Edward Gorey
Gorey and O'Hara quickly made their reputations as the campus dandies, evoking the looks and mannerisms of Oscar Wilde. They read novels by Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett, trolled used bookstores and furnished their campus apartment with white modern garden furniture, including a chaise longue and a coffee table made from a tombstone taken from Mount Auburn cemetery. Gorey was frequently spotted sitting atop their table, designing wallpaper -- a harbinger of the baroque Edwardiana to come.
Poulenc was better than Wagner; Auden was better than Yeats. These opinions, decanted from a complex personality that partook equally of passion and parody, were essentially a social tactic, a means of drawing a line between those who, like Ashbery and Gorey, were subtle or hip enough to hear all the tones and those who, like the poet Donald Hall, weren’t. (Hall and others on his side of the line were badly teased.)They sound utterly insufferable. But would I watch a sitcom about the collegiate misadventures of O'Hara, Gorey, Ashbery, Hall and Koch? Hell yes.
Basically, I still read Frank O'Hara today for the same reason as when I first read him in college: he makes me want to write. Not all poets do. Some prefer you to simply admire their brilliance. Some like to hide their tricks. Some pretend that they have none. . . . With Frank, there is always a feeling that he's encouraging you, the reader—and that the poems were, in a very real way, written to have you write back and respond.My favorite of his is "Why I Am Not a Painter."
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posted by Horace Rumpole at 12:35 PM on February 15, 2010 [2 favorites]